Sep
3
Oh man, you guys. You have no idea how much I have been DYING to share this news with you. The last month has been crazy in terms of sudden new opportunities, budget-wrestling, life-balance agonizing, and everything else that goes with such a major life upheaval.
Here’s the deal: I’ll primarily be writing ongoing posts for The Stir along with some corporate work. I’ll be doing this from home while juggling kid-wrangling, because this is the last week of the boys’ daycare. Three days a week, our wonderful babysitter will be coming from 1-4 in the afternoon to watch Riley and Dylan, and I’ll scoot off to a coffee shop or wherever I can poach some Wi-Fi.
There are a lot of questions I don’t have answers to yet. I will have daily deadlines that I’ll need to meet, and I need to figure out how to do this without relying too much on Yo Gabba Gabba. I know I will slowly go crazy if I don’t have any adult interaction EVER, and the kids need socialization too, so I need a plan for getting us out of the house and interacting with actual live humans. I need a schedule, one that can be flexible enough to accommodate unforeseen problems but structured enough so that I don’t completely morph into this Oatmeal comic.
We decided to wait on starting Riley in kindergarten this year, so I had to think long and hard about whether it was the right thing to do to pull him from preschool. (His daycare is a care center and school combined.) And Dylan, for that matter—they have both done really well in their classes over the years. Under my new salary, I can’t afford to keep sending them there even part time.
Maybe I will find a less expensive preschool somewhere down the road (although as long as we live in this area it seems doubtful), but for now they’ll be home with me. The idea is that school—the homeschool variety—is going to be part of our new routine too. I don’t have much to say about that yet, but I’m hopeful that we can figure out the time management, and that the inevitable frustration is tempered by fun. I hope that it ends up being a great opportunity to connect with my kids and enjoy the last of their little-boyhood.
I have no doubts whatsoever that all of this is going to be really, really hard, in a lot of different ways. But I’ll tell you what, goddamn if the very best things aren’t always hard as hell.
Priorities have shifted all over the place, and I won’t be going back to school in the fall like I’d planned. Winter, probably. I will slowly but surely chase down that dream, no matter how long it takes.
I still dream of a career helping people reach their fitness goals. I want to get our house sold and move to Oregon. I want to write a book. I want to do a lot of things, and my road seems wider and more beckoning than ever before. This isn’t my forever, this is my new right now. And it is so, so much better than my yesterday.
For that and so much more, I want to say thank you. Thank you so very, very much for reading and being part of our lives. Without you I would not have this opportunity, and that is the absolute truth. The words aren’t enough, but I want you to know: I am so incredibly grateful.
Now, my dear friends. The comments are open for all kinds of advice, because I would love to hear any and everything you might want to share about surviving being at home full time, figuring out schedules, avoiding hermit-ness, keeping kids happy, not collapsing in a pile of your own personal filth, and so on. Next week a new chapter of our lives is starting, and I am so happy to be sharing it with you.
Sep
2
Goodbye vacation and sick time. Goodbye free massages, computers, and meals. Goodbye quiet office to myself and uninterrupted hours to get my work done. Goodbye friends and coworkers, hallway conversations, funny emails. Goodbye stability.
Goodbye soul-sucking commute. Goodbye not seeing my kids for eight hours a day. Goodbye unrewarding paychecks, not giving a shit, and giving too much of a shit. Goodbye job that stopped being right for me a few years ago, and started being actively wrong for me six months ago.
Yesterday I said goodbye to Workplace. Today I am officially a self-employed freelance writer who works from home.
Hello to dreams coming true.
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