by Liesl Jurock
The September calendar is taunting me. It has too few boxes for the too many “to-dos” I need to fit in there. Maybe there are people out there for whom September’s calendar is no different than August or October - who don’t have kids starting a new school year, who don’t work at a school, or who don’t go to school themselves. But for me, as an educator, a mother, and sometimes a student too, I find my innards filled with the familiar flutter of anxiety as September’s page fills up.
In August, I told myself, this year will be different. This year I won’t commit to so many things. This year my theme song won’t be Green Day’s “Wake me up when September ends.” This year I will plan ahead. But here we are in the first week of classes and I’ve done no such thing.
There are pants to hem and slippers to buy and drop-offs and pickups to coordinate. There are overlapping events at my university where I’m meant to promote my career programs, while my unanswered emails and undone tasks pile up. There are diets to get back on, and budgets to balance, and all the repairs to the house that we said we would get to this summer, and didn’t.
And as I try and cram my son’s swimming lessons onto Tuesday afternoons and wonder who will get him there on time I find myself drawing lines across the word September. And that bit of penciled aggression makes me stop and laugh at myself. Of course, it’s not the calendar’s fault that I can’t fit all my “to dos” into its boxes. And as I go to erase the lines I’ve made, my elbow lifts the page to reveal October’s empty boxes.
There is time ahead. It does not all have to happen in one 30-day period. Slippers don’t have to be new. The budget can wait a little longer to be balanced. Swimming lessons don’t have to start right now. The ending of summer and dawning of a new school year will be enough to take on without adding more.
And I’m not alone. I can hire a handyman to fix our fence. I can ask a relative to pick up my son on Tuesdays. I can sit down with my husband and plan for some of the bigger things on the list.
With renewed energy, I erase the extraneous activities and pipe dreams off the calendar and sigh in relief at the white space. Space to breathe. Space to think. Maybe even space to enjoy what September brings.
Image courtesy of stockXchng.
