Category: Work

with a slow workweek, i’m trying to enjoy the beauty of life

 

beach

Having felt as though I wasted my entire day yesterday, yearning for work and clicking on the Refresh button a gazillion times to will something into my inbox, then wasting five hours –yes, five hours!–taking a test I correctly assumed wouldn’t lead to a job, I drove myself to the water today.

So here I sit, facing the glorious Pacific. I watch a couple, possibly honeymooners, approaching the water. Deeper out are surfers, some young, some old, enjoying the moderate-sized waves.

I’ve rolled up my sleeves (having fought off a farmer’s tan all summer, I don’t want to promote one now), and I’m busy doing what? Taking in my surroundings, I guess I’d say, enjoying the bounty of what God’s given us (for it can’t be just science and happenstance that made the deep-blue sea, the soft sand to walk on, and the sun to warm our bodies and souls).

I’m easing into the comfort of the scenery, but I’m still on edge. I don’t do “outside the box” really well. And being at the water on a beautiful day–the many that we have here on the West Coast–instead of being at my desk is, for me, literally outside the box when considering my house is shaped like a cardboard saltine container. I realize I have a lot to learn about living in the moment. With four kids, whose futures I’ve spent more than half my life shaping, I have become a planner and not an enjoyer of the present. I’m better at trying to figure out what lies ahead, who needs to get where, when the next pediatric appointments and tap lessons are, and how to get from one field to the other without leaving a kid waiting for a ride, than appreciating what is in front of me.

The fact that work is slow to nonexistent at the moment, with the promise of a very busy October and November ahead of me, should be a relief and a motivator to linger in the present, but to me, it’s not. I will try very hard, just the same, to make it so and take in what’s here and now and not what may be–or what should be. Yes, I’d love to have work that comes in steadily. I’m a person who likes having a plan. But it’s currently not possible.

I’m not starving. I’m not unclothed or homeless. We have enough to get us by and savings to fill in the gaps. I’m a pro at budgeting when times get tough too. And we will work as long as possible if the money isn’t replenishing quickly enough. I have to remember all this when the stress of not working and, therefore, not earning hits me.

So right now I will put my pen and paper away, continue along the path beneath my feet, and say a little prayer for the truly unemployed (and the underemployed) who don’t have this view of the ocean (and a soundtrack of crashing waves) before them. I may not have a perfect amount of work for my liking and the money coming in will have to stretch a little further than usual, but what I do have before me right here, right now is pretty perfect just the same.

 

how being underemployed can result in a whole lot of wasted time

underemployed_med

 

I am underemployed. If I could just be paid for the time I waste looking for work, I’d have a healthy five-figure salary.

I work freelance, and for the duration of the time I’ve had little ones–and not so little ones–at home, it’s been a great thing. I could be here for the children and also be able to bring in a few extra bucks. Fast-forward twenty-five years, though, and what was once a wonderful thing is now holding me back and keeping me from moving in the right direction.

There are so many jobs I know I could do if just given the opportunity, but picking up crumbs of jobs that require copious amounts of time to do them is all I can find right now. And I’ve been looking.

I applied for a full-time job last week that I felt I was perfect for. I still see the job up on the company website, therefore, the company didn’t see me as a perfect fit. (I think the salary-requirements line tripped me up, not having any idea what real people make out there.) In addition to applying for jobs, I keep working toward getting a certificate to make me more marketable for a government-agency job, but those jobs, after having applied, can take months and months to get called back on. There is no rhyme or reason as to how people are selected for interviews, although the county’s website says that people are phoned alphabetically. Great. I’m in the middle of the alphabet (which makes me want to hyphenate my maiden and last names. I used to be a “B.”)

So today I sat down at my computer and, not having received any work again, looked at the work-at-home job sites. I found one job that looked interesting. It’s with a company that requires candidates to input metadata (whatever that is). I took the test, being that I’m good at tests and am uber proficient in editing and researching, which was part of the test. After two and a half hours of working on this three-hour exam, which partially included identifying pop culture figures and events, I was switching between open tabs in my browser when–oh, lord–I accidentally clicked on the horrible, no-good, very bad X, closing out the tab and losing all the work I had input.

