Working, or not

Right now I have a fantastic job. I get to do what I am trained for, I have lovely people to work with. The company is pretty good too. Sure I am sometimes bored and don’t always have enough to do, but I really enjoy my job and the break it gives me from mom-life. Soon though we are going to move, for a multitude of very good reasons, and I am becoming increasingly sad about leaving my job and what that will mean. I keep reminding myself that us moving is logically a good thing and really the only con, other than the (significant) hassle of moving, is leaving my job. I remind myself of that especially when my husband says that we could stay just for my job. I’m not sure if I believe he means it. It’s also a frustrating thing to hear because A. we’ve left my work for reasons related to him before (and I’m mostly ok with it these days because life turned out ok, but I was sad for a time) and B. I’m not the primary earner and my job does effectively come second to everything. Sadly, as the primary care giver to the kids because of my non-primary earner status, my job is more like a hobby that I get paid for. I’m first choice for kid sickness duty, errands and so on.

In short I would really feel guilty if I did make us stay. No one would be happy including me.

In looking around for work at our new location (we have been planning for a while) I certainly see things I could do that are full time. Did I forget to mention part of what makes my job so fabulous is that it is part time with the option to change my hours? So yeah, fulltime is easy enough to come by. Now, I’m not looking at this from any kind of financial perspective, because I have privileged people problems and I don’t need to work. Essentially my job needs to cover child care and a bit extra. But full time means I do give up daytime activities with my kids, and I think more importantly, fulltime means I would lose some ability to cook proper dinners. Right now at 60%, or 3 full days per week, I premake a lot of food and dish it out and heat it up on my work days. Small children don’t want to wait for me to cook something. I could do without tanties at the kitchen gate. Not that what I make gets eaten with great gusto or anything, because uuurgh, picky kids,  but I do like making food for my family.  It seems like a small thing but apparently it’s big enough to have me considering not working at all. Another factor is of course the days I work I feel so rushed. I get home, feed kids and prepare their daycare bags for the next day and then we have about an hour or so before it’s getting toward bedtime for them, then bedtimes and then bedtime for me. Right now three days in a row of that has me ready to be done by the end of the third day. I don’t think five days of that would be great. Then the weekend rolls around and I spend all of Saturday catching up on the house stuff I didn’t do the three days I was working so the weekend is not very relaxing in any way.

My other option is not working at all. Right now if we have a 3+ day weekend that cuts into one of my work days and I end up with five or more days off I start to get very antsy. On my regular four days without work (weekend and 2 weekdays), we do at least one out of the house toddler activity on a weekday and a family activity on the weekend. I don’t feel like I would cope well with no work days. I find  working is also very important for my mental health. I think if I did do this things would have to be very regimented and planned out in advance so we had a schedule all the time. Of course the no working at all is bad in other ways. If I get a sizeable career gap I will have a much harder time finding work in the future. This concerns me because of our plans to have a further baby. I could be looking at  at least 18 months where starting a  new job is not feasible (9 months of pregnancy and 9 months of baby care before back to work). If I had a job before this it would be different, but it’s a tricky time to be job hunting. Or baby making. I do plan to go back to work full time at some point when the kids are older and all in school, but not when they are toddlers and preschoolers. And of course with me not working we won’t have my extra income. It’s not much after daycare and travel expenses, but it is nice to have.

Right now I just plan to keep looking for new work. I have a kinda-sorta request in for transfer, but realistically I’m 0.6 of a job so it’s not impossible, but not likely either. I have a fantastic CV and experience, so I’ll be a good contender for anything I apply for.