weight

For a few months I've been mulling over a conversation I need to have with Sasha and Ezra's parents. I've been waiting to compose and send that email until I have felt like we're balanced -- that I don't owe them any favors and they don't owe me. Or maybe that they owe me a little.

So finally, today, a few days before Sasha's birthday, I did it. I spent two hours writing and rewriting a two-page email that boils down to a request to quit a few months ahead of schedule. I made a verbal contract to stick it out for a whole year with their family, but there are actually a lot (two pages worth) of reasons for me to withdraw before the summer starts. The weighted dread coiled in my gut of spending three full days a week with Sasha notwithstanding. The reasons are more to do with my grad school and classroom teaching trajectories and the impracticality (financially and topographically) of a bicycle-based transportation system that would allow me to get the kids out of the house during the three long months of summer break.

I tried to ease the blow by wrapping the whole thing in the word "transition" rather than the harsher "quitting" or "leaving," even though essentially that's what I'm after. I also offered reduced-time compromises that I hope they don't want. I hope they will see the sense of hiring a new nanny in June rather than waiting until September.

I feel lighter, but not by as much as I had thought I would. I guess their answer will determine what happens with the remaining weight I'm lugging around inside my belly.

Hugs,
-MP