I tried to recover the page, but it had flown into cyberspace for good. So I restarted the test. Having done a lot of the research already, I had half the battle won this second time around. It was a matter of remembering and, if I couldn’t do that, looking back into what I had originally researched. In the meantime, I was supposed to be watching and listening in on a webinar being presented for that certificate I’m going after. I was able to do both, albeit half-heartedly. Still, I managed and was pretty proud to have multitasked those efforts and while picking up a phone call from my husband, to boot.

After the webinar ended, having made good time on the test the second time around, I focused my mind on it and was nearly finished within two hours. I just couldn’t figure out the identities of two of the people who were featured. I tried to research some more but had no luck. So I reread and reworked some of the longer questions that needed my attention.

When I thought I had finished the entire test, I submitted it. Trouble is, I’d forgotten to fill in one of the answers–the name of some pink-bikini clad woman standing on a beach while holding a microphone as some performers were singing on a stage in the background. (Can anyone place that?) Everything else was perfect, trust me. But I knew I was doomed. I knew this was going to be one of those tests graded by a machine, whose first role was to make sure there were no blank answers. And what do you know, within minutes of punching the damned Submit button, I received a ding saying I didn’t get the job. All because of one idiotic semi-celebrity whom I couldn’t ID. No human at this company even bothered to read my answers.

What ticks me off the most is that five hours were wasted. Five hours. I didn’t even walk the dog within that time, which is something I do every morning. I hadn’t even showered. I looked at the clock and it was after 1 p.m. when I got dinged. I realized that I hadn’t gotten up from my chair since 8 in the morning. Five hours wasted because I don’t have a full-time job–or even a regular part-time job–to call my own. If I made twenty bucks an hour, that would have been one hundred dollars I could have earned.

It’s not just the money–or potential loss of it–that is so bothersome, it’s what I could have done with my time. This has been a really slow two weeks for me. Make that three or four weeks, actually. Last week I got some painting done in the house, but this week I was hoping to get some paid work. Only it never came. So after sitting at my desk and feeling like I wasted precious days in the beginning of the week, I promised myself yesterday that I’d get out of the house today. The weather has been stifling hot and my office is the hottest room in the house, and I promised I wouldn’t make myself sit and pine away, clicking through website after website to look for work one more day this week. I told myself I’d get out and get some fresh air.

But when you are at the mercy of others for work, a job can come at the least-expected time. It can pop up when you’re walking the dog or getting some fresh air or sitting in an air-conditioned coffeeshop sipping a pumpkin latte. So I’m sorry to say that I probably have a lot more disappointingly slow, unproductive days in my future as long as I can’t find a regular job. I won’t stop looking for freelance work too, but I sure as heck won’t take another five-hour test to get it. I worked backwards today. And that’s never the right direction.

underemployed waitress.jpg
“I have a B.A. in journalism and 30-plus years of experience.”

is full-time employment in the cards? when working from home may just not cut it

working-woman-1900s

I applied for a full-time, outside-the-home position yesterday, the first full-time job I’ve appied to in about thirty-two years. I’ve been a work-at-home mom all that time, which was a great alternative when the kids were little. It brought in extra income–although at times what I earned was so piddly that it barely paid for the newspaper subscription for the year–but it kept my foot in the water of the working world and my brain from frying from kiddie overload. With four kids spread out over a lot of years, it was so easy to put them first and myself last. And I did that. Had I not had something to call my own–a little bit of employment–I’d have been much worse off.

But my youngest is now a senior in high school. He probably will not play sports this year (a great reason for a parent to have a flexible schedule is being able to drive the kid and attend away games), and he has a license and drives our old car, so I’m not even needed to transport him to and from school anymore. He’s looking for a part-time job to help pay for a phone and his insurance and to have a little spending money without having to hit up the parental unit. A job will take him away from home even more often.

In the meantime, my freelance career is in a lull. I will be madly, deeply busy in October and November, working both day and night, and I have been promised some assignments into December and January even, typically a slow period in publishing, but at present I’m bumbling around, finding stuff to do at home, like laundry and cleaning, and refreshing the home page of one of the web portals where I obtain some of my work. I can do that all day at times and find nothing or maybe one assignment that can take less than an hour. So my precious hours spent “working” from home are not getting me anywhere.

And that is why I applied to a firm that is looking for someone who does exactly what I do. Those jobs are rare to find and because it’s an altruistic nonprofit, I applied. Time will tell whether I hear back for an interview, but I was encouraged to find something so specifically tailored to my career choice.

