NATZ! THE AMAZING FAT-FIGHTER!

Oh My Gosh Natz! I don’t know how you do it!

Why, yes you have. Feel free to do it again.

I sit there and soak in all the praise, because really…I’m doing some amazing things right now.
I’m teaching full time on a super full roster of girls who are doing major exams this year (2 groups facing CSEC, three groups facing CAPE- and those aren’t the only groups I teach btw!). And excuse me for bragging, but I am KILLING it! My lessons plans are on point, I’m trying something new and engaging every week and my girls are ACTUALLY parlez-ing the français  (You know. When they’re not failing abysmally.)

I’m a mom, and I adore my babies. And somehow in the middle of this, I managed to bake cakes and cupcakes for my son’s 4th birthday- one for his class party, that I went and hosted and photographed, and one for home. I drive toy cars, chase toddlers, answer 4001 questions, read books and sing songs.

Repping that full-body support underwear

I’m a wife, and I message my husband multiple times a day, just to say hi, to tell him I love him, to make sure he eats, to find out what’s happening. Somehow, there really are moments at home when the kids are asleep that we spend chatting, watching favourite shows or just being chill. He knows he’s my MAN.

I just destroyed my last exam, got a pretty high A on a tricky topic and I just finished my first research paper that kinda felt like an A in my outbox. Killing it. Killing it for reals.

In some other post, we will analyze my utterly unhealthy obsession with perfection. I see it. I hear it. I’m working on it. This post is dedicated to the fact that though these are all lovely things to be ‘killing it’ in, there’s another area that I’m definitely not killing. And it could, in turn, well… kill me.

Advertisements

Happy D-Day! ( ‘D’ means Diabetes)

Not everyone reads my blog. As a matter of fact only about ten people in the world do, and I don’t even think my mom is one of those. I hope my husband is. So it’s a very strange thing to realise that although there is a (really, very) tiny corner of the internet where I am a vocal- yet occasionally self loathing- diabetic, in real life, most people still don’t know I am one.

That’s fine. It’s not like it’s a thing that needs to be know up front the way I believe things like, “I hate chocolate” and “I secretly take pictures of the back of your neck” should be. (That last one happened to me in college. True story.) But when I find myself around a certain group of people that, for whatever reason, I realise I’ll be around for some length of time, I find myself wondering if I should let them know what to do if I suddenly slump over or go incoherent.

Exactly

Doing my Masters degree with the minuscule cohort of We English-French-Spanish Speakers who are interested in a job involving hours of reading, writing and rejection, means 4 days a week locked in heated intellectual battles or shared confusion with the same 9 people for the next two years. I should say something, right? Nah. Wait, yeah. No.  Tell. No. Wait… Should I?

This is the mental dosey-do that’s been going on in my head since September o’clock. A week or so ago, I turned up for an exam. I had tested my blood sugar levels about two hours before exam time, and I was fine. A little high, perhaps, but anxiety does that to me. As I readied myself for the start, I noticed a light-headedness. Must be nerves, I reasoned. But wait! Worse light-headedness. “Knowing” that my sugar was fine (because this whole ‘your body is doing crazy things’ sometimes doesn’t stick) I didn’t even think of it, but did wonder in a largely idle fashion if I should mention it to one or two classmates for ‘future reference.’ But wait! It intensified. And the black spots. The racing heart. Could it be? Yes it was. Yes it was. Stupid low blood sugar ambushed me again.

But I didn’t tell anyone. I glucosed-up and rallied. I pulled it off smoothly, I was fine. End story, right?

Bu then you randomly find out that there’s such a thing as World Diabetes Day, and you think to yourself, “Hey- don’t I have a diabetes type blog thingy? Shouldn’t I do something ‘writey’ for that?” But you’re a very busy mommrsmastersmiss, with too many momly, wifely, scholarly and teacherly things to do to spare a moment for such sanctimonious scribblings.  So then night before this auspicious day, you hustle off to class, still with your ‘sweet little secret’ touched into your pocket where your insulin is kept. Except your insulin isn’t in your pocket tonight. Tonight, when you sit at the front of your class, right beside your teacher, your insulin pen rolls out of your folder, and onto the floor. And when you hastily bend to retrieve it, your other one joins it, clattering noisily and drawing all the attentions. Then your teacher, who thought you had been lending him a whiteboard marker, thanks you, picks it up and uncaps it to write on the whiteboard before going, “Wait… what is this?”

What is this indeed.