Keeping it together when you're ready to pop

This has been one of the longest weeks of my life and it's only Tuesday.

One of my seniors popped today - she's worried about next year and being able to make friends. I hope I defused that situation. I asked her if she'd felt the same when she was about to start high school. When she said yes, I asked her what she would've told herself back then if she'd known then what she knows now. I hope it helped. At this point, I'm still not sure

Yesterday when I tried to defuse a situation, I ended up being called a douche. I explained to this accelerated student in no certain terms and with a slight Southern accent that it wasn't appropriate to call one's teacher a douche and that she should never do it again. Did I write her up - why bother? She's accelerated and will probably cry when she's confronted.

Today, I collected the sonnets this same class is writing for a poetry slam - something kinda fun for the last two days of school. Their sonnets had to be about a person. One particular student wrote about me. How I pushed him and crushed him and how his friend got a 100% on his summer reading project and I had failed his. After all he had thought he'd rocked it. And then in the end of this poem, I was dead.

The poem has really thrown me - truly. I'm not particularly sure why it's affected me so much, but it did.

Which is where my daughter today taught me a valuable lesson.

I was explaining to Tim about my day and how angry I was, how hurt I felt, and how tired I have become in these two days. Jenny was sitting there eating. Suddenly, she threw her spoon at me - her way of telling me she was angry - and then she hit me.

Jenny, it seems, had thought I was angry with her and had reacted in her own little toddler way.

It was at this point that I realized what was really important about this day. I had let those little boogers affect my night. I then took her oversized bib in my hands and started playing peek-a-boo with her. That little laughter worked itself into a small flame and then into a flickering fire.

Ya' see - it doesn't really matter if I declare their poetry slam over, their exam cancelled and their year done. It won't matter if I throw a temper tantrum and yell at them. They will not care if I stop talking to them and just put in Disney movies for the next five days.

To them, I am nothing.

But to Jenny, I am everything. And that's what matters. She is what matters.