Sustainable busyness

The "wheeee!" period of being a grad student/teacher/mom is coming to a close. It's still a major-ambition-come-true to be getting my MA, and it's fulfilling and enriching to teach, and my kids keep parenting pretty exciting, but WOAH. Sometimes I am just exhausted and I don't know if all that I'm doing now, and have been doing since September (and since a year ago, to a lesser degree, when I was doing my MA but not teaching), is sustainable. Each midterm completed, and each class taught, I am that much closer to being done...for this semester. And then it will start all over again soon enough. Thank goodness for summer...I guess?

Even though I enjoy everything I am doing and feel the positive impact on my life, it is also very wearying. When the paper is done, there is still the lesson to plan, and dinner to make. The work is never finished anyway when you're a mom - there is always more to do, more messes to clean up, more things to talk about with your kids, more skills to teach them, more activities to plan - and I'm feeling that sense of never-ending work from the other areas of my life, too.

I'll probably laugh at all this the day after finals are over. I recharged fairly quickly during the last semester break and I'm hoping this summer (after that summer term course I take, sigh) will put some extra gas in my tank, to shore up my reserves for Fall 2012. In the meantime, I'm trying to be grateful that this is truly a temporary - if very long temporary - stage of my life. After I finish my MA (estimated completion: next summer-ish), I will probably never be juggling three major roles at once like I am now. I know there are women out there with kids who are studying and working and being moms, with a lot longer than a-year-and-a-bit stretching out in front of them. God bless them.

Have you ever had a period of life where you were unsustainably busy? How did you get through it? Or did you?