@ Home in the World

What is the Universe trying to tell me now?

They called me last night to offer me a 3-month contract. I accepted, although the logistics are far from ideal. Somehow the energy of the people who interviewed me was contagious, and then in my research, I found a former co-worker I spent hours and hours with, several jobs ago. Our cubes were across the aisle from each other, all those years ago. We did the three hour car trip to corporate headquarters more than once. We wore jeans one day in protest of a nasty-gram from the CEO. Now he will be my contact on one of the first projects I will do for this new company. We have both been in the industry so long that it is getting to be a very small world.

It occurs to me that every one of the men that went through my department during the years I was there are managers now at different companies. Very few of the women are. I know a lot of that has to do with family choices, but it is still depressing.

So as much as I thought I would be using this time to change direction, it seems that after nearly six months, I'm taking a great big U-turn. Of course as we look at the bills we are still holding for the house renovation and the national unemployment rate hitting an official 10 percent, I am also relieved.

Interestingly, directly after I accepted the offer, I had two calls from other organizations about my resume. One was from a university, and after I hung up with them, I wished I had had the presence of mind to go through the motions of the interview with them. What I have is a contract after all, not yet a permanent position. I have always wanted to do ID at a college.

So now, I have to figure out how to handle this position without letting it consume my life, as the last one did. By the time the job ended, I had pretty much run myself into the ground. I seriously needed the six-month vacation I just had.

I have next week to wrap up some things before I re-start commute and cube life. What's interesting is that I have the strongest urge to de-clutter and get the house more manageable than it has been. I went through my closet this morning and threw out at least ten pairs of pants that were either ill-fitting or outdated. I wish I could say that it made a dent.

Halloween is over, the candy is dwindling. Now that the job thing is settled for now, I find myself looking forward to the holidays.

Vexed

I haven't written much about my job search, partly because there hasn't been much to say, and partly because although I blog mostly anonymously, I'm still a little worried about any possible professional impact. Also, I try to keep the whining to a minimum. I do, and get, enough of that in real life.

Today, I'm going to throw caution to the winds and try to work this problem out somewhere other than in my head.

Except for my deliberate and extended maternity leave, I think this is the longest I have ever been unemployed. Somedays it's extremely discouraging, and other days I really enjoy the opportunity to be here when the boys get home, work through their homework and take them to practices and appointments as need be. There are a few things that have come up with the boys that I just wouldn't have been able to handle as effectively had I been working full time. I wish that I could find a way to do this and still be bringing in money.

I've been sending out resumes regularly, and even getting a few interviews. What's been so different this time around is that even the interviews that go well haven't resulted in offers. When you are sitting there aceing the interview questions it's easy to forget that there were a huge number of other applicants and one of them is bound to have more experience, or say something that hits the interviewer in exactly the right way. I'm also starting to wonder if my age is becoming the factor that motherhood became in my last job search. Maybe they are actually looking for someone with less experience that they don't have to pay as much.

I'm starting to wake up to the fact that shifting careers at this point may not only sound good to me right now, it may become a necessity.

Some kind of course correction was on my mind when I was still employed. After five years of chasing after children with some consulting mixed in, day after day of heads-down-at-my-desk work wasn't really sitting right with me. I need to be up and about, collaborating with other people. Part of the reason I was so anxious to return to work was that I missed being part of a team. What I found when I got there was just as isolating as being at home for five years.

I recognize that complaint is more about me than the work or the workplace. We're all cut out for different things and the things we are cut out for sometimes evolve.

So the big question now is how to change direction and what direction to take. If I knew the answer to that, I'd probably have a job by now. Or at least a plan.

... and the dream shall never die.

I am having a hard time imagining politics without the Kennedys. The family and their history have been a part of my political life since I was a small child.

My answer to that famous question of "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" is "Not born yet, don't hate me." But, you would think that I had been around when it occurred, so familiar am I with the story and the feeling of devastation at the loss.

Born Irish and raised Catholic, I had a few strands of the Kennedy family mystique woven into my own tapestry, as if our heritage were somehow elevated by their success. Many families I knew had a photo of President Kennedy up on their walls along with blessed portraits of the Pope and Jesus Christ. When I came along in the late 60s, people seemed to still be mourning Jack, and then mourning Bobby.

Maybe it wasn't just us Irish Catholics. It's easy to see how the nation, and Democrats in particular, might feel as if hope, also known as Camelot,  had been stolen from them. As imperfect as President Kennedy was, what came after him; the escalation of Viet Nam, the struggles for Civil Rights, and the scandal known as Watergate brought this country to its knees.

In the 7th and 8th grades, JFK's speeches were standard fare for those participating in Forensics competition. I still have much of that oratory rattling around in my head and can follow along with recordings of him like many people can sing along with a song they haven't heard in 20 years.

