Dichotomy

I just woke up crying.  Have you ever done that? I cannot remember a time that I have, and it has left me reeling.  I am sitting in my hotel room at the posh Rosen Shingle Creek Resort

in Orlando, Florida with fresh tears wiped from my face.  Today is the last morning of this six-day trip.  I am not upset about leaving, nor reminising about my beautiful town or husband and sons I left behind (although I will be very happy to see them at the end of the day).

 

I was dreaming about my second-grade classroom, and my colleagues at Lena Whitmore Elementary.

The day before I left for this trip I returned to my former classroom to begin the process of separating my personal belongings.  It was the first time I'd been alone in the room for a year, and it was an experience that I was unprepared for.  I didn't anticipate the intensity of my own emotions.

I was surrounded by the deep blue and green bookcases that I had painted.  The empty branches of the giant oak tree made from crumpled paper bags that I'd stapled to the concrete wall loomed overhead.  My beloved rug with children from around the world smiling up at me beneath my feet. Every drawer that I opened or bookbox that I peered into was intimately familiar, and yet foreign to me.

It was all wrong.  The furniture wasn't where it was supposed to be and the Ikea bookboxes were cracked and broken.  Some of my childhood books that my father had read to me as a child were now ripped.  An unknown child had ripped the preserved green June beetle from its plastic case in the cover of the Beetles of the World book.

Yes, I realize that I chose this path....  Another one-year, once-in-a-lifetime presented itself to me, and I took the leap.  Against multiple odds it worked out.  And now I find myself subconsciously mourning the loss of my second-grade-teaching self. How is it that I can be genuinely excited about my future and all that it holds and at the same time so very sad about what I am leaving behind?  I know that it has to do with all of the time and energy and love that I poured into that time in my life.  A life that I loved and never imagined myself leaving permanently. That's the dichotomy I find myself in at this time.  Sitting in a tropical paradise dreading the act of removing a piece of my heart when I return home.