The start of summer: Part 2 (After School)

I've had a number of things needing to find their way out in a blog post…but every time I sat down to write (or else thought about writing one), I emotionally shied away from it. I actually started writing this morning while Anna was at school, but of course ran out of time before having to go pick her up. I resumed writing after we got home and ate lunch, but what I wrote after school went off in such a different (albeit related) direction that I decided to split them into two posts.

For Part 1 of what led me into this post here, read this: Almost the start of summer: Part 1 (During School). 

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"Yes, it was only nineteen months, but the weight of everything I lost when Charley died tips [the scales] so completely out of balance that I'm now left on a platform suspended above a whole lot of nothingness, wondering to myself:

Where on earth do I go from here?"

- From Almost the start of summer: Part 1 (During School),
written earlier this morning

I suppose that question to myself--Where do I go from here?--is yet another reason why I'm so ambivalent and, at times, antipathetic toward the whole job issue. On the one hand, death leads to a rather remarkable filter and concentrator: you realize what's most important in your life, and early into grief, it can make big decisions easier in some ways, a whole lot more black and white. You're bleeding and hurting so badly that you can't bear, can't contemplate, continuing with something that makes you miserable. And if you have any control over the issue, you can stop doing it.

Which is why I quit working the day that Charley died. I was utterly miserable in my job the six months before he died, ever since I went back after my four-month maternity leave with Anna. All I wanted was to be able to work less, to spend more time home with my precious, beautiful baby girl, to not be so frustrated and unhappy with how I was spending the vast majority of my time each week. But not working wasn't an option for us; we couldn't afford to live on Charley's salary alone. So when he died without any warning and money suddenly wasn't a factor, I did what I'd wanted to do anyway: stay home with my child. And while I originally intended to go back to work--albeit only part-time at three or four days a week--at Intel after my six-month personal leave, at some point, I also swore to myself that I wouldn't go back to technical writing. (I can't remember now if that vow seeded itself before or after I was effectively laid off.) The idea of going back to my old job, my old life, like nothing had ever happened, like Charley hadn't died, was repulsive and horrifying. His death--as awful as it was--was an opportunity to get out of a job field I never intended to stay in, that I fell into accidentally after college.

The thing is--the ironic and frustrating thing now is--that I wasn't even doing technical writing when he died. Without ever stopping to think if it was a good idea or not, I'd agreed to take over a coworker's projects when I went back from maternity leave...an unconscious (and stupid) move, it turns out, which made me a project coordinator and, ultimately, put me in a completely different department and job. And it was that new job that I hated, not actual technical writing.

Yet in the compression chamber of grief, technical writing became my anathema, that one thing that became untenable and abhorrent to me. Which doesn't help me one damned bit, now that I'm needing to go back to work full time. And just as aggravating, apparently the fact that I actually liked my two recent technical writing jobs just fine (otherwise ignoring the no-salary bit while working for my brother and the working-from-home misery of both that job and the contract one last fall) doesn't really sway my mind all that much either. My logic isn't having much influence over my emotions.

In the end, it's really just the whole corporate, 8-to-5-plus-commute, 40+ hours each week aspect of technical writing that makes me want to stop cold. As a single parent, how on earth would that work for Anna and me? Getting up at 6am (or earlier), dropping my child off at school at 7:30 (or earlier), only to have to battle traffic for 30 to 60 minutes to race home and pick up my child from daycare before it closes at 6pm, to get us home and make dinner, make sure she does her homework, and gets in bed at 8pm? Just to get up and do it every day of the week, week after week, year after year? Where's the time for Anna to take a dance class or swimming lessons, for me to do anything social? Hell, where's the time to spend with my child, period?

I know millions of families do it, and millions of single-parent families too. I know Charley and I did it for six months, and it was fine. (But it feels so different to do it as a single parent and with an older child in school, too, part of me cries. Anna was just a baby before--and she was so easy--and Charley was home before me, making dinner most nights. It's different now with Anna older. She might be an easy kid still, but she takes five thousand times more energy as a six-year-old than she did as an infant!) But working full-time is such a huge mind-shift from how we've lived our lives the past six years. How on earth do you go from spending twelve hours a day together to just one or two?

