The Last One

Initially I sat down to write about the body builderia everyone in my house is currently suffering from.  If you are not aware of body builderia, it is a condition where when one person says “Look at my arms!” and those suffering with body builderia immediately roll up their shirtsleeves and flex for comparison.  All McMahons are terrible about this; even the boy, who in his sloth-like condition should have absolutely no muscle tone as he lifts nothing heavier than the TV remote, yet has the mostly beautifully sculpted arms around.  And while I could easily pump out a solid thousand words more about body builderia, today I find that maybe I should not.

We had a staff meeting recently about social media, kids, and parents and how everything and anything we say or type or emoji can and will be used against us in the teaching profession.  While I am not teaching yet, I will be and this has started to concern me.  If I type up a blog today with humor and with no ill will about body builderia, will an angry parent somewhere down the line come across this blog and accuse me of being insensitive about eating disorders?  Even though body builderia is entirely made up, will they look at it and say “There!  This is the proof that this woman is insensitive and as such the only reason my child is failing!”  It seems a stretch, but it could happen.  It does happen. I don’t want it to happen to me.

I’ve worked hard to realize my goal of becoming a teacher.  I took the long road to getting here and I am old to be starting a new career.  Well, older anyway.   I think that the goal of teaching is drawing nearer and I keep saying things like “When I am a teacher” or use declarative statements in front of most of the faculty that start “As I will be teaching next year…” and it feels really good.  When I am left in charge of someone’s classroom and I stand up there and explain and talk and teach, I feel like this is where I am supposed to be.  It is almost similar to when I held SG for the first time and knew, quite instantly, that this is what I was meant to do with my life.  This is the work I want to do for the next twenty+ years of my life and I don’t want to feel like I am exposing myself to losing this career because I quickly wrote about something I found amusing at the time. 

I love this blog. I love to write about what is going on in our lives, our things that I think stink or things in our life that stink. I love to reread the ones I wrote three years ago and sigh about what a sad-sack Sally I was.  I love the feedback that I get from you after I blog.  Being a middle child, I need that constant validation.  I love to write, I love to take all of my words and throw them down in a way I think is pleasing to read about.  However, as much as I’d secretly wished my blog would be picked up by Huffington Post or that I would be offered an editorial spot in the Austin American Statesman, neither thing has happened.  This blog might be a happy maker, but it is not a money maker.  So again, teaching wins as they will actually pay me to teach.  A little bit anyway.

So I guess what I am doing here today is retiring from Rebecca Who Always Spoke Loudly.  My words will always be a huge part of me, but I don’t want them to be the undoing of me.  I don’t want to continue writing it in a censored, watered-down, parentally approved version of me either, because that would be an undoing of me as well.  All or nothing, all or nothing.  However, I do know that I will continue to write because it is part of me.  It gives me joy to write, it gives me my sanity back when I write and it gives me peace when I look back and reread the old stuff and see how far we have come.  I will just choose a more private venue.  Maybe this will even force me to send Christmas cards and not assume everyone is reading my blog and knows all about our life.  Maybe I’ll enter writing contests, although I do not like to be limited in the amount of words I am supposed to write in.  Perhaps I will put more thought into what I am writing and somehow put a whole book together.  Maybe I will take the adventures of my first year of teaching and publish it under a pen name and make a million dollars and then let you all know that it was me!  It could actually happen.  Or, much like the sports world, I might announce this retirement only to come back again and again.  I am not one hundred percent sure.  All I know is that I truly want to be a teacher and I am going to focus on that for now.  Rebecca, who always spoke loudly, is going to continue to be shushed in the library, continue to use all of her words and most importantly, Rebecca, who always spoke loudly, is going to teach.

See?!  It says teacher right on it!