Every day, when I get home from work, I stop into my husband’s home office to say hi. It’s organized. It’s tidy. It’s calm. It’s quiet. The smell of vanilla gently wafts from the air diffuser that sits in the corner plug. It is a space and place that is just for him.
It is the complete and total opposite of where I spend my days. As a middle school teacher, I am well aware that I choose to live my days with pubescent, hormonal beings. It is a choice I love, and that I’ m proud of, and also sometimes can feel like complete and total chaos.
I share a classroom with over a hundred teenagers
I share my classroom with over a hundred teenagers throughout the course of the day. Organization is mediocre at best, given that there are so different personalities and styles coming in and out of the door.
Tidy is nonexistent. It’ s baseball bags shoved in the corner. Track shoes thrown under my desk. Sweatshirts strewn around the room that nobody wants to claim. Pencils thrown across the floor.
Books tossed in the wrong bins in the hurried exit when the bell rings.
There is never a quiet moment in middle school
I honestly can ’t remember the last time there were more than a few minutes of calm. I mean how can there be with teenagers randomly shouting out “Chicken Jockey, ” “6-7, ” “Not my name, Quarterback,” – or whatever the random TikTok meme of the week is. There are never less than 3-4 people talking to me at once, waving papers in my face to check over, or side-eyeing me for asking them to do a little more work.
And, let’ s be real. There certainly is no smell of vanilla wafting from anywhere. Definitely the smell of teen hormones, AXE Body Spray and leftover breakfast in the trash- usually launched as a three point shot from a desk.
So, it’s definitely a real shock to my system, when I come home to a quiet house every day after spending my days in a constant state of heightened everything. I’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately as my own kids have grown older, with one ready to leave the house in just a few short months.
Now I come home to a quiet house and it’s a shock
Coming home to the calm and quiet that my husband lives in all day, and that now truly embodies most of my time outside of work, is a reality check on so many things. It’s the nudge on my shoulder that the many years I spent sandwiched in the chaos at school and the chaos of having younger kids, is now pretty open faced. My car ride home used to be my 15 minutes to destress before the hustling around of picking up kids, getting them fed, driving to sports, helping with homework- all the things.
Now, it’s just the start of usually empty and calm nights. Sure, I hustle to the bleachers to cheer on my kids while they do their sports things. But, really I’m a spectator now, rather than a conductor of the bustle that used to constantly swirl around me.
I used to be exhausted from the constant chaos. An entire day of school where everybody needs something all of the time. Hearing my name on repeat for 6.5 hours. Then coming home to the same in a different way.
“Mom, Mom, Mom!” Gathering up any remaining patience and energy to go to the park, play hide and seek, go for a bike ride around the neighborhood. The nonstop seemed never-ending, and truth be told, I wished for the downtime more than anything back in those days.
But now, when I get home, it is just quiet. Calm. The scent of the diffuser from my husband’s office. Get your violin out, but really, it’s rare that anyone wants to hang with me- there’s really no one calling my name on repeat, asking for much of anything, or even any noise to fill up the empty space where constant noise once resounded.
And my kids aren’t even gone yet.
I don’t know how to embrace the calm quiet
I don’t quite know how to embrace it. I don’t quite know how to welcome the emptiness. I’m trying to reframe it more as the calm each night before the storm of my next day at work. An attempt to trick myself into thinking that it doesn’t pull on my heartstrings more than I ever anticipated it would to be in this stage of life.
So for this mom of teens, school is the best kind of chaos. A place where I know someone will always be needing something. Talking to me. Want a hug. Even when they are mad at me, or the world, I am the person some of them will come to navigate through the storm.
I will hold gratitude that, while sometimes I come home and shake my head in disbelief at all of the things that can unfold throughout the course of a day, the chaos gives me a sense of comfort and completion.
And for now, that is something I don’t take for granted.
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