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Archives from 2002-2006

It was last April, I think, when JB had turned in his notice at Microsoft and had maybe two weeks before starting the new job in Eugene. We got in a habit of dropping Dylan off at preschool in the morning, then heading down the road to a nearby diner for breakfast. You know the kind of place: white ceramic coffee cups, thin utensils, tiny sweating plastic cups of ice water. We’d sit and order gigantic meals, cheesy omelets and ham-adorned scrambled eggs. “This is what life could be like if we were retired,” JB said once. It’s true the diner was always busy, always filled with older people. “We’d get so fat,” I replied, but as I said it I was comfortably troweling cold butter onto hot rye toast. The melting spread of it, salty and sweet under a layer of strawberry jam dug from a foil-topped packet. All around us, the bustle of movement and voices and opening and closing doors.

I was thinking about how I’ve been freelancing from home for a couple years now and whether or not I want my career path to curve back around to an office job someday. And if so, what that might be. Marketing again? Copywriting? Something else? Have I expanded my options by focusing on freelance writing, or drastically reduced them? What would happen if all my work dried up and disappeared tomorrow — what have I done to my employment chances over the last two years? (Other than moved to a smaller town with fewer opportunities, of course.)

Dylan will be in kindergarten next fall and that will be another big life change, one that will free up about 34 additional non-child-wrangling hours per week for me. What do I want to do with those hours, as time goes on? Do I want to work from home forever? Do I want to do something different? Is being flexible and available always going to be worth the financial gut-punch of not being a salaried employee? Do I want to think about school again?

I’m almost certain my answer to the last question is no (it’s a whole different post, I suppose, but the idea of college has slipped away almost entirely. I don’t mean that in a sad, giving-up-on-my-dreams way, either, although I realize it must sound that way. Of going back to school, I once wrote, “Maybe when you shoot for the ridiculously big stuff, you’re bound to land somewhere good,” and I believe that’s exactly what happened), but for the rest of it … man, I’m not sure. Here I am at nearly 40, wondering (again) what I’ll be when I grow up.

Where are you at with your own job-related thoughts and plans? If you changed your career (or left it) because of parenthood, what’s your long game?

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