This past month has been something else — overworked, trapped in my office all day long, stressed out to the point where I’m severely lacking in sleep. I’m a physical and mental wreck. But that all changes shortly. I’ve been meeting with students all day, trying to coach them through their last few assignments, and my last appointment of the semester is at about 1:00…and then I’m done. They’re all on their own at that point. They’ve got their final exams in hand, they do them and turn them in on Tuesday, and it’s one last surge of grading, but I’m free until then. Days of freedom. I won’t know what to do with myself.

Well, actually, I kind of do.

By 1:30 I’ll have finished my last meeting. Then I’m bolting outta here. It’s a warm sunny day, I’m going for a nice refreshing walk. I might stop at the coffee shop — I can do that, I’m vaccinated — which I haven’t visited in over a year. I might just breathe fresh air for a while. I’ll try to avoid getting hit by a bus, which would be a terribly ironic end to a long painful year.

Then I’m coming home to sit out in the sun room and work on our Mother’s Day Fundraiser. See the link over there on the left? It’s empty at this point, but only because I’ve been too swamped to fill it in. The other good people here at FtB have been making plans, I’ll be consolidating those and putting them on the page, and then we just have to do it all, while begging you for donations to cover our legal expenses. I’m making a video about an intersex mother — it turns out you don’t have to have XX chromosomes to be a good mom, surprise, surprise — and we’ve got stories about mothers on various blogs to be unveiled. But all that isn’t work, it’s a change of pace, and fun.

But first, leg-stretching and lung-filling and pretending I’m human again for a while. Maybe I’ll sleep through the night tonight, too.

I think my theme for the day will be, “Look, mom! I’m still alive!”