We all perform a range of roles every day and their order and priority changes over time. Mine include: mum, step-mum, wife, daughter, friend, mother-in-law, sister, mentor and tutor. 
Just now, I am resting after finishing my main role as a teacher, which I have been acting for the past thirty years.
Tending the Garden
During this resting-between-roles phase, I’ve taken on some new responsibilities. I am now the chief gardener, and the money we used to pay the real gardener is redirected to our holiday fund.
I am loving the opportunity to weed, mow, plant, redesign, choose and train the garden. Each day, Prince Charming and I stroll around the royal grounds, pointing out the progress and the setbacks. I am amazed and delighted at the way the wisteria wraps itself anti-clockwise around the trellis, adding several feet to its length every week. I am reluctantly impressed by the equally potent ability of the brambles and ivy to wrap themselves around anything that stays still for more than thirty seconds, and to suck nutrients out of rocks, fence panels and even bricks. 
Time Limits
All this gardening and resting, though, is between jobs. I do have a time limit on my rest phase. My gardening skills do not stretch to money trees, and I will have to earn a real living again before the roses bloom next summer. I do have a new role as the principal of my tutoring business. However,, that that business is not open yet and has a monthly turnover of precisely nothing so far. It hardly seems worth mentioning just yet. I do need to work at it though.
Recharging My Strength
It’s been three months now since I gave up my teaching job. I have plenty to do in terms of writing policies, finding premises, checking resources and tutoring my private pupils, but I am loving making my own priorities and choosing my own timetable. When I have twenty minutes, instead of choosing whether to go to the loo or eat a banana because I can’t do both before the bell, I go and prune a bush or pick some flowers or pluck a weed . The little jobs I’ve been looking at vaguely for over a year, are now completed and ticked off. 
The house is looking better, I feel more at home here and the more I do, the more energy I seem to have left over.
I know things will get stressful again in time. My premises are scheduled to be ready in September and then I will have to face the public and advertise and deal with rejection and complexity and challenge. In the meantime, I am recharging my batteries and, as my husband describes it, ‘sharpening the axe’. 
Maybe in the future I will exchange my role as wicked stepmother for that of a woodcutter! Or maybe I’ll need to chop down a beanstalk. Whatever happens, I’ll be better prepared after my four months of rest and rediscovery.