The toilet is going to eat my pee

“I’m going to tell you that the toilet is going to eat my pee,” he said. It was my son, nearly three, standing with his pants over his ankles. He held himself, umm, firmly.

“I’m going to tell you that the toilet is going to eat my pee,” he repeated.

“OK.”

“The toilet is going to eat my pee.”

“Got it.”

“The toilet is going to eat my pee. The toilet is going to eat my pee. Water is going to come out and it’s going to eat my pee.”

Flush.

“The toilet — it ate my pee.”

***

This is more or less where my head is these days. The last six months have been ridiculous in our tiny apartment. Minus the random and intense freakouts, our kid is becoming a kid — out of diapers, into a big-kid bed, counting and talking all the time. And our baby is teething, sitting, eating, even maybe sleeping.

But most of all there’s been a lot of poop, pee, yelling, family time at 3 AM, etc.

In the meantime, I’ve been feeling a little bit lost lately. I’m feeling stalled out on a bunch of projects that I was excited about. I’m having trouble getting stuff done. I’m tired, and I feel dumb a lot of the time. This sometimes happens, I’ve learned (even before having little kids) and there’s nothing to do about it, just work it out.

Part of that working out is happening on this blog. I don’t like it, but the only way I know to get out of a rut is to find a low-stakes place to just make an ass of myself, and that’s what I intend to do in this space.

Without getting too whiny, I’ll say that I’m struggling with the same things that I’ve struggled with since the start: what does it mean to be a teacher who writes? what do I know? what can I learn? where can I publish? am I headed anywhere with all this?

I need to figure out if there’s a way to do what I do, but in a way that feels a bit bigger than how I’m currently doing it. I’m not sure what “bigger” means yet but that’s part of what I’m working on.

(Oh god, kid: go to sleep! This bedtime is dragging on and on.)

So: follow my Problems With Teaching blog for things that are a bit more put-together than what I’ll be trying out in this space. There’s an automatic IFTTT trigger so that posts here get posted on Twitter, so you can subscribe to this blog or just follow casually via my @mpershan feed. If I end up blogging a lot here, I’ll try to cut down on my tweets so the internet isn’t over-Pershaned.

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