I have applications in with a couple local government agencies as well, but with them, being placed on the eligible list is in no way a guarantee of being called for an interview. I’ll continue courses for those positions and I’ll get busy with work in the coming months and not even think about looking for something outside the home, but then the doldrums will hit again . . . and again . . . and again.

Am I ready for full-time employment outside the home? With a little adjusting, I think so. It certainly would beat hitting the refresh button and finding nothing for forty hours a week.

 

 

work-at-home depression–yes, it is a thing

Some people–a lot of people, actually–would think that the perfect job is one in which you get to stay home and still earn money. That sounds good to me too, but working at home is not all it’s cracked up to be. And here’s why.

Working from home can be awesome, especially if you have young children or a difficult time commuting. It’s also great if your schedule is ever changing, like if you’re a student and have a hard time fitting a work schedule around classes. There are work-at-home situations that offer the same benefits (monetarily and otherwise) of working outside the home, like when you have a steady job with one employer who lets you work from home instead of at the office. But for those of us who freelance and whose work is sporadic and piecemeal, working at home can be a drag. For one, it can bring on depression. And here’s why:

1) Who’s the boss? Most people would think not having a traditional boss would be a good thing, right? But when you freelance for a number of different companies, you are at the mercy of their very different rules and requirements, and although you run your own company per se, the clients are the ones who direct your work. Many times too, projects can overlap and deadlines can conflict, meaning you have to take on two or more jobs at once, working crazy-long hours to get everything done, and oftentimes the work suffers. If that happens, you run the chance of not getting called on for more work.

2) Whose line is it anyway? Because of the risk of being contacted by an employer at any time via e-mail or by phone, most workers would say there’s a fine line between work and home these days. But with freelancing, there’s no line at all. At the end of the day, people who work in a physical space, be it an office, a factory, or a library, are able to walk away from work, get in their cars or hop on the bus or train, and go home. They may take their work with them via a laptop or running through work scenarios in their heads, but there’s a clear line of demarcation between work and home. Freelancers don’t have that luxury. They literally live with their work. They can work at 2 p.m. or 2 a.m. They work weekends, weekdays, and holidays even. They work when the work is there or, as stated at the end of point number one above, they may not be working at all.

3) Show me the money! Unless you’re JK Rowling or someone equally fortunate and talented to have made it big while doing something without a regular paycheck, the money from freelancing or contract work is not as lucrative as working for an employer. Polls have shown that freelancers doing the same type of work and who have the same education as those in full-time jobs are paid woefully less for the same output. A small percentage can make more, but I guarantee you they are working many more hours than the guy in the office. And yes, you can pay for your own health care and it is a tax deduction, but take it from someone who has had health care plans through an employer and plans not through an employer, without a workplace plan the premiums are higher, the benefits are lower, and you still have to earn enough to pay for those premiums. It’s not a win-win situation at all.

4) I’m so lonesome, I could cry. Sitting in a room for hours on end and staring at a screen, a canvas, or whatever work tool you use can be isolating, to say the least. Whether you like ’em or not, people need other people. We’re social animals. So’s my dog, of course, but I can only have a one-sided conversation with him. We crave human interaction, even those superficial conversations while standing by the watercooler chatting about last night’s episode of 60 Minutes.  (Do offices even have watercoolers anymore or have those been replaced by water bottles? Well, at least 60 Minutes is still around.)

5) Risky business. Even well-established companies shut down entire plants and office complexes at times (now more often than ever), so there’s not a soul who isn’t at risk of losing his or her job at any time these days. Long gone are the companies that hire workers straight out of school or the service, employ them for their entire working lives, and send them off into retirement with a nice, fat pension.Though they’re few and far between, there still are some employers like that. Freelancers, however, can’t count on steady work, let alone steady paychecks, ever. And there’s no pension, not even a 401(k), to fall back on one day. Sure, you can squirrel away a few thousand a year into an IRA, but there are limits to how much you can contribute and it’s all after-tax, not pretax money.

