Tuesday, September 29, 2009

NsFW: Nostalgic For Work

I was having one of those mornings when everything seems too hard; when the stretch between the end of breakfast and the beginning of nap feels so impossibly long that I'm paralyzed by it; and when the clearest thought I can manage is, What am I going to do with him today? It was one of those mornings when my heart feels heavy and sad, even as I watch my beautiful son playing.

I called Rob at work for a second opinion on the best way to get tomato seeds off the TV screen. "You wanna come over for lunch?" he asked. I said sure, and that we'd be there as soon as we could. When I hung up the phone, my heart suddenly felt a little lighter. My mental schedule wasn't one blank page anymore.

I've never had a dream job. Or even a cool job. My jobs have been occasionally pleasant at best, but lately I find myself missing even the lousy, behind-the-counter Clerks-worthy jobs. The thing I find I miss the most now that I've been officially not working for about a year and a half (besides having a professional identity and having an income, of course) is the schedule.

As much as I like to think of myself as independent and self-motivated, the truth is I'm oddly soothed by having someone dictate a start and end time for my activities. I think this is why I did reasonably well in school, even at my most depressed: Everything about my life is awful, but in 20 minutes physics will be over and I can switch to thinking about American cinema in the 1940s! Something about a schedule-mandated mental shift can get an exclamation point out of me on my most ellipsis-prone days.

One solution to my problem (not having a regular schedule) seems pretty obvious (make a friggin' schedule!). However, this is one area of at-home parenting in which I feel painfully, embarrassingly inept. When it comes to planning a day with Westley, I still feel like it's Day 1, and I have No Idea What To Do. I sat down to write out a schedule a little while ago, and I had to do it backwards: 8:00 PM--bedtime, 7:30 PM--diaper, pajamas, books with Daddy, 7:00 PM--bath, and so on. Apparently, I'm not a morning person, even on paper.

The other solution I'm looking at requires mental gymnastics of a different type. How do I get over my work-nostalgia? It's hard to convince myself that this is a false nostalgia I'm experiencing, even though I know it is. Because work? Not that great. (The work I was doing, anyway.) Westley, on the other hand, is pretty fucking great.

This afternoon, when it was time for Westley and me to say good-bye to Rob and drive home, Westley absolutely lost it. In the past few weeks, he has started crying in the mornings when Rob leaves for work, and I think he thought Rob was coming home with us today. I told Westley, "We'll see Daddy at dinnertime," as Rob kissed him good-bye. But nothing helped. Westley just cried and cried for "dada" as we drove away and Rob headed inside, to his desk.

Driving home, it occurred to me that it's so easy to get hung up on the things I don't have: income, professional identity, regularly scheduled programming. But I almost never have to listen to Westley bitterly cry "mama" as I go out the door. That's the dream part of my job.

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