Le Travail

travail

In English:
[truh-veyl, trav-eyl]
–noun
1. painfully difficult or burdensome work; toil.
2. pain, anguish or suffering resulting from mental or physical hardship.
3. the pain of childbirth.

travail, pl -aux /tʀavaj/

In French:
–masculine noun

work

I finally did something yesterday that I've been meaning to do for a long time. Or at least since late June, when I was in the throes of my almost-breakdown from almost 6 weeks straight of one or two all-nighters per week at work, just to get my stuff done for the huge deadline(s) we had in late June. Then, it was in the last week before my big deadline, and I'd made an appointment with the grief counselor who runs our support group, Alix, so I could sit and cry and figure out what the hell I wanted to do about my job, about my life, in a setting where I wouldn't be interrupted and where someone wouldn't be trying to make me feel better about the then-crummy state of my current normal.

I admitted out loud, actually heard the emotions and words pouring out of my mouth for the first time, that I didn't want to do "this" anymore. I didn't want to be working for free just because I should be grateful to have a job--paid or not--during a terrible recession and when I hadn't worked for 3 1/2 years. I didn't want to be having to juggle working with parenting when I wasn't being paid to do it. I didn't really know how to get from point D to point F (and I had no idea how long it would take to follow through on it), but I knew then that, in reality, I wanted to quit.

But I'm working for my brother, and it's not that easy to just quit. He needs the help; I'm theoretically in a position to offer it; and, earlier on, I needed something to do, needed to be reminded that I was competent and intelligent and still good at my job, widowed or not. And besides, I hadn't totally decided if I really wanted to quit completely or if I was just reacting emotionally to a very stressful, exhausting situation. As it turns out, I suck at being able to say no and that I simply don't want to do something.

When I started this job in January, it was a great solution at the time. But with no cash for salaries for an indefinite time into the future, at best it was a temporary solution. And then I sold the house--a transaction I never would have agreed to if I didn't have a job, a direction for the future to move toward--and the equity I had from the sale removed the main reason I needed to go back to work in the first place; financially I didn't have to work after my house sold, buying myself about a year--just long enough to get us through until Anna would start public elementary school--until I'd again be facing the same must-have-full-time-income issue again.

I'm glad I took the job. It was really good for me in a lot of ways. And as painful as the financial loss was when I sold my house (I lost a lot of money when I agreed to the insultingly piss-poor sales price), I'm glad I did it. With no hesitation, I'm glad I moved. But now it's eight months later, life has shifted into its own blend of working/parenting/post-move normalcy...and this new normal hasn't worked very well either.

Bottom line, I keep rediscovering something that I felt intrinsically, automatically, forcefully, after Charley died: that I wanted to spend every moment I could with my child while she was young.

Charley's death proved to me, irreversibly and irrefutably, that you never know what can happen. No matter how careful you are, how smart, how good of a person you are, how much good luck you've had in the past, you can't control when someone dies. All you can control is making the most of your time with someone, knowing you can never know how long that might be.

Anna was all that mattered to me in that first year after Charley died. I made the choice to quit when my job at Intel was eliminated seven months after Charley died. I wanted to stay home with her until she started school, be able to spend that time with her. But it was an easy decision to make when she was a baby, an easy early toddler. It was a harder, more painful decision to have to live with when she was older, in the throes of her Terrible Twos/Demonic Threes, and when Mommy was falling apart from too much grief, too much isolation, too few distractions.

But after eight months now of working at a "real" job--one that still isn't a totally normal job because its feasibility has always been measured by how long any of us can work at a job without getting any income from it--I've found, much to my unexpected surprise, that my original tenets about working still hold. When push comes to shove, if I have the option of staying home with my child, I don't want to work; I want to be home, raising my child, spending every minute I can with her.

As hard as that first year of widowhood was, it was easier to make big decisions then. The answers were clearer cut, more black and white. The right decision was always there immediately, right in my gut.