6) Happiness is a warm gun. The hot-and-cold of freelancing is extremely difficult to handle especially if you’re a lukewarm person. I like things I can count on. I’ve been married for 30 years and have had some of the same friends for decades. I hold on to my cars (the one I drive turned 14 last month), and I eat the same breakfast daily. I’m a very consistent person, so having a job without a consistent workflow is really difficult to bear. I am trying to supplement my freelance career with a “regular” job outside the home just so I have something to count on on a weekly basis, but finding even part-time work outside the home is difficult if you don’t have a steady employer to vouch for you. References are really hard to come by, too. Yes, you can use as a reference the client for whom you did a bang-up job on a recent project, but how are you going to look to that client if you mention seeking outside work? He or she may think you’re no longer interested in the occasional project and not call on you again, whether you got the regular job or not. He or she may think your time will be limited now, little does he know that you were juggling gigs while doing work for him too.

There are ways to get around the feelings of isolation (take your work to Starbucks, take a walk, go to the park, meet up with friends, join a group with other freelancers) and there are times the money is good for the work done, but there’s no getting around the roller-coaster ride of workflow that freelancers have, which in turn can affect one’s mood.

I try to look at the positives of working from home (being “there” for my kids, being in a comfortable place, not having to fight traffic in a big city–that one’s huge in my mind, and not having to dress up or even shower–OK, that one can be a big negative, actually). And I do realize that there’s good and bad with both scenarios and, truth be told, I’d rather work at home. But there’s no getting around the fact that there are negatives. Now if only I had a coworker to discuss them with.

sabotaging my life one anxiety at a time

I just finished Jenny Lawson’s new book, Furiously Happy, and am amazed at what this woman can do while suffering from mental illness and anxiety. As she says in her chapter “We’re Better Than Galileo. Because He’s Dead,” there are degrees of mental illness–it’s sort of like the autism spectrum–and some of us are worse than others. I’ve never been diagnosed, but I am pretty sure I fit squarely in the middle of the anxiety spectrum.

What’s horrible about anxiety, or at least to the degree I experience it, is you are your own worst enemy. When good things happen, there still is a sense of dread that something is wrong with it. And it’s not like we can’t see the good in situations, it’s more that we run through the worst possible scenarios of every situation, while hashing out some positives as well, but the bad always outweighs the good in our minds and we vote for bad.

Take my recent job prospect as an example. I have had my resume and application online with a government agency for a little over a year for a position I thought I could do and would enjoy doing. It doesn’t pay well, it is entry level, but it’s in a field I’ve always had an interest in and is semi-related to my writing and editing career. A year ago, when I learned from one of my work sources that there would be no more assignments coming from her or the publisher, I panicked. I had recently lost another contract because of tax implications for the company in hiring freelancers in my state, so that source of employment dried up. It was fleeting and never amounted to much money or work, so not a problem. But when my longtime publishing source, which comprised one-third or more of my income, dried up, I knew I was in trouble.

I still sent out resumes for freelance work and I enrolled in a program that would ultimately award me with a certificate in another area of interest. I took one class toward the certificate and updated my online application to reflect that. I also watched a few webinars for professionals in the field. I never heard back from the government agency at the time, which is not atypical, and I was able to pick up two more clients for my freelance editing career, which was excellent, so all was good.

With no contact from the government agency for months on end, I put it out of my mind and simply kept my application active in the system whenever a new reminder would be sent out.

In the meantime, my editing work dried up again. It’s a fickle business, publishing, and the work either comes in droves during the two annual publishing seasons or it’s as dry as the Sahara and you’re left rearranging the items on your desk and looking for other means of employment. So I was in a huge dry spell when the e-mail arrived last week notifying me that the government agency was hiring for the entry-level position and to call if I was interested in scheduling an interview. I ruminated on it for a couple days: Do I want to give up–or partially give up–working from home and the luxuries it provides? Do I want to start at the bottom and make barely over minimum wage in a position with no benefits? Do I have the time to add on one more job–and one I’d have to drive to and physically be at–when I get so busy and overwhelmed during publishing season that I can’t even get up from my desk for weeks on end? Could I do work and be on my feet, something I don’t do while editing or writing?

And then the phone call came.

I had a feeling who it was from when “City of” appeared in the caller ID window of my phone. I hadn’t made up my mind about accepting an interview but I picked up the phone anyway and agreed to meet for one. I thought it was a sign that I was meant to take this job if offered, after all the city never calls.

Then the panic really set in.

