Life does not stop

Life marches on despite my personal emotional crises. The children need to go to school and to be fed, and to be made to do homework, and to be put to bed. There are necessary business tasks. Laundry happens. None of this goes away because I choose today to have an emotional crisis. It merely piles up if my crisis causes me to neglect it. Fortunately having stuff to do keeps me from spinning in mental circles, so that is good.

I had my fourth session teaching the creative writing class today. It continues to go variously. The early class continues to be loud and chaotic, but each of the kids there has produced multiple stories. They sizzle with energy and some of it lands on the page. Derailment Boy continues to be a major distraction. He doesn’t really want to be there. Today I found out that his dad is currently dating the mom of one of the giggle girls. This explains much of his behavior. I can see the conflicts raging inside him. And in her too. Neither of them is particularly happy about the prospect of the other as a step sibling. Not only that but the talked about how their parents are going to abandon them to the care of relatives and go on a cruise together. Apparently I’m hosting a soap opera as well as a writing class. But addressing the issues by talking about them a little helped Derailment Boy calm down some.

I’m having a harder time pulling stories out of the afternoon class. I get them excited and creative and they start to write. They’re so excited that they take the stories home to work on them. I then never see the stories again. They vanish never to return. I need to send a note to parents pleading that they help the stories get finished and sent back. I need to have finished stories to include in the book.

Last night we got to have dinner with some long time friends. They’ve lived 20 minutes away from us for a decade, but somehow we fell out of touch. I’m glad that they made the effort to contact us and to host us for dinner. It was really fun. We’ll need to do it again soon because we’ve barely scratched the surface on getting reacquainted. Also they have pet chickens and my kids think that is the coolest thing ever. Gleek in particular loved picking up the chickens and carrying them around. These were really nice chickens. They would just let the kids walk over and pick them up. That is completely unlike all my prior experiences with chickens, which all involved pecking and flapping.

Now if only my kids would go to sleep so Howard and I could have our together time.