First day of lab and we survived the bed bath! Our teacher was a great lady, making us all comfortable, drawing the quiet ones out to participate, making donning PPE a race and getting everyone to laugh.

Between that and postponing homework for a night of Glee and committing to some kind of exercise daily, I feel so much better. And I’ve realized why this is such a challenge for me — my anxiety. I take medicine that I wanted to get off but a great counselor advised me to try school with the help first. That’s what professionals are for. But even with that help – or crutch as it sometimes feels like – I’ve felt on the edge of breaking. Too much input and not near enough time to process. Hence I heard that same voice in my ear with the other half of the best way to manage anxiety disorder – exercise.

I must exercise. If you have diagnosed anxiety like I do, you need to exercise too.

Yesterday it was throwing ball in the park with my guy. Today I went for a walk and ended up in front of school to meet the kids at the exact right time.

I know I won’t always remember or be disciplined enough to get off my tush, but the hour not spent studying to physically move is so worth it. My mind is clear, I feel ready to tackle hours of reading, essay writing and skill videos. And most of all the stress is way WAY lower. Time to get to it!

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I never thought this day would come. I always wanted to be so terribly careful about I said. I wanted to have a message. Be a leader. Be someone, something, anything. But I have a family, a job, I’m in NURSING school and I’d like to write about it all on my blog. So the day has come.

This blog is officially a “whatever I feel like it today” blog.

Today there was panic and loneliness, feeling weird, forced extrovertedness, success, laughes and kale chips! Wanna hear about it?

Going back to school is a dream come true. As school drew nearer over the summer, my long awaited excitement slowly became a dawning anxiety and nameless general fear.

The first days were a blur, keeping my head above water, orientating myself to college as a mature student, to a system of education in a different country, to a university nursing program instead of the diploma one, to new people, to buses that don’t go the direction I think they will, to where to park and how to find food.

The second week was one long sugar craving. Seriously.

The third turned serious. Two quizzes and a first assignment due changed everything, and I went even more overboard than needed, totally killed a quiz my eleven year old daughter could have passed and am rethinking everything.

Hence, I’m blogging.

But today, wow, what a rollercoaster.

It occurred to me that we have our first skills lab on Monday – we get to bathe each other! – and that I’d better ask around to the few people I feel comfortable with to find a partner. My efforts gave me the impression that everyone else seemed to have paired up already and that I was a really late bloomer and would probably have a total stranger giving me a bed bath! This did not help that general nervousness and overwhelmedness.

I took my sad sorry self to the library to watch the skills video in preparation and found that my cat had eaten through my headphone wires. Strike two for the day. I kicked myself out of my hidey hole however and went over to the “caf” which in Canadian college speak means the cafeteria. And yes, it has it’s very own… you guessed it… Tim Hortons. When I saw some girls in my classes, I literally forcefully willed that I must ask them to sit and chat over lunch together. Natural for me would have been to sulk.

Miraculously it worked. We ate, we “studied” in the library, I found someone available to partner with before our next class, our teacher had us play a nursing board game for two hours which was JUST the break that everyone needed, we laughed and I came home to make mini crustless quiches and kale chips for supper. My ten year old son is eating the leftover kale by the handful as I type. I kid you not! Try them, you’ll love them. Just take it from me… don’t overdo the salt!

G’night, back to student mode.

p.s. and anyhow i really need somewhere to break grammatical rules and not captitalize personal pronouns just so i can pretend i’m heckling professors and their personal pet peeves. not to mention, i NEED somewhere to write creatively because they are making me be straightforward and concise and direct and… worst of all, without metaphor! /swoon

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It seems so easy. You just stop going. Sunday comes around, and you will yourself not to care. Later as you get accustomed to lingering over coffee and longer than normal web-surfing sessions, all the guilt is gone and you savour the morning. Eventually, the fact that any given day of the week is actually Sunday may totally escape your notice. That’s where I am. I have no need for church.

Except when something doesn’t go my way, when unsure, when something big is coming up.  And it’s not really church that I need, but that’s when I feel the loss of my faith because… because well, the habit of prayer has been especially annoying. It has indeed become a habit over the years. If I’m feeling down, unconsciously it pours forth… Our Father… Hail Mary… Please help, please hear, be with… me…

I call out inside to that being or person or creator that I once thought was there, I catch myself in the lie… or in the uncertainity — at best.

Do agnostists pray? Do atheists? And if not, what is there to do with those feelings of need and loneliness? Can the logic of my argument for there not being a higher power comfort in the dark of the night?

I don’t know.

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Evening trips to the library are the best. Even when I’m being held temporarily captive to some novel or fantasy, I can still peel myself away from my obsession to take the kids to find a new book. Although, is it ever truly just one? No, not even close. Try a back-pack full.

As a young mom, as an emerging lover of better and better literature, I was anxious to help my children read well. But the volumes of Scooby-Doo mysteries, shelves of grahic novels and never-ending series such as Animorphs made me wonder however if I would ever win that war.

I persisted and compromised and tried to remember back to how excited I was to find another new Dean Koontz at my own library as a young teen. Now I get excited to find a Margaret Atwood. Go figure.

Along the way, they have read good books, good literature. But today I want to herald those other books. The ones with the thankless job of winning no awards, garnering zero reviews, sporting no bright shiny metal on the front. Are they simply taking up shelf space that should be reserved for the best books? Hardly. Because it is those books that my children wanted to read so bad that I received enthusiastic shouts when announcing it was library night.

I’d like to say thanks to Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie for making the library fun for my son. He would later read award-winning Canadian author Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens.

Thanks Ann Martin for the Baby-sitters Little Sister books that inspired my daughter to devour books and join her school book club and read even more.

My kids were not of a reading age when the Harry Potter phenomenon occurred, but I understand why parents supported their children’s interest and the surge of getting back into reading.

The lessons in reading, plain and simple no matter the material are enormous: they have learned to love and to laugh in books, to find books and topics of interest to them (so important to self-esteem), to say no thanks Mom to the ones that don’t (assertiveness), to respect my opinion too and trust that I’ll find them books they’ll love, to wrap little minds around the eternal paradox of the words fiction and non-fiction, to call the library a beloved place, to know where to go when in need of information and to run up the curving staircase to the children’s section with glee…

though last time they did that, the sweetest librarian you will ever meet greeted them at the top with “Slow down guys.” hehe

Library nights are indeed the best!

ps. In the latest episode of Bookrageous podcast, they discuss this very thing! They could have called it the “brain candy versus the GREAT books” episode. It is spun mostly thinking of summer reading and comparing that reading over the ages of one’s life, aka what you read over the summer in high school versus as an adult. You might be surprised which side they fight for.

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