When I got home from my staff meeting today I went into my room, laid down on my bed, and cried for about an hour.

My week was long.  My students were really demanding and needy.  Not in a horrible way, just in a childish way.  I haven’t slept well this week.  I wasn’t in the mood to go to a staff meeting in any event.  But I doubt there would be any circumstances where I would be in the mood to hear the following:

“Of course, this isn’t possible for those of us with kids.  It’s not like having no commitments, flying off from date to date in the evenings.”

This comment did not go uncontested by another single faculty member, but I was done.

I am subjected to comments like this all the time.  Last week my very ability to perform my job was called into question due to the fact that I have no children.  Now apparently I not only have no children, I have no commitments.  As each individual instance occurs, I can say to myself “it doesn’t matter, they’re not thinking about what they’re saying.”

So let me give you something to think about.

I am not married.  I do not have children.  But do you know what I do have?

Showers to take.  Bills to pay.  Meals to cook.  Garbage to take to the dumpster.  Carpets to vacuum.  Floors to mop.  Clothes to launder.  Friends to check in with.  Family to care for.  Books to read.  Walks to take.  Appointments to keep.  Trails to face.  Anger to calm.  Fears to face.

Does this sound familiar?  Is it possible that my non-child-having life has the same fundamental requirements as your child-having life, only on a smaller scale?  You see, there is a horrible strain of thought that insists that because I don’t have a husband and children to care for that I do not have to care for myself.  That somehow being single means having escaped the general responsibilities of being a semi-competent adult.  And that is simply not the case.

I have a ton of help from people I love (and sometimes from people I don’t even like).  But for the most part, the basic functions of my life are solitary.  This requires a particular disposition.  No one thanks me for the meal.  No one offers to clean the dishes for me.  No one makes the bed just to make my day easier.  (Okay, I don’t make my bed that often, but it’s because I like to sleep in a big messy disaster of blankets.)  No one hugs me before I go to sleep.  There is no exchange of love that sustains the home life.  There is the simple dignity in a life well lived.

Would you like to know what I am?  I am, to the best of my poor ability, a witness to living life in obedience to God’s will and not my own whim.  Where someone to ask me if I preferred to be married and have children, or to carry on as I am, I would choose the former without hesitation.  But that is not what God is asking of me at this time.  He is asking me to be patient.  And to give another perspective.  I know that there is easy sex and indulgent distraction available to me should I choose it.  I have times when I feel like a complete sucker for trying to hold my head up and live a life of purpose as a single devout Catholic.  But I think the world needs women like me just as much as it needs mothers.

That picture of single-hood you get from pop culture may be a reality for some women, but it is not my reality.  And that is by choice.  I choose to be responsible.  I choose to be restrained in my desires.  I choose to be of service to others rather than to reduce other human beings to vehicles to be used for my pleasure and discarded.

Maybe the next time you’re inclined to brush off my existence as an endless string of suitors and cat-naps between drinks and dancing at the club, just stop.  Stop and really look at me.  Ask yourself who packs the lunch I eat everyday.  Ask yourself who washes the blouse you just complimented.  Ask yourself who hugs me when I have had a long day managing children, stumbling through math lessons, and replying to the incessant emails of over-eager parents.

Ask yourself what life I am actually living, instead of joking about the life you think you would be living if you were me.

Maybe my example could show you something something worth seeing.

(3 Years, 4 Months, and 10 Days Sober)

I was having a conversation with a friend a few weeks ago.  We were talking about how fire-pits are wonderful.  I mean really, they are amazing.  You get to enjoy time with people you like with something pretty happening.  Talking about fire-pits leads inevitably to talking about the social appropriateness of guitar-time.

My friend told me that a few years ago she and her husband invited some friends over for a fire-pit.  She said that in the invitation she wrote “and if someone want to bring a guitar, that would be ok.”  She told me that she had never really thought about the pros or cons of guitar-time (since it had been present in her life for a significant amount of time, without being a feature), until, a friend replied to the invitation saying “I hate guitar-time.”

