Embracing the Struggle

 A couple of years ago, my therapist told me that the idea of "should" is the enemy of any healthy relationship. So often unhappiness results from a dissonance between our expectations and our reality, and the word "should," when applied to your partner and your partner's actions (my partner should  be doing this certain thing), or when applied to one's image of one's relationship (our relationship should look this certain way), can cause all sorts of unrealistic expectations. My memory of this conversation with my therapist resurfaced this week as I did my weekly mental wrestling match with the realities of hybrid learning. I realized that "should" is a dangerous concept in a lot of different aspects of life, not just one's relationships, and that it had been surreptitiously lurking in my feelings and expectations about this school year and thus making me miserable.  Honestly, I thought I was doing a great job of managing my expectations o...

I get it. We're all struggling. All sick of hearing about COVID-19 and how it's changed everything. We've all looked at the same memes about being stuck inside, all shared in the collective outrage at people who refuse to take this pandemic seriously and shared in the collective support of our health care workers, grocery store workers, and others who are the front lines of this. Those of us who are teachers are scrambling to figure out online learning and posting about how much we miss our students. We're all (or at least I am), completely and utterly terrified when we read articles about the current death toll and about how much this pandemic might spread, how long this all might last. So I'm not really expecting anyone to read this (which is how I usually approach this blog), because the last thing anyone really needs  is another online take about COVID-19 and how we're coping with it. But it has quite literally taken over the world, and all of our lives an...