One reason, which would sound ludicrous to some, is because I would have to submit a list of three recent work references. As a freelancer, I don’t have a superior who oversees my work. I work for myself but I also work under production editors who send me work. There are two of whom I used once, for the freelance editing job I got that I love but only worked on three assignments for so far. The third resource is a friend of mine whose book I helped edit a few years back. She gave a glowing review of me last spring, she said, and I knew she’d help me again with this job. But here’s the kicker: It’s awkward giving a potential employer a list of names of people who themselves don’t have regular 9-to-5 jobs and who are often vying for the same jobs as you.

It’s also awkward because I just gave out those three names to get that freelance editing position and what would these women think if I were having someone contact them again, that I didn’t get the first job? That I’m now striving for something beneath me? That times are that bad? That this career change might be something they would like to consider and sabotage me? Mostly, though, I didn’t want to bother them for an entry-level position I may or may not get and I didn’t want to bother them this time when I might need them to secure a much better position in the future.

I mulled over the offer to interview and got input from some of my family members. Two of my kids, a teen and a seasoned, employed adult who is very rational, said don’t bother because of the pay and the disruption to my life. They said I should wait until (or should I say if?) the other position with this agency that I had applied to opens up and I get called to interview for that, which pays about what I make per hour freelancing and offers benefits (and it would be steady work!). To them it was a no-brainer. But to me it wasn’t so cut and dried. I like the editing work I do–even love some of it–but some stuff is tedious and boring ,and, although this may be a plus to some but not to me, work fluctuates. There are seasons of an abundance of work, too much so at times, and there are seasons when I’m anxious and scouring the Internet job boards for any morsel I can find and applying to anything that I think I can do. For so many years, I’ve longed for a job that’s reliable and that would be a boon to my freelance career.

After my kids’ sage advice, and being the anxious person I naturally am, I ran through all the negatives of taking such a job. I still have a child in high school who doesn’t drive and I have to drive him around town for games when he plays a sport and to and from school daily. How would he get where he needs to be until he is able to drive and until we have an extra car for him to drive if I were locked into working regular hours (but then again, what if the hours were when he’s in school or on the weekend?)? I also fretted over having to run off to a $10-an-hour job when I could make double that from home–if the work is available. And then there was the sense that I have a good thing going right now in freelancing. I can take work when I want it or refuse it if it doesn’t fit into my schedule (although I rarely refuse it because a freelancer will not be sent work if she’s apt to pass it up; it’ll go to some other freelancer who can then be relied on all the time while your name gets erased from the list). I texted a friend of mine for advice and she said stick with working from home. Another said to go to the interview and learn more about the position. Then when I showed how anxious I was to disrupt my life, she finally said don’t do it if it would alter your life so much.

So the other day, I sent an e-mail to the recruiter, thanking her and letting her know I would not be able to take the interview and that I had applied for the assistant position instead of the aide position and would be happy to accept an interview for that if and when I was chosen to do so. As soon as I hit “send,” I felt relief. I ended up having a really nice day with my husband, which reassured me that staying home and being able to write my own hours is the right thing. (I usually plan our family vacations around his much-less-flexible schedule, which makes me grateful for having a schedule with flexibility.)

Then the regrets hit.

And it was a tsunami of hits: Why did I not go to the interview and present my resume asking to be considered for both positions? Why didn’t I at least meet the people who do the hiring for these positions because they will no doubt be calling me (or not anymore!) when the other position opens? I felt I not only closed a door, I slammed it right in my face and theirs.

I did some work at home on one of my boring jobs the morning of the interview and then called the interviewer because I never received a reply e-mail after canceling. I wanted to make sure she got my message and wasn’t waiting for me to show up. But I got her voicemail and left a message. I also called the person her message said would be of help to callers if she was not answering her phone. But he didn’t pick up either. My phone call was not returned. My e-mail was not replied to. The slamming door reverberated so loudly it shook the house from its foundation. I am doomed, I thought. I am the Charlie Brown of humans. I am my own worst enemy.

Now I am awash in regret and guilt for not doing what I now realize was the right thing: going to the interview, learning about the entry-level position, discussing my qualifications, which would somewhat make me a better assistant than aide candidate, but at least I would have gotten my foot in the door–the door I ended up slamming shut.

Some people would be thinking I did the right thing. That I shouldn’t take a job beneath me, that I shouldn’t take a job with low pay. But I’ve been wanting to work in this agency for decades, yes, decades, and this was the very first time I’d gotten so much as a request to set up an interview.