Slightly shocked, her friend laid out the same case I would have against guitar-time.  Personally, I am against guitar-time.  I don’t mean that I am against people getting together and playing music for one another.  That can be lovely, but only if that is the expressed purpose of, or at least stated possibility mutually agreed upon for, the evening.  That is very different from guitar-time.  Guitar-time is when at a social event someone bring out their guitar, usually without being asked, and begins to play, usually slow, weepy songs.  I do my best to keep my feelings about guitar-time to myself.  Many people enjoy guitar-time as a thing and I believe they are well intentioned in doing so, so I usually just absent myself.

In it’s essence, guitar-time is an activity that is supposed to be enjoyable, and we all say that it is, but is actually just uncomfortable, made more so because we refuse to admit that it is such.

Half-way through this week the phrase “I hate guitar-time” popped into my head and I couldn’t stop laughing.  I sent my friend a message telling her about it.  I’ve decided that I’m simply adopting her friend’s phrase anytime I find myself in the position of politely accepting a situation that I would rather run screaming from.

I’m slightly concerned by how much of my life I devote to collection phrases, but I digress.

I wish I had remembered to say “I hate guitar-time” to myself on Friday during parent-teacher conferences.  Now, of course, the main difference would be that parent-teacher conferences are a professional necessity, while guitar-time is an unfortunate social faux-pas.  I can’t avoid parent-teacher conferences just by leaving the room.  Well, at least not if I want to keep my job.

But maybe, I can keep “I hate guitar-time” in mind as a mantra for the next round I’ll have to do.  I used to be an intensely confrontational person.  But drinking was a fairly effective way of keeping my mouth shut, avoiding telling people what I really thought. Asked a question I didn’t want to answer, I would shrug and sip my drink.  I’m still fairly non-confrontational.  I try to stay out of situation where I know I am going to come into significant conflict with other people’s choices or opinions.  But while avoidance can be a nifty coping trick, it’s not a long-term strategy.

I can admit that I hate something, but that I will also endure it.  The problem with avoidance is that you build no resilience.  I could avoid telling parents difficult realities about their children.  But every time I do, in the midst of the yelling and the accusations and the denials, I get just a little bit better at surviving it.  Even knowing it will suck, I know that it will suck less the next time.

Maybe, someday, I’ll even be able to tell that dude who starts a spontaneous strum session that he can stop.

Wait, I probably still shouldn’t say that.

(3 Years, 4 Months, and 5 Days Sober)

Happy New Year everyone!

Alcoholics are amazing at saying “I’m done” and not meaning it.  Or at least, not being able to stick to it.  New Year’s resolutions are a time when almost everyone in the world gets to know a tiny bit of what it feels like to be an alcoholic.

Even though I’ve been sober for over three years, I’m still not the best at sticking to things.  I make a lot of promises to myself.  I set goals, usually in times of sadness or loneliness, and those goals slip through me fingers when I find something good on TV or a friend invites me to lunch.  My desire to be better, different, more, (or in the case of my weight, less) hasn’t manifested into a great deal of action.  Unless, does whining count as action?

So I might be up to my eyeballs in things I want, plans I have, but I’m only making two resolutions.  First, I want to read one book a month.  I was having lunch with a friend before Christmas and she told me how she tries to read one book a month.  She has three children and another on the way, and honestly, it made me feel incredibly lazy.  Surely, if she can find the time, then I, with far less responsibility and fewer people demanding my time, I can manage to finish a book a month that isn’t meant for teenagers or a trashy romance novel.  I have until February 1st to finish Terry Goodkind’s Stone of Tears.  It’s like a million pages.  Maybe it could count for February too?

I haven’t decided on my second resolution.  I want to wait and see what presents itself as most important.  So I resolve to make a resolution.

Slowly, ever so slowly.

(3 Years, 3 Months, and 14 Days Sober)