As you likely know - or have experienced first-hand - Boston was suh-lammed with snow and nasty-ass weather over the past few days. The bad news: lots of shoveling and dangerously slippery ice. The good news: a chance to bring our daughter sledding for her very first time.
The verdict: sliding down a hill in a 58-inch inflatable tube while grasping my shrieking 3-year-old was worth every penny (until she wanted me to carry all 36 pounds of her back UP the hill).
It turns out that snow still makes me feel young and in those few moments that we flew down the hill with reckless abandon, I forgot all about the clients from my day job that I was neglecting (I hope they don’t google me and find out).
But there is a but to all of this. I realized that my afternoon of fun was an extreme exception to the rule of my life. That every other workday, I trudge into the office, enduring a not-so-pleasant commute and do the work thing and rush home just in time to give our daughter a bath, wipe her butt, and kiss her goodnight. And I have to wait until the weekend to spend any significant time with her. So blowing off a few hours of work on a Friday was the perfect remedy, and thanks to my CrackBerry, I wasn’t really out of touch - but I was on top of a mountain!
So the bottom line here is that I began to question if I am on the right path with my career and my life - on the one hand, wouldn’t I prefer to have greater flexibility during the week and have the opportunity to be more present at home? Of course. And so I tell myself that life is largely all about tradeoffs, and right now I have this job and need to go into the office but I do have the benefit of working from home and I need to compromise.
Though I don’t always want it to always be about compromising, so I wonder does *anyone* have it the way they want it, or does everyone have *something* that they’d change about their working life? For me, I think I would like to have a home-based, more flexible job, even though that’s not really a possibility (right now). I know it’s oftentimes greener on the other side of the fence, but listening to my daughter’s shrieks, I couldn’t help but wonder: what IF this was more of the rule than the exception to it?
What about you?
My husband is in the same boat as you. Don’t jump ship yet! I, on the other hand, have the pleasure and pain of working from home, being with my children pretty much 24/7, and bringing in a great income. It’s fantastic but, as you said, the grass is always greener. Now, I wouldn’t trade this for an office job and I do get relief of a babysitter for 12 hours a week. Plus one day hubby works from home. But it’s damn tough to do breakfast, lunch and dinner plus bath and diapers and whatnot. No need for me to expand on the list here since many of us moms are…I almost wrote same boat again but then I’d have to throw in the “two ships passing in the night” analogy which also happens around here. Sigh.
Now that being said, we are working kinda sorta hard at making our business bigger so that we are both running it from home. Or at least a studio that seams like home for our whole family. I see some downsides to that as well but tis’ the way of it. For us right now this is the rule. When he gets an extra day that he can work from home b/c of the weather or illness then that’s the exception.
Mandy | December 18th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
I work in a job with zero flexibility, but with long breaks (public school teacher). There are moments that I wonder, too — is this right? If only I could jobshare or teach part time.
Daisy | December 19th, 2007 at 3:48 am
I often feel the same way. I get home from work in time to spend a few hours with my boys before we put them to bed, and I head out to work the next morning after very little time spent with them. I wish that I could work from home, but that doesn’t work real well in my industry (banking). It’s even worse when I’ve got an afterwork meeting or on the odd occasion that I have to work late, because then I come home to sleeping kids and miss spending time with them entirely.
Vanilla | December 30th, 2007 at 3:35 pm