I just sent a text to a friend asking if she wants to meet up. I can use a shoulder. Then she, who has been out of a good-paying career for about nine months, just told me she is taking courses to boost her chances of getting hired and she has other unexpected expenses. I told her I could drive to her on the weekend, but she laid it on the line. She’s not feeling up to it. She, like me and probably the reason we’ve been friends for thirty-plus years, is anxious and just needs some time to feel better. Now I feel like a fool for having bothered her about my $10-an-hour-job worries. Unlike me, my friend is single and doesn’t have a husband to support her.

I have a big tendency to compare myself to people who have it better than me–or to whom I think have it better. Then I read about or get a text like the one from my friend, whom I’ve always envied, and learn that even when you’re feeling bad there’s always someone who has it worse.  As Jenny says, “Really, the only people you should be comparing yourself to would be people who make you feel better by comparison. For instance, people who are in comas.” There are plenty of people between me and the comatose. I just have to remember the silver lining is within every cloud and just forget the fact that the cloud is gray.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

still pinching pennies, but it’s getting better . . . we hope

My husband has been at his job for nearly two months. It’s hard to believe. Because the company insurance plans won’t kick in until he is employed there for three months, I’m still paying the health insurance premium on my individual coverage plan for the self-employed. It’s over $1,100 a month, which is a ridiculous amount of money for people who rarely if ever see a doctor. I go for my annual checkup and a mammogram every couple years (though my doctor would like me to go annually). My sons haven’t seen the doctor in well over a year. My husband is the only one who checks in with his physician on occasion. And he takes a daily pill for high cholesterol. But that’s it.

The job is going a little roughly, as there seems to be much more to do than hours in a day to do it. The other employee who was hired at the same time as my husband to do the same work was let go after just three weeks. (This firm, we’ve learned, is notorious for its turnover rate.) But my husband, being the hard worker that he is, is sticking with it. He’s earning his keep, and then some.

I’m in a bit of a lull with my work, but the pace should pick up later in the month and into November. I look forward to that, if for no other reason than to pay for that health insurance bill. I cannot wait until that’s behind us and I can start banking my earnings instead of paying for services we don’t even use.

In the meantime, I count our lucky stars that my husband has found steady employment (a friend of ours has been looking for five months) and we haven’t had to change our lifestyles too much.

 

i don’t know how she does it

I had to get the oil changed today, so after dropping off the car at the Sears Auto shop, I parked myself in the food court with my cup of McDonald’s coffee and got some work done. As a freelance editor, I sometimes have the ability to take my work with me and so my errand was partially paid for by my flexible career (although the fee for just that one oil change surpassed the amount of money earned from my hour or so of work).

I’m fortunate to have the option to be able to do not only this (working just about anywhere), but also to work my schedule around my kids’ school drop-offs, pickups, and other events in their lives. I’m also occasionally able to enjoy some spare time. In fact, while at the mall and after finishing with the work I had brought with me, I took in a movie, or most of a movie anyway, before rushing out the theater door and down the mall corridor to pay for the oil change and retrieve my car before rushing to school to pick up my son. If only the pay I receive for the work I do were as desirable as the flexibility, but this is the dilemma a lot of working parents face.sjp

The movie I saw, I Don’t Know How She Does It, hits upon this dilemma of balance. The movie stars Sarah Jessica Parker as the harried working mom, Greg Kinnear as her usually understanding husband, and Pierce Brosnan as a business cohort whom Kate (SJP’s character) works with and nearly falls for.  The topic drew me in–in fact, I remember having checked this book out of the library some time ago, although I couldn’t find the time to finish reading it–so I thought I’d check out the movie.

On some levels I could relate to Kate in that there never seems to be enough time in the day to get everything done. I also could relate to the lists she draws up in her mind. What mom/working woman/wife doesn’t lie awake at night ruminating on, hyperventilating over, and dreading the events of the upcoming days and the shortcomings of her life?

