Summer and the summer camp are over, fall semester has begun, and my wife is, once again, a full-time student (though she still has some duties completing paperwork, supervising clean-up, and squaring away finances). She's once again taking all of Allen's classes--Lies, Statistics, and Illusions, Healer's Health, and Tricks of the Trade--plus Intermediate Martial Arts and Sword, both with Karen.
Of those five, all but Healer's Health are extensions of classes she's taken before. Not that she's repeating anything. Tricks of the Trade and Sword are both cumulative, and she hasn't taken Intermediate Martial Arts before, only its prerequisites. She took a statistics course as an undergrad, but of course that didn't have Allen's focus on perception. But Healer's Health is the one really new thing. I took it, as a novice. It's all about how to avoid burning out, how to not get codependent with the people you're trying to help, how to not become a workaholic, how to recognize signs of mental health problems and exhaustion in oneself, that sort of thing. I wish I'd paid more attention to what I learned in it when I was in grad school. She's impressed that we teach it here at all, because, as she points out, almost nobody teaches self-care as a part of professional training, even though all professionals need it.
"Its like they teach you every part of flying except the staying in the air part," she says.
She wanted to take more classes, she's very funny how excited she is to focus on academics again, but fortunately someone talked her out of it.
I was not allowed to talk her out of it. My access to my wife is still being rationed. It's as though we lived on opposite sides of the country, not in the same building. In a way it's easier, now that she fully understands why this is happening and I don't have to keep her away from me, but in a way it's harder--what if we get stuck like this?
"We will tell her to talk to you and to be with you, at the end of the year," Allen assures me. What they break, they plan to fix, I guess.
But it's frustrating. Again, it's like I'm being treated like a child. I'm looking at thirty, now. And it's not just with June, it's in my academics, too. In grad school, I didn't always know everything that was going on (there's an initiatory component to becoming a scientist that I didn't appreciate until afterwards), but I knew what credits I needed, what classes were available to take, and I had an advisor (actually two--one academic advisor, one thesis advisor) who would give me actual advice, if I asked for it.
As opposed to Charlie, who gives me orders and then walks away, leaving me to figure out exactly what he's talking about.
Case in point: today he walked up to me, asked me to give advice to at least three yearlings by the end of the month, and to write up a report on whether I should have given the advice or not. So, part of my homework is to figure out whether I should have done my homework?
This Mysterious Master thing was cute--ok, it was enjoyable, intriguing, glamorous--in the past, but it's not anymore. It's like, ok, I get it, Charlie, you're smarter and wiser than me. But why can't I be given the information I need to make decisions about my life?
Of course, I am making decisions. It's not like I'm locked in. I have an outside job, I have an education, I could leave any time I want to, and I want to stay here, doing this, despite everything. Maybe I'm afraid that if I said anything, that's what he'd come back with--well, leave, if you don't like it here. And he'd have a point. I mean, I knew what kind of teacher Charlie is before I came back from my Absence. It's just that it feels like I got my first real taste of adulthood while I was away, and now I have to crawl back into that proverbial chrysalis again.
But it's for a greater purpose, a deeper sort of adulthood, I suppose, so I do what he tells me, what they all tell me, and I try to do it well.
I'm even taking a class of my own, in addition to the ones requires for candidates and the things I'm teaching--Climate, Weather, and History. It's pretty much what it sounds like, and it's fascinating.
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