Completing my Course

Last week, I submitted my final piece of coursework, completing all the requirements for the Montessori Diploma I started in March 2017. I was supposed to complete in August when I did my workshops and took the exams, but owing to all the divorce stuff going on this year, I fell wildly behind schedule and they granted me an extension. Even then, I hoped to complete in October. But things kept on happening and interfering, and although I was still plugging away at it whenever I had time and focus (the latter being a major issue this autumn), I grew concerned that I was not going to complete it in time to actually apply for jobs.

So in November, I decided that enough was enough and I was going to make the coursework a priority. And then about two weeks later, I realised that me making it a priority didn't mean the rest of my life made it a priority...

So I went to extinction level. For three weeks, I treated the coursework as my newborn baby, and sat on the sofa with it to the exclusion of almost everything else. The laundry was done, but that was about it. The house went to rack and ruin. The children were largely left to fend for themselves: screentime restrictions were almost totally lifted, but they also had to make most of their own meals.

I feel like I have seen this story elsewhere online: the mother, for whatever reason, stops doing the cooking and cleaning, the home environment degrades... and the family suddenly realises just how much she does for them; reformed and loving, they step up to the plate and start taking the burden of household chores on themselves.

Yeah, not in my house. It is quite possibly a Christmas miracle that none of us died from dysentery.

(That was a joke. No need to call social services.)

The other result was that I stopped going out almost completely except for chauffeuring the kids and the weekly grocery shop. Once a week, I would go and socialise with a few friends—and that was all the adult interaction I would have for that week.

It worked. I finished my observations of my friend's toddler and wrote out the child study. I studied and self-tested for the last three topics of my curriculum planning module and wrote out a concept web and a subject web for a theme on snakes. And I submitted that last piece on my daughter's last day of school before Christmas.

However, three weeks of isolation amid clutter is depressing to say the least, so it wasn't as triumphant a moment as you might expect. I submitted, then cleaned the house in a daze. The kids were ecstatic to hear that I could actually do stuff with them again, but I only felt numb and weepy for a couple of days.

Fortunately, I have tremendously kind friends, and since last Friday, I've been to a Christmas party, celebrated my birthday—taken out to lunch by one pair of friends, taken out to dinner by another—caught up on some parkour training and have another party to attend tomorrow. I feel well and truly rehabilitated into society.

It's perhaps today that it's really sunk in. I'm done. (Assuming no corrections are needed.) I still have a lot of other crap to do, but I can write for leisure again and not feel guilty about it.

I don't know when I'll get my result... probably not until after Christmas. Based on the exams I took over the summer and the earlier coursework I've done, I should be on track for a distinction, if I can maintain that mark through these last two modules.

I want that distinction. I know it doesn't really matter... the key thing is passing and getting the diploma, and God knows, I was never really bothered in school about the difference between an A and a B. But this year's been hell, and completing the course was so much more difficult than I ever imagined it would be... Getting a distinction would be a personal victory on a couple of different levels: I was able to keep all the crap going on this year from interfering with this aspect of my future, and this is something I am really and genuinely good at.

Because I am. I'm incredibly smart about this stuff. I get what I'm doing with these young children and I love doing it. It's never going to earn me a lot of money—something which is unfortunately far more relevant now than when I started this course—but this is a career I will be successful in.

Anyway. That's step 1 of the move, finally complete, so I am... roughly six months behind schedule. Le sigh. The next few steps can at least be more concurrent as I try to find a job after not working for eight years, figure out where I'll be living and how much everything is going to cost... I've already started on this, but this weekend, I'll give myself a day off and take my long-suffering children to Dickens Town followed by Mary Poppins.