The school year ended last week, which is always a relief, but this year it marked a transition between being stressed out about work  (an ever present stress about schedules and too much to grade and kids’ lives) and what we’ve planned to be a transitional time. My husband is going to finish his degree this fall, but to do it, he has to go back to his original campus, which is three hours away. We wanted to make sure we have three medicated cycles– July, August, September– before he will be gone and the opportunity to Do It will be seriously diminished. Not that it matters. We’ve Done It only once in the last month (right in the middle of the month, coincidentally when my phone said I’d be ovulating, so now despite having very little chance of being pregnant, there’s still an outside chance, so I’ve got it in the back of my mind). I thought it was just me being absolutely exhausted, but we went to the coast this last weekend, where our usual activities are Doing It, walking along the beach, and eating salmon. We rented a big house, which felt like it would be too much space for just the two of us, so I invited another family along. Maybe that’s what killed it, I don’t know, but there was no sexing.

The couple we took with us was our third choice for couples to go to the coast with. They’re super planny, and the dude half of the couple is constantly down-trodden, like he’s carrying the weight of something unimaginably difficult, but whatever that might be is a mystery. Combine that with an attitude of arrogance and constant talking about how and who he was in high school (the smartest, the most athletic, the most awesome)– it was a trying weekend. I couldn’t stop complaining about him, which is not sexy, especially because I was the one who invited them. The truth, though, was that I was scared that once we got to the coast, we’d have nothing to say to each other because we’re always around each other. I wanted some shared ground, someone else to talk to and hang out with so that when I was alone with my husband, we could connect about what happened out of the eyesight and earshot of each other. It kind of backfired. When we got home, I made dinner, and we sat down to eat, and I got sucked in to reading the newspaper, and when I apologized for not exactly being attentive, he was like, “I love you, but there was a lot of talking this weekend. I’m cool with a little silence.”

So now I’m in a strange head space about when he goes back to school if he’ll just keep going further away, and if I’ll retreat too because that’s what I do. We’re both terrible correspondents, and I know that we would not have successfully dated had we not already been living together as roommates. Neither of us returns phone calls. Neither of us regularly checks texts. He loses his phone all the time. If I didn’t know that about him in the beginning, and if we’d been living apart, I’d think he was completely uninterested in me and I would have returned the same level of affection because I am too insecure for that.

His wedding ring fell apart this weekend. Mine broke. I’m trying not to see metaphors. We also blew a tire on the way home and found that the inside of the two front tires were bald too, so four tires and alignment sucked about $500 out of my uterus budget.

Next weekend, three of my friends from grad school are going to be here to hang out for the 4th of July. All of them are my age or older, and none of them have children. If they are pregnant, which I realize is a possibility, I will not let them stay at my house.

I go through this every single year, this disorientation between who I am as a teacher and who I am in the rest of my life, which should be my real life. I’ve ignored myself for so long I’m not sure what I do with my time. I don’t remember what I like to do, so I’m going to spend the next eight weeks figuring that out. Meanwhile, I’m going to work outside as much as I can, tend to some vegetables in my first ever raised garden bed, get a deep brown tan, listen to good music through headphones, draw, write.