WHEN I FEEL STRESSFUL...

Honestly I usually feel 'stress out' every morning and every afternoon.
In the morning, my son always makes me feel stressful because he never hurries even though the time to attend school is pressing. Both of two children make me feel the same way when they come back home from the school in the afternoon. My son is in the 7th grade and daughter in in the 4th grade now. On coming home from the school, the argument between us is just begun. They often consider me as a walking dictionary, so they always ask me everything as keeping supplied with their homework under my nose. In fact, my family immigrated just a few months ago. Surely most of immigrant families run into troubles as my family does. Probably this problem will go on till my children fluently handle English. Actually I need a time to think it over and figure it out because I don't have English skill enough to give them satisfaction either. I am a beginner as an immigrant just like them! Finally I cannot bear the stress and yell out to them.
   "Later, later! Don't you see me wash the dishes?"
The struggle with their homework continues until midnight. After finishing that, I have a splitting headache. But I never free from that pain because I am treated as a walking dictionary by them. All that I can do is just waithing for the time when they are grown up and grasp my real abilities.

In these days my homesickness becomes my heaviest stress. It drives me into uncontrollable confusion. Everything is gettimg mixed up and finally I drop my tears. Once I begin to cry, I can't keep back my tears. Sometimes looking myself crying in the mirror helps me controll my feeling. How funny crying appearance in the mirror is!

To relieve my stress, I usually listen to music, write a letter to my friends, call and chat with them, or work on computer.  But the best way to handle my stress or sad feeling is letting myself sink to the bottom of sadness. Ironically excessive sadness or stress ends in a dim hope. Nevertheless, I am not a masochist. I am a truely ordinary person and perfectly normal woman. (2002)