I have a category called Productivity. This is a vestige from a former job, where some co-workers and I filed all the silly fun junk emails, the non-work related crap, away in our "productivity" file. Because a little nonsense each day kept us more productive on the whole.
As of last Wednesday, I'm unemployed. For the first time since I was about 14 years old, actually. The job I had melted, in a not pretty way, like into the fires of hell kinda way. It was long past time for me to leave, but I'm not dancing a jig, tho I too feel like I ought to. I'm still sort of reeling... Summer is over and I'm not back to work, not back to school, and this current state could stretch on forever. I might like it, if I let myself, but my latent Protestant Work Ethic says it's shameful to enjoy not having to report for work every day. So I get up at 6 (which is earlier than I did when I had a FT job) and I work like a mad woman on everything I can (babe, house, volunteering) until I am exhausted. Then I fall into bed with a long list started for the next day.
Officially I am, right this second, a Stay-at-Home Mome (SAHM). Now I know that raising children is Real Work. But it's still not the same. Because I didn't get a Masters to be a mom. My work as a mom is not reported on our taxes. I don't get Social Security benefits (which oddly my nanny/babysitter would, if I hired one to help out). My work as a mom is not counted by the Department of Labor stats.
From salary.com: "Based on a 90-hour work week, Salary.com has estimated that a fair wage for the typical stay-at-home mom would be well over $90,000 for executing all of her daily tasks. Factor in overtime, and the appropriate salary takes a leap of around $25,000." And that's not counting 401(k) and benefits.
It's embarrassing, but as a life-long overachiever, it's totally bewildering to have nothing to measure achievement against. Some part of me is waiting for someone (my husband? my child? friends? other moms? my in-laws?) to nod in approval. "Wow, look at how well/how much she is doing. She's a good mother/homeowner/wife/friend." And I have promised WeeE that I won't become one of those moms who measures her own worth based on her child's achievement. If WeeE is a C student with no remarkable talents, that's fine, so long as she is a generally happy healthy person.
So here I am in this "decadent" state of unemployment, playing with my child and my house and my dogs, but it seems equally like a vacuum, endless nothing. How can you have a decadent vacuum?
So I blog it... because yeah probably I want happy positive feedback, but more because I'm not hearing or reading other folks admit that this is not easy. "This" being the switch from a woman who strove endlessly in academics, who was supposed to break the glass ceiling, who has an unnecessarily vast vocabulary... to being the woman who could stay in the house for a week and no one would notice. (not that I WOULD. The point is that I COULD.) It's hard not to feel like you are maybe just a teeny-tiny less relavent, ya know?
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