The part I always forget is that I'd get a lot of energy back from working, too. I'd be getting an eight-hour break every day from being MOMMYMOMMYMOMMY every second. I'd have more than five or ten minutes at a time to myself, to be able to think or do something. I'd get out of my house every day, for more than only ten minutes. I'd have ADULTS to talk to. I'd be able to use my brain, feel competent and capable again instead of, at worse, feeling like a miserable, lonely, lazy, tired, impatient slob stay-at-home mom every day. I'd be earning my own money again. I'd have a place to wear nice clothes (oh, how I miss that!). I might be able to feel whole again.

...And I just might be able to feel better in those two hours each day that I'd get to spend with Anna, or the 48 hours on the weekend, than I have in all those hours upon hours spent together these past few years.

I'm glad I stayed home with her when she was a baby and toddler. I'm glad I was home with her after my world was shattered and I had to learn how to survive being widowed at 27. But I'm not so sure I'm glad that I stayed home these past two years since I moved back to Milwaukie. (Stupid crap economy and the worst recession since the Great Depression taking the choice to work out of my hands for so long! [Psst: It was the worst recession, right? I'm not bothering to check my facts; sorry.]) I felt so much better when I went back to work two years ago. I felt useful again! I wasn't bored out of my mind anymore! I was more than just a widow and single mom for the first time! And if I'd actually been getting paid my real salary (in real money!) and if I'd been able to have Anna in daycare during the workday, I don't think I would have stopped working again.

But life is what it is...and it's not always easy or pretty, and it certainly doesn't go the way I want it to all the time. And the longer it's been since Charley died, the harder it is sometimes (many times?). Only it has nothing to do with grief, per se, anymore. This isn't me having to reconcile myself with Charley's death, with adjusting to and accepting life without him. This is me having to deal with life.

So yes. I have no idea what I'm going to do. Or no official plan, anyway. Some part of me has decided that perhaps it'd be easiest to just get some brainless, low-commitment, part-time (read: retail) job for the summer, as a temporary measure. Social Security's salary caps mean right now is pretty much the worst time possible for me to go back to a full-time salary because I'd likely have to pay back thousands of dollars of my mother's benefits. And besides, I don't know if I'm quite ready for a full-time "real" job yet, nor what I'd really like to do long-term. Why rush into a permanent job out of fear, and then possibly regret it later? Hell, why not just keep something simple for a few months? (Snork. What a novel idea for me--me, who always tries to overachieve and do something hard and big.)

Or at least I think that's my plan. And once Anna's out of school the end of next week, I'll start trying to find that convenient, part-time, low-wage job. (I'm firmly plugging my fingers over my ears and singing La-la-la-la-la as loudly as I can, to ward off the voices sneering and asking me what I'm going to do if I can't find that mythical retail job.) I'm preparing myself that I might be so exhausted and worn out come the end of next week that it might take me a little bit to actually start looking. I'm all about low expectations, I guess.

Or else I'm really just hoping that a good solution will magically fall in my lap, at just the right, opportune time. (Yeah, 'cuz my Fairy Godmother has really been doing a kickass job these past five six years. [Insert all the sarcasm that's humanly possible, and a good eye-roll to boot.])

Pffth. Huge sigh. I'm tired. So very, very tired. This past school year has utterly exhausted me, and the fear and stress about no money is pretty much doing me in by now. Yea. Life right now, at almost six years out, is so much fun…so wonderful and so much better than I ever could have dreamed.

Snork. (Love that word, by the way. Sorry for slipping it in twice today, but I fully blame Alicia for sharing its beauty with me recently. ;o))

So I suppose, for now, I'm trying to bide my time until I actually know what I want to do, until I have some better, less emotional idea where I'd like to go from here. Which probably doesn't seem like much of a plan for most people…and not for so many of the voices in my head.

But in the meantime, I'm like the Little Engine that Could:

Only seven more days to go. Only seven more days to go. Only seven more*….

(And apparently I'm rambling a whole lot too. ;o))



* = Days to go until Anna's out of school for the year, that is….