The last few mornings I have been getting up and going for walks. Very close to our place is a wetlands which has been replanted and now has heaps of birds and is a little bit of paradise in suburbia. Walking through it as the sun comes up and the mist is still over the water is absolute bliss. It is a heady mix of being reminded that my life is really not the centre of the universe but also testament to the way God cares for his creation.

It has also been wonderful to be active. This has been the winter of sloth for me. My energy levels have been at an all time low and I have not been eating very healthily. So with the coming of daylight savings, my enthusiasm for being healthy has been reinvigorated. I love that it really is true that when you do some excercise and eat well you actually do feel better. Who would have thought?

Superwoman syndrome seems to be a rampant disease and one which I am struggling with at present. I have recently begun to accept that I can't do everythink I think I should. This results in me feeling like a failure. I am always sure everyone else is coping and fine and I can't understand why I can't keep up with everything.

I read an excellent column about the issue which stated that women who suffer from superwoman syndrome are often people who seek affirmation and approval from others, who have had to take on responsibility in their families or have had high expectations placed on them as a child. They are often plagued by guilt and fear if they don't meet their own high expectiations. I could see myself in the description straight away.

The columnist gave some interesting advice. He suggested facing up to the trauma that you cause to others and the people you are supposed to care for by saying yes to too many things and burning out. It was also suggested that despite the internal voice which accuses you of laziness and makes you feel guilty for not doing everything, to just push on through and embrace doing less.

One thing I have realised recenlty is that trying to be perfect adn seem perfect is a very selfish way to live. It means that everything you do is all about feeling good about yourself adn not really about others. It also is a recipe for mental and emotional trauma because you can never meet your own standards and always feel inadequate and ironically everyone around you has to make space for you to be so tortured.

The tricky thing I find is working out what realistic expectations of myself are. Sometimes you do have to work hard and be tired but when is it required and when is it because of my need to be perfect? I also think that society today almost reinforces the superwoman mentality by promising everything if you just work hard enough.

I must go and try to be a not so perfect teacher to my very much less than perfect students!

I was marking some research by my students today. They has to research the life and works of a New Zealand writer. I was reading through the brochures they had put together and was so imspired by the careers of these well known writers. Many of them came to a realisation at some point that they wanted to write seriously and be published.

When I was quite young I used to go sailing with my family a lot. There isn't much you can do when you are sailing except look at the view. I used to stare into space and come up with all these ideas for stories. I still remember on quite vividly. We were sailing from Coromandel Harbour up towards Moehau and there are quite a few islands dotted about. One you can sail very close to. It was a grey day and gusty and I could see cattle dotted about on the hills. I thought it would be a great place to use as a setting for a kids novel about abandoned buildings, with mysteries and lone cattle left by a family who had abandoned the island. I went for a walk on that island and thought about the story even more. But I never wrote it.

I heard an interview on the radio with an author of teenage fiction and she also inspired me. She had a successful career which she had put on hold while she had kids. When her kids were school age she was looking for something new to do. She went to a seminar and a well known author asked her what she wanted to do with her life. She said she wanted to write. He replied by telling her to get on with it, so she did.

So I might get on with it. Even if the writing sucks, at least I will have had a go. Bit scary really, actually doing something. It is much easier to have a perfect dream rather than an imperfect reality.

I have really been enjoying my holiday and hence my absence. I haven't done anything much but what I have been doing has been well with my soul. But now the new term is looming and I am trying to work out how I am going to deal with it. I have been feeling rather luck lustre about teaching. But I have decided to keep at it for another year. I don't want to drag myself kicking and screming back to school and I would love to recapture the passion I has when I first started teaching.

I think I have lost a great deal of self confidence this year. I have felt unable to measure up to my own standards as a teacher and therefore I have felt a bit of a failure. Teaching is rather a conundrum really. If you do heaps of work it is often very exciting and enthusing, but you just can't keep working at that pace so eventually you crash. However, if you work in a way which is purely about self preservation there is very little satisfaction and in the last term I got into a rut of feeling that the job was too impossible and why would anyone bother so that I really felt like a victim of my job. So in order to try to solve this dilemma I think I have come up with a solution.