Of course we knew the Kennedys did not walk on water. The treatment of women in their personal lives did not always reflect the actions they took in fighting publicly for their rights.  My mother happened to be a friend of Mary Jo Kopechne, so my family was well aware of the Chappaquiddick incident.

With the legacy of his brothers resting on his shoulders, Ted Kennedy lost his way, as I have seen many, too many, youngest sons do. However, some say with the help of his wife Victoria Reggie, he fought his way back to purposeful service to his country and constituency.

When I moved up to Boston in the mid 80s, it was as close to the center of the political universe as I might get without going to Washington, D.C.. It was a city of history, legacy, ideals, and the Kennedys. A friend quickly recruited me in her efforts to resurrect the College Democrats, and I found myself holding signs, making phone calls, and stuffing envelopes for state-level candidates and eventually, for John Kerry's effort to succeed the respected Paul Tsongas.

It was at Kerry's victory party that I met Ted Kennedy.  He was kind and approachable and I was left with a sense of meeting history. My story is not nearly as interesting as those many whom Kennedy helped directly, but the experience was unforgettable nonetheless.

Years later, I volunteered for a Kennedy campaign, doing the usual things that lower-level campaign staffers do. I didn't even cross paths with him during the campaign, but my efforts garnered me an invitation to the victory party at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport. I'll probably always regret not going.

I thought about going down to the JFK Library for the viewing; the family's legacy has meant that much to me and my view of the world. Unfortunately, neither of my children would have been able to stand the long lines, so I was grateful that my older son noticed the flags at half staff and asked about them.

His question gave me a chance to explain to him the story of the Kennedy family; the combination of privilege and service; the dictum that "for those to whom much is given, much is required." We don't seem to believe that as a nation anymore, and I wonder if churches still teach the concept in real-world terms.

Like a lot of other people, I am left wondering if the Kennedy legacy, and the old-style liberalism the family  embodied, ends here. That the Democratic party has moved more toward the center in recent years, is not an entirely bad thing, in my opinion. But, where are the strong voices of critique against greed, corporate welfare, and war profiteering going to come from now? Is there anyone left who understands that a modicum of security and stability for the lowest rungs on our socioeconomic ladder benefits society as a whole? Who truly fights for the little guy anymore?

In addition to their service, another think that distinguished the Kennedys was their great rhetoric. There have been many, many lines in speeches given during and before my time that have brought me to tears. In the past several days, many of Ted's speeches were revisited in the media; our memories restored through archived recordings. The lines that stick with me were delivered by Ted at a time of loss; the 1980 Democratic Convention. I hope they will still prove true as time goes on.

For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end.

For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

 

Computerless

I have a new laptop on order. It arrived with a problem. Yesterday, our house desktop developed a problem that may or may not be virus-related.

Posts will, of necessity, be short as I will have only my phone for the next few days.

What did we do before computers again?

You can keep my things, they've come to take me home!

You probably recgonize it, but if you don't, it's the last line from Peter Gabriel's Solisbury Hill; a song he supposedly wrote about his decision to leave Genesis.

My take on it is that it's a fairly positive tune about knowing something isn't a good fit for a long time and then finally making a change that's expected to work out better than what you had been doing. In Gabriel's case, he went on to have a very successful solo career, and the band he left also changed direction and had quite a bit of success as well. A good outcome all around!

The song was released when I was a child, but it was still very widely played in the mid 80s, when I was in high school and college. It grew to have real meaning for me when I was about to return to Boston after taking a semester off and living back in Guilford for six months. I learned a lot about myself, but Boston was, at least at the time, where I really belonged.

I've had that song in my head for a while now, and not just because it remains one of my favorite. I've always hated it when bloggers got all cryptic and mysterious about changes that were happening behind the scenes, and now I have to do that as well. At least for now.

Let's put it this way: I'm 42 years old, the older I get, the more I find myself in these "now or never" situations. Increasingly, I'm learning to say "now."

My Fridays fall apart

It’s 10:30 at night and I just sent the project I promised to finish today off to the stakeholders. I had planned on finishing way earlier than this, but as so often happens, my Friday fell apart.

 

I spent part of the morning preparing for a telephone call that never happened. The guy I’m dealing with is out in California and has a crazy-busy job, so I was sort of expecting him to cancel, but not to just forget.

 

When it came time to pick up the kids at school, I was nowhere near as far along as I had expected. It is not impossible to get work done after they come home from school, but it is not easy.

 

I bumped into a friend’s kids while at the school to pick up my own. The buses had left so I offered them a ride home knowing that their mom wasn’t home yet. One of the boys got his mom on the phone and that became a discussion of whether we could all meet and go out for pizza. Since I hadn’t had lunch, pizza sounded good to me, but I also knew I had this project waiting for me at home.