On other levels, however, I couldn’t relate . . . at all. I’m referring to things like having a nanny, living in a Pottery Barn-styled home, having a career that is so satisfying and fulfilling that you just can’t imagine ever giving it up to be a full-time mother. I think every woman would love that dilemma–being a loving mom and wife and having a fulfilling career that allows for all the good things in life–but nothing is perfect. Something’s gotta give. Either you are present for your kids’ first haircuts, first steps and first smiles, and are actually able to bake a pie from scratch for the school bake sale, or you’re out cornering a lucrative deal while making incredible pay, wearing sharp clothes, meeting interesting people, and padding your 401(k) for what will obviously be an amazing retirement. Either way, there are trade-offs.

In the grand scheme of things, I guess we should all be thankful for the little things that do go right–the work that comes in, the home that is comfortable enough, and the family that is usually happy to see you. Oh yeah, and being able to occasionally sit through most of a show or finish a book.

the perfect life

One of my favorite films of all time–holiday or otherwise–is The Family Man, starring Nicolas Cage and Tea Leoni. In it, Cage plays a Wall Street businessman who seemingly has the perfect life as a wealthy bachelor. One Christmas Eve he stumbles into a world that is a glimpse of what life would have been like for him had he taken an alternate course, that of a common family man living in a chronically untidy house in the suburbs with two adorable children and a wife whose career has been less than stellar.

I love this film for a number of reasons, but specifically because it questions what most people would consider the perfect life–fancy cars, a driver, a penthouse suite, the attention of beautiful members of the opposite sex. It begs the question, what would life have been like had we steered onto a different path? How different would our lives have been and would it have made us happier than we are now? And the film makes you question what is perfection. Is it the Ferrari and the penthouse suite, or is it a comfortable home with a loving spouse and children? Leoni’s character, Kate, is a lawyer–typically a well-paying career–but Kate is content helping the disadvantaged, taking on pro bono cases instead of the ones that could make her much more money. To her, the house in the suburbs and the minivan and the child in a decent public school is the perfect existence.

For sure, the movie poses an interesting scenario to ponder. What if you had married someone else? What if you had chosen a different career? What if you had more children–or none at all? What if you had never moved from that city or ended up in this one? What if you had never left the farm?

One of my favorite scenes in The Family Man is when suburban Jack gets a break at cracking into the lucrative career he had lworked at in his former/real life. On their anniversary, he takes Kate to a magnificent Manhattan apartment that he has been offered as a perk for accepting a high-paying, high-powered job on Wall Street. When Kate wants none of it, Jack pleads that this new business opportunity and living in the city would provide them with “a perfect life, a great life. Everything that we pictured when we were young; the whole package.” When Kate continues to protest, Jack says, “I’m talking about us having a life that other people envy.” To which Kate replies, “Oh, Jack. They already do envy us.”

This movie hits a nerve because my husband chose a career that makes many people quite wealthy. There are millionaires in his field. They live in mansions or at the very least McMansions. They drive foreign cars (and by “foreign” I do not mean Toyota). They have country club memberships and second homes in the country. They travel to expensive places on extensive vacations. In other words, they live the high life, what many would label the perfect life.

But even before my husband had started his career, the two of us had started a family. By the time he graduated from school, he was the father of two children and the husband of a wife with no job. We lived off of student loans the first three years of our elder daughter’s life and the first year of our younger’s. We worked part time at whatever we could manage. The loans totaled $15,000 for the first year, and $12,000 for each of the following two years, maximum. Try buying groceries and diapers, paying for health insurance, car insurance, paying the utilities and rent in the Bay Area for four people on that income, and without taking any kind of a handout. We had one car–a two-door Nissan Sentra, which posed a problem when getting the babies in and out of the back seat–and little more to our names. We ate a lot of spaghetti, lasagna that lasted an entire week, chicken, and macaroni and cheese (the boxed kind, not the luscious stuff featured on the Food Network). A treat would be a very occasional bucket of fried chicken or lunch at McDonald’s. We shopped on an extremely tight budget and somehow made it work. By the time my husband got his first job, I’m sure our elder daughter thought “generic” was a brand name.