I am going to downsize my job. Middle management in teaching is a nightmare. Too much to do and not enough time so the plan is to go back to purely being a classroom teacher. I want to get back into creating interesting and challenging lessons for my students, having time to give good feedback and the energy to be creative and improve my teaching practise. I am hoping this down shift will reignite my passion for teaching. I also plan to just teach one subject rather than the two I teach at the moment so that I can focus on one thing and hopefully do it well.

This simplification of my work goes totally against the grain of where my teaching career was heading. I am very much a big picture person and I can always see improvements and changes which I think should be made across my whole school and become very frustrated when people don't seem to be able to make those changes. So I thought by moving into middle management I could be a part of those changes. Well I was mistaken. For some people I think it definitely works but it seems the further up the ranks I have moved there further I get from the students and the teaching, which is supposed to be what schools are about. I have very little patience with school concerns about PR and politics. I think schools should be places where the management serves the teachers so that they can do the best job they can in serving the needs of their students, unfortunately it usually goes the other way round.

So by returning to my classroom and the kids hopefully I will remember the reason I wanted to be a teacher in the first place and will be able to stop just surviving each day at work and instead be excited about being there and what I can offer.

Women have so much choice but is that just an illusion or a trap? I have been reflecting a great deal about the huge array of models of womanhood which women can choose for their lives. When my Mum was my age there were only three careers for women; teaching, nursing or secretary. It was assumed that you would get married young, have kids and stay at home. Today there is no such expectation. I am so grateful to the feminist movement that I do not have to deal with the prejudice so many women have experienced in the past but I don't think women have it very easy now either.

You may have heard of the "supermum" syndrome. This is the condition many women suffer under where they want to have a high powered and successful career, equal to their male colleagues while also being the perfect wife and mother. I believe for most women, this is actually impossible and certain compromises have to be made, usually in their personal lives in order to meet the demands of their careers. This may explain why so many women are starting their own businesses in order to work from home and be closer to their kids. Now don't get me wrong, I would consider myself to be strongly feminist, in the sense that I believe women are capable of doing anything they set their minds to. However I think the reality is often women try to fulfill and traditional roles of men as well as women and these women then end up being plagued by guilt and frustration.

I am not very career minded myself. I have been in the past and I do love teaching but I find the stress of work very difficult to deal with. I am useless with money and maths so I don't think I would be a very successful business owner. I am also quite young by today's standards to be considering having kids. Twenty years ago it would have been normal for me to already have three kids. These days that would be seen as highly irresponsible behaviour or at the very least, be seen as missing out on opportunities. Instead I am still paying off my student loan and have no assets of any real value. Oh the irony!

I guess what I am getting at is that women still cannot do everything. I know no man who could manage to be successful in their career and manage to fulfill the traditional mothering role without things going seriously amiss. So why do women expect that of themselves?

I have decided that I will have to sacrifice either career or kids at various times in my life in order to be happy with how I am doing one of those things. So I am so grateful that I can choose. But there is still a choice to be made and trying to do both brilliantly seems to me, a recipe for dissatisfaction. It is not that I am anti working Mums. I think I will want to work, at least part time, while having and raising kids, but if I can hardly manage my work load at the moment, having a bunch of anklebiters to care for won't exactly make that easier and I want to feel like I am doing something well rather than lots of things, but not well. So I guess it it a mental wellness choice. Women are doing it for themselves but they don't have to do everything!

I have a sore brain from thinking too much and a sore neck due to navel gazing. But I can't seem to stop. As the end of the year approaches I feel more and more urgency to work out what I am supposed to be doing with my life. That may sound overly dramatic but it feels slightly life and death to me.