 

The boys decided that they wanted to stay and play on the playground rather than have pizza so, grateful that it was finally warm enough to hang out on the playground, that’s what we did. The older boys took Tigger into the woods with a bunch of other kids and discovered a “snapping turtle pond.” I think they were just kidding about the snapping turtle, but somehow Tigger managed to get wet up to his knees and tear a hole in the leg of his good pants.

 

Meanwhile Pumpkin found friends to play with. It never ceases to amaze me how he attracts other children.

 

While watching Pumpkin on the playground, I texted a question to another friend of mine. I expected a one-word answer in return, but instead I got a phone call. He was driving, he said, going away for the weekend, and couldn’t text back.

 

Going away for the weekend.

 

When we first moved up here from Newton, I was doing a drive commute instead of taking the train. Every Friday I would see a sign for 95N NH, MAINE and every Friday I would contemplate following that sign and not coming back. Maine in those days was my idea of heaven. The air was cleaner, the stress non-existent. Of course I never went.

 

Now I work at home on Fridays and while it is great that I am no longer part of the throngs of people on the road who are going away for the weekend, thus jamming the drive home commute even worse than usual, I am often frustrated that there is no clear line between when my work stops and the weekend begins. The kids were playing on the playground, my friend was going away, and I still had work to do.

 

Piper made dinner tonight. I came downstairs long enough to take a few bites, forego the beer we usually share on Friday nights and get back to work.

 

I finished at 10:30 at night.

 

My weekend has just begun.

Summertime and the living is

A bit more difficult for working moms.

School ended two weeks ago the way it began - with two useless half days on a Wednesday and Thursday. Of course that means that Friday there was no school. Piper used a vacation day to cover the Wednesday half day and I swapped my work at home day for the Thursday and took the Friday off.

I really enjoy being there for the last day of school. All the parents and the students in the lower grades hang around to "cheer on" the fifth graders leaving the building for the last time. The school buses are decorated in balloons and streamers and the drivers honk their horns as they pull out. This year I noticed that they put kazoos and other noise makers on every seat and that the kids were contributing to the cacophony on the way out. God bless 'em!

My neighbor and I have a tradition of our own of taking the kids out to lunch on the last day. This year she insisted that we bring two other women along and they insisted that instead of going to Friendly's like we always do, we should go somewhere that served Margaritas. I can't remember the last time I had a drink at lunch time. Maybe never.

Now these two other women have boys in Pumpkin's class, but they also have either older children who can watch the younger ones or husbands who work alternate shifts (a cop, for instance), so even though this idea started out as a kickoff celebration for the kids, the only one that actually brought her kids was me. Add to that I was technically still on the clock at work, so I did not have as many margaritas (1) or as much fun as the other women did. But I could drive home, which proved to be important.

I spent the entire time thinking someone from work might be trying to get in touch with me - just my luck. Hardly anyone ever calls me unless there's an immediate deadline, so I don't know what I was so worried about. I wound up taking a couple of hours out of my Friday vacation day to make up the time I missed as lunch hour turned into three hours. I'm good like that.

Tigger has spent the following weeks at a nearby camp that he loves. I thought about sending Pumpkin to the same place, but ultimately felt that teenagers could not handle the wigged-out nuttiness that is my younger son when he is overtired and overstimulated. Also, a 5-year old drowned in a camp pool in this state last year and that news went straight to the deep, dark place in my heart usually reserved for paranoia about my own health.

Now, why don't I have those same fears for Tigger? The pool is the one place that he has almost always behaved himself. And he's an awesome swimmer. But yeah, I feel guilty about it.

In the meantime, the woman who so bravely babysat for my kids after school has left us.  It was only a matter of time. She has three kids of her own and after years of saying they were going to move to our town, they have pretty much decided to stay put in this housing market. It's not the end of the world. She was fabulous, her kids were around my kids' ages, but she was also doing double duty as a taxi service for my neighbor's kids who decided that it was okay to come hang out at my house when they were done with their homework. I'm more than happy to have to put an end to that practice. Not that they're not nice kids, but there were just too many people in my house when I wasn't there and inevitably the place was trashed when I got home E V E R Y  N I G H T.

P's former pre-school teacher will be taking over, but she can't start right away. So Piper and I have been juggling our schedules to try to make it work. I realize now that we are never going to have a proper vacation this year. Maybe not next year either. The number of days that Piper and I are actually home together with the boys is going to be pretty limited as well.

I wonder if this is the curse of working parenthood, or maybe just parenthood in general - that we never get the chance to feel settled. And then some days, I suppose we feel too settled.

Some days I hardly recognize that this is my life. And then yesterday a co-worker announced that she was pregnant, due in December. For the first time ever, I was irrationally excited for her.

