I Was Marking Assessments From My Son’s Hospital Room
What it took for me to learn about looking after myself during the term.
For years, I thought being dependable meant getting everything done, regardless of what was happening in my own life. Looking back, I’m not sure that was resilience at all.
I have a very clear memory of sitting beside my son in hospital with assessment papers in my lap, marking student assessments while he was being treated for seizures.
At the time, it didn’t feel particularly remarkable. I had assessments that needed marking, students who needed feedback and work that still had to be done, so I packed my laptop and took it with me. Nobody from school had asked me to do that. There was no pressure from leadership to keep working from a hospital room. I just knew there was work waiting for me, and somewhere along the way I had become so accustomed to pushing through that continuing to work felt like the responsible thing to do.
I think a lot of teachers will understand how easily that happens.
There is always a legitimate reason something needs to be done:
Lessons need planning.
Assessments need marking.
Parents need responses.
Data needs entering.
Students need support.
None of it feels unnecessary, which makes it incredibly easy to justify giving the work whatever is left of you.
For a long time, I was very good at that.
Teaching Made Me Very Good at Pushing Through
Teachers become incredibly skilled at functioning regardless of what is happening around them. You can walk into school exhausted and still greet your class. You can have something enormous happening at home and spend the next six hours making hundreds of decisions for little people. You notice the student who is unusually quiet, the child who hasn’t understood, the behaviour that is slightly out of character and the lesson that needs adjusting before tomorrow.
You become very good at noticing what everybody else needs.
My life outside the classroom was demanding too. My son is profoundly deaf and has complex additional needs, and those early years involved seizures, hospital stays, specialists, therapies, advocacy and learning Auslan so that we could communicate with him.
There was a lot happening, but I continued doing what I had always done. I worked, parented, managed appointments, planned lessons and got through whatever needed to be done.
At the time, I probably would have described myself as resilient. There are parts of that resilience that I am still incredibly proud of, but I can also see now that I had become very comfortable with putting myself last.
I Kept Waiting for Life to Become Less Busy
For years, I approached looking after myself as something I would get to when I had more capacity.
I would exercise consistently when things settled down. I would get more sleep when work became quieter. I would eat better when I had more time to organise myself. I would look after my skin when I wasn’t so tired at the end of the day.
The problem was that life kept changing, but it never really became less full.
Eventually I left the classroom to focus on learning sign language and so I could attend appointments for my son. And just recently, I made the decision to homeschool him. I have built online businesses around my family and created far more flexibility in my life, but there were still my boys to raise, content to create, appointments to attend and all of the ordinary responsibilities that come with being an adult.
Spare time wasn’t suddenly going to arrive and make looking after myself easy.
That realisation changed quite a lot for me.
I Stopped Looking for the Overhaul
As I have moved through my thirties, I have become much less interested in extremes and much more interested in what I can do consistently.
That philosophy now shapes the way I think about my health, movement, skincare and ageing.
I don’t want to punish my body into looking a certain way, and I don’t want to chase a younger version of my face. I’m far more interested in looking after what I already have and feeling good as I get older.
For me, ageing well isn’t about trying to stop ageing. It’s about the choices I make now that support the way I want to look, feel and live in the years ahead.
The interesting thing is that those choices are much less impressive than I once imagined they needed to be. I move my body regularly. I try to make good choices with food. I do my skincare every day. I have become better at recognising when I need rest, and I fit small things into the life I already have instead of waiting for the perfect opportunity to take care of myself.
It turns out consistency is far more useful to me than intensity ever was.
The Things That Stick Are Usually the Simplest
One of my current favourites is ridiculously simple: [these eye patches that I swear by].
Yes eye patches!
I put them on while I’m working at my laptop, getting ready or doing things around the house. They feel beautiful when my eyes are looking tired, and because they don’t require me to carve another chunk of time out of my day, they’re exactly the sort of thing I actually use.
There isn’t a dramatic story attached to them. They’re simply one of those small things that make me feel looked after, and these days I think there is a lot of value in that.
Somewhere Along the Way, Wellbeing Became Another Thing to Get Right
This is something I think about a lot when I look back at teaching.
Teachers are already surrounded by expectations to improve. Improve the lesson, improve the data, improve student outcomes, improve your practice, improve your planning and find a better way to manage your workload.
Then wellbeing enters the conversation and somehow that can become another list too:
Drink more water.
Exercise regularly.
Meditate.
Meal prep.
Establish boundaries.
Sleep eight hours.
Make time for yourself.
None of those things are inherently bad advice, but I think we sometimes miss the reality of the person receiving it.
When you are already carrying a lot, you probably don’t need another area of your life in which you feel as though you aren’t doing enough.
I certainly didn’t.
I Think About That Hospital Room Differently Now
When I picture myself sitting beside my son with those assessments open, I don’t judge that version of myself. She was navigating an extraordinarily difficult season and doing what she thought needed to be done.
But I do see her differently.
I don’t think I needed to become better at carrying everything. I think I needed to realise that I was one of the people worth looking after too.
That has probably been one of the biggest changes in me over the years. I still work hard. I still have a full life. There are still weeks where everything doesn’t go according to plan.
The difference is that I no longer believe I have to wait until everything else is finished before I can look after myself.
Because everything else is never finished.
And perhaps looking after ourselves was never supposed to be another thing we mastered anyway. Maybe it is simply something we learn to make room for, little by little, in the middle of the lives we already have.
Trudy x
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