Stereotypical end of the year introspection...

Lately I’ve been thinking about who I’ve been and who I’m going to be. The biggest catalyst for this is the fact that I’m going to have a baby in 2009. I wonder what kind of mother, wife, teacher, friend, Christian, and person I will be. The hormonal changes going on in me have brought out the worst; or in other words, the person I was in college.

Back in middle school, I was terribly, painfully shy. I didn’t know how to interact with people my age. I was lonely. I was miserable. By the time I got to high school, I was over my shyness but the social cliques at my private school were as strict as the Caste system. You were what you were when you got there, so for 7 years of my life I was stuck quietly on the outskirts, with just a couple friends, wishing I could say what I wanted to say. (Just a side note: the friends that I had then were fantastic people. I still keep in touch with some of them.)

When I got to college, the game changed. I got to make up for lost time, or lost words, and I became the person that says what everyone is thinking. People listened to me and genuinely wanted to know what I had to say. I was emboldened by this new found freedom and sometimes took it to the level of jerkdom. I used being honest as an excuse to be derisive. I still have flashes of things I said to people that make me wince.

Then I got to seminary. I had simmered down some, but I was still honest. This took a lot of people by surprise. People didn’t know how to take me, and I felt like I was back in high school. Many of my classmates were good ol’ southern boys who didn’t expect girls to be smart or speak their mind. It was really hard. I wasn’t going to change who I was, but I had gotten used to being friends with guys who weren’t suspicious of me. The underlying assumption of women at seminary while I was there was that they were desperately seeking their MRS degree or that they were crazy raging feminists. While I was neither, I came away with more sympathy for group #2. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, at a place surrounded by likeminded Christians, I was mostly alienated for being an honest person. (Some notable male exceptions: John, Jody, and of course, William)

After graduation, I began teaching. I had to ratchet back my honesty for the sake of not scarring small children and/or getting fired. (There’s a time and a place to speak your mind… when you want to tell the 10th six year old that day who has sneezed all over their classmate/not washed their hands after potty/can’t tie their shoe/wants you to look at their booger/etc. to TAKE THEIR UNTIED SHOE AND…. Well you know. It’s probably not good to speak your mind in that moment.) Then I began teaching 5th grade, and then middle school. I love teaching middle school precisely for the reasons most people think I am crazy for. I love that they are all over the place, and I get to have some small part in shaping the person they are going to be. I have such vivid memories of how miserable that was, that I know I belong in that classroom. But again, I have to be a calm presence. If I get a crappy paper turned in, I have to phrase my comments nicely… firmly point out what’s wrong, and put some encouragement in. When students are being bad, I can’t just scream at them to shut up. (I have never in my life raised my voice to a student.) Calmness works much better. The result of that, though, is that I have become very adept at pushing my emotions away, dealing with them later and rationalizing why I shouldn’t be upset. I do this at home, and as I have recently become aware, I do it to my friends. Who the emotions come out for are total strangers, and it’s not in a good way. For the first time in my life a couple weeks ago, I leaned out the window and yelled at some lady in the Publix parking lot. It’s even worse than something I would have done in college. William was picking me up at Publix and I had a few bag’s worth of groceries, more than I could easily toss in the car waiting at the stop sign. I told him to pull into the pick up-drop off lane so we wouldn’t hold up traffic. Then, I realized there was a van parked RIGHT in the entrance so William couldn’t pull off the main drive. The driver of the van was outside of her van, talking on her cell phone. I know she must have seen us there, me with bags of groceries, William trying to pull up behind her. I got in the car with my bags after some effort, and then William had to back up into Publix traffic to get back out. I leaned out my open window and gave her a piece of my mind as we drove off. Afterwards, I thought, what on earth is wrong with me? I never do things like that. I yell at drivers, I get impatient with people in grocery store lines that are being, in my opinion, purposely obtuse, and I get annoyed with people who walk realllllly realllllly slowly in the middle of the walkways at stores. I was even rude to a salesclerk at Target on Black Friday. I think that in some ways this is because of the crazy pregnancy hormones, but in other ways, I need to learn balance. Not in the new-agey, meditation sense, but in a real live normal person sense. I need to find a way to open up my emotions responsibly to the people around me, who actually care how I feel. It’s just hard to get out of the forced calm I’m in from 9 to 3 every day. It’s easier to keep it together if I’m trying to do it all the time, but then it jumps out in ugly ways when I don’t want it to. But honestly, I’d rather be ugly to strangers than to my friends… I don’t know how to fix it. Help?