Searching for my Feet....

Well, the dust is beginning to settle. After the parties, flowers, balloons and the glorious trip to the Crown and Castle in Orford, that my husband treated me to, I'm feeling a bit lost. 

My daughter has just arrived home for a week, bringing me a box of lovely goodies to use in all my newly acquired free time, but I am simply unable to get my head around the fact that, should I decide to do nothing at all for the rest of my days, there is no-one that can tell me that I have to. Whilst I am sure that concerned family and friends would gently encourage me to engage in exciting activities, like washing, eating, getting out of bed, they do not have the power to sanction me with disciplinary proceedings, or by ultimately withdrawing my pension!

This means that from now on, I will have to be self-motivated and self-disciplined. Scary… this is not my forte!

Over the course of my career, I have worked with children with a range of special needs, which has  rewarded and challenged me in many ways. For the past three years, I have worked exclusively with children with severe autism, and my motivation came from the seemingly small breakthroughs that I supported them to make.  Motivation also came from the fact that if I wasn't organised and entertaining, me and my team would endure extremes of emotional and physical challenge - people with autism do not do disorganised and underprepared! We would all work interminably hard to provide an enriching learning environment and use our many skills to support the pupils that we came to care so much about. Now there is a vacuum, a void, a dirty great gaping hole where my life for the past 17 years was!

So, I will have to find new challenges, and motivate myself to actively pursue them. To be fair to myself, I have made a start - I’m on week 2 of the Couch to 5K programme, and played tennis last week. Writing a blog is new too, and I did make some bunting! I have purposely avoided signing up for anything that requires a regular time commitment, until I have found my feet. Ironically, my husband, who retired three years ago, has recently started to volunteer for two organisations. In recognition of this, I have started taking photos of his feet - he’s clearly found them, so they are worth recording! 

Technically of course, I am still on holiday, so I could continue to do what all good school staff do in their six week summer break - eat cake and drink gin. Don’t think I will need much motivation for that!