Truth Thursday
It has been nearly 10 years since I have been working in a full or nearly-full time job where I had to commute and be in an office more than I’m not. For nearly the past decade, since my youngest son was born, I have been running my own fundraising consulting business from home.
The decision to leave my job, from which I was on maternity leave, and hang up my consulting shingle, came easily and suddenly. My son was born in late August, 2001. On September 11, 2001, while my 6 year old was being brought home from school and my 2 year old was down the block at the babysitter’s and my 3 week old was nursing on my lap, I looked up from the scalding pictures of the downed Twin Towers on the television and said to my husband, “I am not going back to an office and leaving these small children at home.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
I have greatly enjoyed my consulting life, especially once all my children wound up in the same public school system at the same time. I have had a good four-to-six hours a day to work for my clients, write, work out and manage our lives, and I have had the privilege and the opportunity to be the primary parent at home in the afternoons. I am both a mom with a car and a soccer schedule, as well as a respected development professional. It works.
But a month ago, my husband lost his job, quickly and unexpectedly. The organization for which he worked flailed, sputtered and shut down. We needed to figure out, but quick, how we would pay the mortgage, cover the orthodontist’s bills and feed our family on one income. I was forced to make a quick and life-altering decision. I would ask my primary client if I could come on staff 4 days a week in order to get the advantage of benefits and an (almost) full-time salary.
And while I mourned the loss of my autonomy and my small business for a time, I have quickly adjusted to the idea of having an office to go to, and having my health insurance covered, having disability insurance again (something I always meant to sign up for as a consultant but never did), having a supplemental life insurance policy, and having a cafeteria plan. They are rightly called benefits.
There is also great fun in being downtown, surrounded by people and bustle and interesting stories all around me. I went out to lunch on a spring-like day earlier in the week, and sat outside, watching the world walk by. I thought about who, striding past me, had been here, working the same job, 10 years ago, when I was last watching. Who, 10 years ago, was still in high school. Who, like me, was back at work after a long absence. What were their dreams? Where would they be in five years? Where would I be?
It was a reminder of how, in many ways, we are managers of our own destinies. I couldn’t have imagined, 10 years ago, what it would feel like to work at home. I couldn’t have imagined, five years ago, what it would feel like to be juggling not only my work and my family, but the writing career that I’ve always wanted. I couldn’t have imagined, 2 months ago, what it would feel like to have the shock of the recession hit so close to home, and to have to step up as the primary breadwinner in our family and leave the soccer schedules and the overdue library books to someone else.
Our destinies, our fates, while not always entirely in our hands, are something that we still have the power to manipulate and carve out. It is an awe-inspiring responsibility. As Mary Oliver says in her extraordinary poem, “The Summer Day”:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
In this one wild and precious life, I plan to keep on working for a living, living for my family and friends, writing for my soul and watching the commuters pass me by -- each one, a microcosm of hopes, dreams, and destinies yet to be reached.
photo by fensterbme via Flickr
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