The irony is that those decisions, the underlying reasons for anything, are still the same four years later. But as life has returned to a more normalized normal, as I'm doing much better, and as things aren't quite so life-or-death anymore, making decisions has become much more complicated. They're not so easy.

Well, that's not entirely true. The answer is still easy, still the same as it often was earlier in widowhood; it's justifying it, coming to grips with my own choices, trying to live with them and explain them to a world that doesn't live in the same dimension as I do, that's hard.

Over the last eight months I've tried almost every tweak to make this job work. When forty hours a week was too much with still having my child home with me, with having to transport her to preschool and make her meals and wipe her tush when she goes poo-poo and the myriad things that make up a parenting-at-home day, I moved to thirty hours a week in late March. But it didn't really change the day any; I was still working full-time...I just was giving myself permission that it took at least 10 hours a week to do those parenting duties during the workday. Which was ridiculously underestimated. So after three more months, I moved from working from home full-time/30 hours a week (but really working about 60 hours or more during the workweek between my two jobs of mommying and "real" work) to only working two days a week and only in the office starting in July.

And this latest tweak--only 2 days a week--still hasn't worked. I knew in my gut at the end of June, after weeping my way through the appointment with my grief counselor, that--bottom line--if I wasn't getting paid to work, I just wanted to be home with my child, wanted to be able to fill my own time however I chose, with whatever worked best for me each day. I wanted to be able to enjoy this last year with Anna before she starts school in a year and forever becomes a big girl. But I also remembered all too pointedly the downhill slide I had when I was home with her for 3 1/2 years, when left to my own devices to drive our schedule. And I was scared. I was scared to remove all underpinnings of a schedule, of something requiring me to get up out of bed, out of myself, and out my door a few days a week, as I was sprinting into yet another summer and the toughest time of year for me.

I knew that I was coming into the summer with some pretty low (make that absolutely depleted) reserves...never a good idea when facing a two-month-long grief gauntlet, stretching from the death anniversary in early July until Anna's birthday at the beginning of September. I know from experience that being worn down at the start only makes these grief milestones that much worse. And after a constant spew of one thing after another since December--our anniversary, going back to work, selling the house and moving, moving into our new house, all the stress and overtime in May and June from work--I was afraid what the summer would be like without something to give me a schedule. So I didn't quit outright in late June when I talked to my brother about my hours. And a few weeks--maybe only two out of the entire ten weeks of summer--I was glad to be at work. Happy, energized, excited to have a reason to get dressed up, go into the office, drive into work in the morning in the bright sunshine; had wonderfully productive and distracted days at work. But the norm was really more one of frustration, of not wanting to go, of wondering why I was forcing myself to keep doing this one thing when I wasn't getting paid to do it. Rather than beat myself up too much about it (or trying not to anyway), I kept reminding myself that this past summer was far tougher than the past few years; of course work would be a bit rough in reaction.

There are many things I miss about working by being a stay-at-home mom. But as it turns out, I miss my child more by being a working mom.

And life is short, and she's already lost one parent. And trying to juggle child care when you can't pay for it is impossible. Forty hours a week was impossible...so was 30 hours...and even two days a week is turning out to be more hassle than it's worth as we're starting preschool next week and having to juggle a complicated schedule.

Even before Charley died, I was never a workaholic. I worked because that's what you do as a single person with rent or a mortgage and because I liked my good paycheck. I liked the challenges of my job at Intel, and I liked the esteem I got from my peers and my own accomplishments. But once I got married and had a child, I realized that work didn't really mean all that much to me; it was a means to an end, a required necessity to attain the life that Charley and I wanted. Even before Charley died, I just wanted to stay home with Anna--even though at most it would only have been part time--but for any number of reasons, I couldn't. But then Charley died, and suddenly I could stay home with Anna. And between parenting and grief and trying to hold onto some semblance of a "me" during the past four years, I've been reminded again and again that I don't need traditional employment and working to help define me, who I am. There are many other things I can do in my time--writing, photography, friends, bonding with other young widows and widowers, dancing, my daughter--that give me more, make me happier than merely "working."

