To be honest…

When I started blogging, I promised myself I would write the good things and the bad things, and write how I was feeling rather than how I wanted to feel. Wednesday was a bad day, and I came home and wrote this post. But with no internet in our apartment again, I couldn’t publish it… and the next day, when I felt calmer and a lot less miserable, I wanted to delete the whole thing. But seeing as I can’t edit this year to take out all the bad moments and leave only the picture-perfect fun bits, here it is, 3 days late.

To be honest…today was hard. Like, no-more-tears-left hard.

I’m not very good at holding back – I tend to say what comes into my mind without thinking about it properly first, and then regret it later. But I also don’t really know how to do things by halves. And so when I started working, I just gave everything. And I think that is true for Inma too. From 7.30 until 2 or later each day, we are physically with our children, and that brings quite a lot of emotional turmoil anyway. But, because our job is the only reason we live in Germany, it tends to seep into every aspect of life. We go home and need to process what the day was like, and we talk and talk, and we plan for the next day, and try and prepare. But we’re lacking the coping mechanisms that we usually have around us – friends, family, a language that we understand without trying, access to the internet – basically, all the things that make you feel secure. All the things that stop the small problems from piling up until they crash down on top of you.

When we started, we gave our hearts to the children we’re working with. And when everything is going well, that’s the best feeling in the world, because it is real happiness.

But some days, it feels like we’ve been trampled on by the same children who we’ve sat with for hours as they’ve laughed and cried and needed so much help from us. And as we sit there, feeling bruised and vulnerable and slightly betrayed, we know that we have to get up and try again, before we’re ready, still carrying that hurt around. That all sounds a bit abstract… and I don’t usually do abstract. But the problems themselves are so small compared to the massive emotions. Like when a child tells you every day that he hates you, or that the last volunteer was better. Or when you get hit in the face, not entirely on purpose but not entirely by accident either. Or when a child refuses your help because you’re ‘not the proper teacher’. Or when they assume you’re stupid because you don’t know a word, or laugh in your face when you try and tell them off, because ‘you speak funny’. Or when you just spend the whole day feeling a bit lost because working in a school is new, never mind a German school, never mind a school totally different from all the other German schools. Or when you just need to hear that you’ve done something right, and all you can see on your own are the things you’ve done wrong. Sometimes, nothing is even wrong – it’s just that 20 small people physically and emotionally grabbing hold of you all day is HARD. I have not written the hardest things, because some of those are not my story to tell, and because the strands are too complicated to pull apart. But they are weighing heavily on my heart today.

One of our friends said to us a couple of weeks ago, after a particularly difficult day with her teenagers, ‘the children are like vampires. They just take… everything.’ And although my mostly lovely 6 year olds aren’t usually very vampire-esque, and I probably wouldn’t say that to the parents on parents evening, I know exactly what she means. I don’t have anything left to give today. And tomorrow, we will go into school slightly wary, aware that we have no energy reserves left, and it won’t change anything in the slightest. The children will keep taking what they need from us, and we will keep letting them – they’re only children, after all. Hopefully, we will get better at riding these emotions, and clinging on to things that will help us feel secure. Because as Inma and I clung on to each other in an exhausted heap this evening, I remembered the advice we get in acrobatics: when you’re trying to keep your balance, you need to look at a point that’s not moving, otherwise you will fall – and we’re both wobbling all over the place. Still, it means a lot to have a friend on this crazy ride.