Posts Tagged ‘WAHM’
Choosing Baby – Why & How I Decided to Leave My Job (Pt. 1)
Jan
After tomorrow I will be officially unemployed. I didn’t get laid off, my company is actually still there, and no one has burned down the building. I chose unemployment. I chose to be home to raise my daughter the way my husband and I have decided she deserves to be raised. I chose the people I love over the things that I covet. It was a long, difficult and stressful decision. Here is the windy version for those still shocked and perplexed by my seemingly sudden change of heart.
In an economic slump, when so many people are desperately seeking employment, it sounds almost insane that I would be choosing to leave my career and hard won position of eight years. I worked so hard, fought so long, to slowly earn my degree while working to pay for it. I never wanted kids growing up. I wanted a successful career, to be the best I could be at something, and generally rock the chick power. Once I reached a point in my life where my husband and I decided our tune had changed and we wanted kids, I never stopped for a second to think my career would be effected. Sure, I’d probably have to adjust my schedule, stop working 15 hour days and learn to leave work at work. Plenty of other career women do it. Just fine. No sweat.
I was ridiculously naive.
My excuse? I’m an only child, whose childhood was rough at best, I never understood babies or cared to be around them. Honestly, they freak me out man. To little and breakable. To smelly and loud. It took me thirty years to have one because I was so afraid I would mess up an innocent little person with my seeming lack of maternal instinct. Everyone says it’s different when it’s your own babe… I didn’t believe it back then, but everyone was right.
The moment my little girl came into the world wide awake and drug free, warm in my arms, I had an epiphany. This was my success. THIS was what I was meant to be. A mother. Her mother. I felt like Neo being jacked in for the first time, a million gigs of data streaming into a blank reality. Once you choose the red pill you can’t go back, your no longer the person you were then, your changed in the most fundamental and irrevocable way.
In that moment I became everything I always feared I never could be. I was flooded with love, joy, and the biggest natural high of my existence (truly natural birth is FANTASTIC). I wanted to give her everything, but not just stuff. I wanted her to feel the joy she’d given me in her life, to reach for her dreams, to know how much she was loved and wanted. We spent my maternity leave dreaming together. Her; of things I can only wonder at, me; of the things I wanted to teach her and the experiences I hope she will have. Birth was magnificent, my infant a joy, and then the reality came cascading over me. I was weeks away from returning to work and faced leaving the center of my universe behind… with strangers.
Come back tomorrow for Part 2 – How we made the change from D.I.N.K. (Double Income No Kids) to S.I.N.K (Single Income New Kid)