I have had a year of struggling to feel motivated in my work. This is my 4th year of teaching and though I still love the learning and the kids it really isn't doing it for me any more. I know that most people believe teaching is one of those jobs where you must have the whole "changing the world" thing covered but it really doesn't feel like that to me. I feel like a bureaucrat who injects knowledge into kids so that they can vomit it out during exams. What I really care about is helping them to deal with life and think about their place in the world and to realise the privilege they experience in New Zealand and the responsibility that comes with that. And also, teaching just exhausts me. Some people can do it but the job is structured in such a way that I just survive and I feel like I have forgotten how to live. The classes I love, the paper I don't.

I must remind you that I am still young and slightly wet behind the ears so it is all possibly me not being able to deal with the real world of work. But if this is all there is then it is not good enough!

So I am now left with the quesiton mark that is next year. For some people this would be a time of great excitement and expectation, for me it is very difficult. I love change but I am also a planner and a dreamer. I need to have concrete realities to plan my life around and to attach my dreams to. So far 2006 lacks any concrete anything. This is creating the navel gazing and obsessive questioning which I referred to earlier. But I am realising something rather profound. There is no one right or clear answer for me. No-one can tell me what to do.

I can either stick with a career orientated life where I make a clear career change and keep working like I have been doing, hopefully with less paper or I can change my whole approach to life as I know it. Both options are scary. With the first I risk depression and dissatisfaction again as well as general numbness, while with the second I will definitely lose my security and risk getting very hurt and disappointed. So I think I have worked out a key to making the decision.

I have to do what I believe in, not what makes me feel safe or sure. But I have to use what has already been given to me and not ignore the past. In a sense I think I have to follow the prompting Jesus has given me with the dissatisfaction and tension I feel but not forget what He has already done in my life.

But what on earth would that look like? So I am on the hunt for some models on how I could do life. I have found some pretty good ones and the time is coming where I will have to take some steps and stop just thinking...

The other thing which complicates everything is that it is not all about me. Since getting married I have not been in such an obvious situation where my decisions and my husbands decision's about out personal direction are so intertwined. I cannot act without knowing where he wants to go and in a sense neither can he.

So what now? Where to from here?

Back to the thinking I guess...

"We too often forget that faith is a matter of questioning and struggle before it becomes one of certitude and peace. You have to doubt and reject everything else in order to believe firmly in Christ, and after you have begun to believe, your faith itself must be tested and purified. Christianity is not merely a set of forgone conclusions. Faith tends to be defeated by the burning presence of God in mystery, and seeks refuge from him, flying to comfortable social forms and safe convictions in which purification is no longer an inner battle but a matter of outward gesture."
- Thomas Merton

This quote sums up how I have been feeling and the issues I am wrestling with at the moment. I used to yearn, and still do, for a sure and certain faith, where I knew where I stood and could put everything in little boxes. Over the last wee while I have been thinking more and more about how uncomfortable it is to question and critique but that the option of not terrifies me even more. And now I am beginning to realise that there is a very small amount of my faith which is certain. And there is a great deal that I struggle with every day.

This weekend there is a big push in the Make Poverty History campaign as the UN World Summit begins. In a world where more than two thirds of people live below the poverty line, and many in abject poverty, what does my faith in Jesus say about that and what will be my response? In the wake of the destruction of New Orleans what will be my response? As New Zealand prepares for the elections how will my faith guide my vote? Now I don't have any easy answers but I do know that I am called to be an incarnation of Jesus, who loves everyone and weeps for those who suffer and who acts in response to suffering. Therefore, though it may be tiring and uncomfortable, I must do my small part to show Jesus in my responses to these important events and issues.

I used to think I could choose how I wanted to live my life but I am realising that I have no choice. I have to do something to make a difference for the poor, the marginalised in the world or my faith in Jesus is nothing more than a hobby or a philospophy. It has to be more than that otherwise I don't know what there is to have faith in in the first place.