Give Yourself a Break–Breaking Character
“My mom is that really laid back one who has it all together,” said none of my kids, ever. Nor will they ever, I imagine. I’ve always wanted to be the Gandhi of mothers who governs with a silent perfection only found in monks and yoga instructors, but that’s not how I operate. I love my kids, but sometimes I yell too much or too loudly. Sometimes I use sarcasm, and sometimes I close my eyes and take deep breaths because I’m so frustrated. I have great kids, but they are alive. So alive, that keeping them quiet or well-behaved for any period of time over twenty minutes really isn’t possible. It isn’t that I think my kids are the only ones that misbehave. I so desperately don’t want my kids to be someone else’s problem that I don’t let myself relax. One issue is that I want so badly for them to be polite. The other problem is that I teach teenagers, so my little ones will be cursed with me worrying about how their actions now will affect their teen years which eventually lead to their adult years. Because I am so tightly wound, I need to shake up what I know as normal.
If I don’t break character every so often, I may just give my babies their very own complex. I certainly don’t want that either.
Breaking Character At Home
Moms are often times considered “not as fun” as the other adults in our kids’ lives. I keep my kids on a schedule, get their backpacks checked, get them to school on time, and help them get their homework done. I’m also in charge of getting them to bed at a consistent time. 
Put that on top of the chores around the house and the grading, planning, and writing, well…I sometimes feel like I’m chasing my tail. Like most moms, I do many things and have a lot of roles, and since I’m striving to do them well consistently, it is hard to relax.
Enter my middle guy. My middle child knows when I need to break character at home. He can turn me from drill sergeant to gooey, giggly mess faster than anyone. And it feels so good to let my guard down and chill a bit. 
All three of my kids have a way of doing this, but the other two share my inability to just relax most of the time. All three of us admire our middle, because he never feels the need to hurry. He never feels the need to stress. Heck, many times he never feels the need to be dressed in clothing. Sometimes, when I get in my drill-sergeant-unable-to-smile moods, he just looks at me, giggles, and throws me off guard. I can feel the tension sliding away, and I am able to relax a bit more. My goal this year is to try and kick back, take some deep breaths, while maintaining sanity and a schedule. Can it be done? We shall see.
Breaking Character in the Classroom
As a teacher, I realize that I am very similar in the way I run my classroom to the way I mother at home. I know other professionals who take their jobs just as seriously, and it can be hard to take a deep breath, and let the lesson go where it goes. Teens are excellent at asking questions that lead us down roads I never imagined, or throwing a joke out that has the room smiling. I went to an educational conference once, and our presenter mentioned the importance of humor in life. She gave many statistics about how people that laugh more live longer. She mentioned George Burns, Betty White, and other comedians to show that this was true. Joy and laughter do amazing things for our brains. Since that workshop, I have started every class period with a joke on the board. 
Sometimes they groan, sometimes I have to explain my jokes (which doesn’t make them any funnier), and sometimes the kids do laugh out loud. That’s how we start every day, and I have Marcia Tate and her book, Worksheets Don’t Grow Dendrites, to thank for that. I find my students smiling or looking for the joke right when they come in. As years go by, they return to see what the joke of the day is even though they’ve moved on in grade levels. (These are often times the same kids that complain that they aren’t funny, by the way.) This is one way I have found to break character. We start with a smile in my class, and then we carry on with business. We find other ways to break down a serious day, and I think it’s important for me to do that. It helps build relationships, and then true learning can begin.
Breaking character at work is actually easier for me than at home. I think that’s because they aren’t the children I gave birth to, but who knows? One thing is for sure, I need to take what I know about smiling and laughing and apply it to my home. Life goes too fast for us to worry about every single movement, word, or action. I wonder what would happen if I learned to break character more at home? How do you break character? How has it worked in your life? Let us know at tessa@familyfootnote.com.