The name of this blog DOES reference the fact that I am a mom... and yes, the girls are what make my world go round. But I guess it's just that they're so self-sufficient and that I just feel like I'm generally their Uber, I find that I don't write about them as often... that and a lot of what we DO discuss is kind of personal. If I've been through a lot in the past years, think about being a kid in the midst of it. Some of what we go through together, I'm just not willing to share. But I write about what is current, and sometimes that leans more toward my personal life than what we are up to as a family.
My girls are the best. They really are so resilient and have smiles on their faces a good portion of the time. Their dad and I separated on and off since 2013. They don't realize or remember much of those younger years because we were all in Colorado, and although he wasn't in the house, we were at the gym and pool and overlapping places often enough, they likely didn't realize the reality of it. And they were used to him being gone a lot in general anyways. Since 2018, they spend the school year with me and then they visit their dad for the summer. This made sense when he was still in Germany and they didn't have the means to travel back and forth, but as they've gotten older and he's gotten (relatively) closer, it's getting trickier.
I mean... personally, I hate it. Eleven weeks is the longest I have gone without seeing them. As a mom that had been with them every day of their lives for 8 and 9 years, this was very hard for me. Mom's don'thave babies thinking they will have to give them up for periods of time, at least not until they graduate high school. But I try to remind myself of that--that some day they will leave me and have their own lives and I'll need to have mine too. So, maybe in a way, it has been a blessing to be forced into remembering I have to find myself in the middle of all this too.
Anyways. That's not the point of this blog. Well, not directly. I guess in a way, it IS about what I have found out about myself. And that is...
I do not enjoy cooking... for fun, that is. I cook out of necessity. I am obviously not in a career for the money and being single, welp, I don't have alllll the money. I also still try to eat relatively well, so I mentally run through restaurant options and realize there are few places that will feed me all the protein and veg without charging me an arm and a leg.
This summer, I decided I wasn't going to go grocery shopping if I could avoid it. I needed produce from time to time, but I managed to find plenty other food in the pantry and the freezer without trying very hard. Okay, so I WAS gone for pretty much the whole month of June, but that's not the point. I tried. I actually feel like I didn't even make a dent in the food we already have here.
The point... is that now my girls are back. And they're expecting food. Ugh, do I have to start cooking again?! Will they be okay with the fact that I ate a salad pretty much every night for dinner and it was usually at like 10 at night? Wait, do I have to go back to my real world job in a few weeks?! Oh no. I have to admit, it is pretty wild how hard I have to mentally "check out" by the end of the school year. The school year is seriously straight up exhausting. I am really so thankful that I've got awesome friends to go on all the adventures that I have this summer (many of them also being the awesome people I work with)! Being such a new teacher though, I am still figuring this new life out. I literally had the thought last summer "Am I going to remember how to teach this fall? Do I know what I'm doing?!" Sure enough, it's like riding a bike apparently. Once back in the classroom, it all came back to me. Ha.
So going back to home life. I think the thought process is similar... Do I remember how to "mom?" The answer is "duh."
Here's a little side story: Their dad. Getting these girls back early this summer, for softball tryouts, was almost like dismantling an explosive. I was given A, B, and C for reasons they wouldn't be back, but after hearing my girl, G, say "I'm not missing softball another year." it was my personal mission to figure out how to help them make it to Monday morning tryouts, even if that meant getting in the car that very moment and picking them up myself. That is how I mom. I get things done. He explained, "Well, you live there, so it's different." It's not. He also had the gall to ask me, "Will you be able to get them to their softball practices when the season has started?" Hmm. Let's see about last year... Cross country, track, travel basketball, scholastic bowl, band, jazz band, and friend stuff. Yeah, I think I'll figure it out... It's what we do. We figure it out. It sometimes takes a village, but we figure it out. That question was clearly just grasping at straws. Kind of how it goes, though.
Enough about that. But the girls are back earlier than usual, so here I am, needing to feed them. I'll figure it out... it's like riding a bike.
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