We started out behind the 8 ball, and it’s been a struggle ever since to roll it out of our way let alone push it completely aside. To this day–more than 20 years after my husband first started his career–we’re still living a modest life in a modest house with many flaws. No, we don’t have hardwood floors, marble or granite countertops (or even Corian, for that matter). Our carpet is old and grungy, but I keep shampooing it, and when we need new flooring, we tend to pull up the carpets and lay down peel-and-stick vinyl. I shop at Target, not Nordstrom. Eating out is reserved for special occasions–birthdays, our anniversary, and the occasional holiday. Needless to say, most of my husband’s peers would not be able to even stomach our lifestyle. I’m sure they’d hardly consider this a perfect life. But it’s what we’ve made and it’s all we have. And it’s really not so bad. We pay our bills on time, have four terrific kids, two of whom have reached adulthood and one who’s less than a year away, and we have friends and family who love and care about us.

Now that my husband is struggling to find a job to replace the one he has been downsized from, I have once again begun pondering the what ifs. What would our life have been like had he taken a different road on his career path? What if he had gone for the high-paying, high-powered career? If it would have meant being without our cluttered, funky home, having three kids instead of four, or two instead of four, or none at all, I’d have taken the very road we’re on. It may not be the perfect life, but it’s an enviable one just the same.

And the Hits Just Keep on Comin’!

Just when I thought it was safe to go back into the world, having just secured extra part-time work to help out with the family finances, I have spotted an enormous, wide-mouthed Great White lurking off the coast: My husband will be losing his job at the end of the year.

This is what I had feared would happen. This is why I panicked so thoroughly when I personally didn’t have money coming in or when I’d get a measly $48 for an assignment that just a couple years ago would have garnered ten times as much for something similar. It wasn’t so much that my income was diminished and my ego was bruised or that I’d have to forego buying extra goodies, like an occasional frothy latte or a French-tip manicure (two items I’ve yet to even desire, thankfully); it was more that I knew that my husband’s job was less than stable. And, darn it, I was right.

He has just a little over seven weeks to find a full-time job or he’ll be standing in the unemployment line, collecting his maximum $1,800 a month, which will only cover our mortgage and property taxes. And although I was able to pick up some extra work, it’s still only part-time employment. I do not earn even close to enough to make up the difference between what he used to take home and what he will be bringing in.

I’ve already begun pulling up the bootstraps, tightening the laces, and hunkering down for a long, cold winter. Today I will survey the freezer and see what we can make use of without my having to go out and buy groceries, an expense that can run easily to $800 a month for a family of six. I’m also looking at items I recently bought that can be returned. Although the two items that first come to mind only add up to $35, that amount will at least cover one month of Internet service–my lifeline to a paycheck.

I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this–and it just might not, if my husband can find work before the first of the new year. But if it does, I will do everything in my power to stay afloat and keep that evil beast from encroaching on our shore.

Runaway train

I read recently that the most productive time of day for most workers is before 4 p.m. I have to concur with that estimate. I am a fairly early riser who gets her best work done in  the morning hours. For just about, oh, always I’ve been one to fade fast as the afternoon approaches, no matter what the job: retail, desk work, parenting. I’d be ready to punch the time clock at around 3 and retire my brain for the evening. (When fully immersed into parenting little ones, my down time coincided with the start time of, at first, Donahue and Oprah and then Dr. Phil and Oprah, whose shows were a great way to unwind before the dinner rush.)

Well, this new job that I acquired has me working in the afternoon on a daily basis. In fact, one of yesterday’s assignments, which I was told would be difficult (and they weren’t a-kiddin’), didn’t start until 4 p.m.–way past my productive time. Not only was the assignment ill timing for my productive cycle, it landed smack dab in the middle of the dinner hour. I didn’t finish that assignment until 7:30 p.m., and only stopped once to remove three frozen pizzas from their boxes and place them in the oven, so that the family would have something to eat for dinner.

My husband supervised the baking of the pizzas, one of my boys put together a salad, and both boys handled the dish duty. There were cranky words among all males involved, as this prepping for dinner and cleaning up afterward is so foreign to them.

But that’s another blog post, this one concerns my fading brain that was on overdrive yesterday. As I usually wind down my day and put aside my work until the next day or for later in the evening, when I’ve gotten my second wind, I needed to be in full-force. Not a good plan for someone who is fading fast. And the rush nature of the assignment made me feel like I was conducting a runaway train with a blindfold on.

I hope I can arrange for my assignments to come in a bit earlier in the day (although being on the Left Coast, I am typically going to get these later-in-the-day calls). I suppose I’ll have to brew a fresh pot of coffee, make myself toast to snack on, and fool my body into thinking it’s morning again. Oh, yeah. That should do the trick.