Slappy Shoes!

Who ever said it was okay to wear flip flops in the office?

That has to be the most annoying sound to listen to in your cube. Especially when they walk by your cubical at a high rate of speed. A lot.

Slap, slap, slap, slap.......

Steam Pipe

As I've mentioned, I've been heads down in a project at work. A couple of times in the last week or so, my manager has asked me "how's your stress level?"  The first time I heard it, I think my jaw dropped because no one has ever, ever asked me such a thing before.

Long, long ago, just after I had taken a job as the assistant to a woman who then went on early maternity leave and never came back (so I was doing my job and large parts of hers' for the better part of a year), someone commented on how calm I seemed. This was during conference season when many of my colleagues were running around in small circles trying to have everything just right for the major annual conference of our industry. I chalked this up to not quite having as much at stake as the rest of my co-workers (after all my manager's job was not really mine, nor would it ever be), but it also gave me a bit of insight into how I came off to people.  Did people really not know that I was a raging drama queen?

My husband surely did. I would come home and rant and rave about work stuff that, in the grand scheme of the universe, was really pretty meaningless. At home, I fluctuated between relishing the victimhood of the position I was in and despairing of ever doing "great things" in my career. At work I approached the whole thing philosophically - "when this is over, it will have been a valuable experience."

There's a scene in the movie Broadcast News, several actually, where Holly Hunter's character is sitting by herself crying inconsolably and inexplicably. The way the movie is edited, the scenes seem to come out of nowhere and aren't connected to anything. Finished with her crying jag, she picks herself up each time and moves into the next scene like nothing is bothering her. My boyfriend at the time was confounded enough by those scenes to actually ask about it, but I got it right away. I've been there. It's taking pressure off a steam pipe. I'm there now.

This is the biggest project I've ever worked on. This is the biggest project that my department has ever worked on. I've never seen so many pieces and parts of a thing and so many chefs in the kitchen. And, as often happens toward the end of a project, I am not entirely happy about the finished product. I start kicking myself that it would have been so much better if I had only done _________________(fill in the blank), but it's too late now.

On top of that, some of the volunteer work I have been doing around town has gotten unnecessarily contentious. Normally, I love a good fight, but the timing here couldn't be worse.

And it's school vacation week. Never schedule a deadline for week of your school vacation. Even with babysitters lined up, something is bound to go wrong.

All right! Enough with the whining (whinging, as the British say, sounds much better)! I will get through this. Of course I will. And when it is done it will have been a valuable experience. But right now, I just want to cry.

I need a day...

The major project I have been working on pretty much since I started my new job is coming to completion at the end of this month. I have been pretty much heads down on it for weeks. When it is done I feel like I need a serious day off to do as much of the following as possible.

Get a haircut - I'm getting to the point where I need a serious change.

Go to the eye doctor/replace my eyeglasses - My current glasses are five years old and are so scratched that it's like they have a film over the lenses.

Go to the chiropractor - What does it say that I can't find the time for what is essentially a 10 minute appointment?

Find a new massage therapist.

Make some changes to my blog and The Soccer Mom Vote.

But who am I kidding? I can't take a whole day off, any vacation time has to be spent with my kids. As it is, while my neighbors are heading off to Hawaii, I'm begging the boys' grandparents to spend part of the week with them next week so I don't have to take off their school vacation week while I finish this project. This kills me. I have three weeks to ration throughout the year. I'm trying to reserve some for the summer and the week between Christmas and New Year's. It's enough to make me consider supporting a longer school year. God knows we Americans won't be getting any more vacation time in my lifetime.

On a slightly more less serious note: I never thought I'd say this, but I'm considering a makeover. I had to be videotaped for a project I'm involved in around town and when I saw the playback, well.... Man, I'm old!

The last time I saw myself on camera I was 35, and all I can say is that motherhood has the intervening years have taken their toll. I've never been the most put-together looking soul, but now I look even more tired, pale, and puffy.

I'm sure the pale, pink, shirt I was wearing didn't help. I may have an affinity for that color, but it does not have one for me. Must. Resist. Pale. Pink.  Of course, it jumps out at me every time it's in style. Every spring I get sucked in by some variation of it.

The Fairy Blogtherapist speculates that my attraction to prim, ladylike, colors and styles is a subconscious attempt to camouflage the loud, forthright, and decidely tomboyish aspects of my personality. The bolder, deeper, colors are more representative of the true me and I should stop trying to pretend otherwise. 

Anyway, I'm thinking that when this project is done, I need to find a spa or a salon and get a full workup. A colleague of mine is recommending the Aveda salon she goes to in Harvard Square, which means I'd have to do this on a long lunch.

Hmmm. Am I going to have time for this?