So while I didn't actually quit yesterday when I finally talked to my brother--after a week or more of deliberation and procrastination...or after two months of testing my waters--I did pare back my work arrangements even more. I'm not sure exactly what they'll be right now; the conversation with my brother was a bit meandering, mostly because I was trying my hardest not to burst into tears in the damned office, with several coworkers milling around (of which most--none but one?--possibly/probably don't even know that I'm widowed [and that one only knows if he reads much on my Facebook page]). And I felt bad for my brother for having to be both my boss and my big brother at the same time. I was presenting my concerns in terms of workload and childcare issues--you know, trying to keep it professional and normal--but as I kept almost bursting into the familiar widow tears, I knew in reality that my concerns were borne more out of grief than simple, "normal" working issues.

I hate feeling like a dumb girl, crying because she can't even do something as straightforward as talk to her boss without falling into tears. I was never like this before Charley died, crying at the drop of the hat when things were tough. I still never cry at the usual expected things in widowhood--sad memories about Charley, talking about him, thinking about him, having to tell people that he's dead, etc., etc. No, instead I cry at "inappropriate" moments unrelated to death...when I get a bad massage and complain to the manager, when I've had to make difficult decisions about pets, when I met with a CPA, with the financial planner (though most of those incidents happened in the first year, not recently)...or when I have to admit when things still aren't working right, still aren't the right decision for me...when I have to do something as simple as quit a job (which I still haven't been able to do).

I quit working at Starbucks after only four days. (I got a job there, briefly, exactly two years ago this time of September, right after Anna's birthday in 2007. I was losing my COBRA health insurance from Intel and thought it'd be "good" for me to get out of the house and around other adults for 20 hours a week, just to get health insurance and a "break." I realized within the first 2 hours and then the first two days that it was the way-wrong decision, and I quit after only four days.)

And I hadn't really thought about the Starbucks jaunt til right now. Hadn't remembered most of my reasons for quitting then...and hadn't realized that they still hold true. Check another tweak off the list: working at a "real" job--one with responsibilities, a career track, a mental challenge and that requires training and experience--doesn't work any better than a minimum-wage one, just to "get out" or have something to do.

Grrr. Right. I'd forgotten that.

But starting after next week (we have another big deadline middle of next week), I will no longer be working a set number of hours a week. I won't be going into the office 2 days a week and I won't be working 3 hours 3 mornings a week just because I'm childless, while Anna's at preschool. Instead, I'll just be working on demand, basically, as there are updates to the software that need to get documented, and I won't be doing all the extra stuff I've been doing through the year. Essentially, I think I went from being a regular employee to being a contractor, working only when needed every few weeks. The catch is that I'll be back to working at home, realistically doing the work late at night after Anna's in bed.

I don't think this is necessarily the right decision either, but quitting when you work for your brother--and when I'm endlessly trying to find the right combination of variables that will suddenly, magically make everything in life feel okay, feel great (a mirage that is totally unrealistic and unattainable, I think)--is really hard to do. Hell, most "big things" in widowhood seem hard to do. This one isn't any different. And it's not like there's any book or bag of tricks giving me the right, perfect recipe for Refinding Normalcy and Happiness after being widowed. I'm having to figure it out as I go, without really knowing what will work best or how...which is part of the reason why I didn't quit earlier this year; I didn't want to throw the baby out with the proverbial bath water.

But...who knows? This latest tweak to my worklife could work out, be just the right thing an okay arrangement to keep my fingers in the working/something-to-put-on-a-resume pie for next year when I do have to return to work full-time. It can give me something different, something external, to do too as I'm sure I'll inevitably get bored at times over the next months.

And if nothing else, I'm sure it'll give me a few months to work up to the next logical step: giving notice and actually, finally, quitting. Or else finding a full-time job in my field with a salary that Anna and I can live on.

Like most things in widowhood, I wish this decision felt better than it does. But welcome to reality: life's not easy and tidy like it used to be...nor was the ease of my former life probably Real Life anyway.

Sigh.

But...back to the real work I need to get done. Procrastination over....