The sacrificial parent considers a career change
09 July 2011 03:31 PM Categories: Quotidian existence
And my brain is blank or it is going places that I don’t really want it to go, or not exactly that – it’s rolling along the edge of howling, maintaining its balance on the thin line between despair and hopefulness. What more is there to say about that? Go, brain, go, you’re doing great, and inside me my world shifts slowly, it’s shifting now and I can be here and feel it and interpret the unsettledness as good.
But I woke up this morning cranky. I spent the morning wanting a drink, have been thinking about 5 p.m. or 4 p.m. or even 3 p.m. for hours now. I want to obliterate the line, mix it up, make it into something else. I want to be left alone.
My husband and I are trying an experiment: we now spend fifteen minutes every night talking about our feelings. Emoting. We switch the focus, him one night, me the next. I look forward to this, to the full attention. I am less good at asking him about how he feels than answering how I feel. The questions may come, but I don't always believe the answers, want to say, oh, but is that an emotion? Is your rationality showing? I can be an emotional bully sometimes, with my oh-so-accurate interpretations of other peoples' reactions and my spot-on intuitive analysis of what makes them tick (this is sarcasm, by the way).
What do I ask about? Right now there’s plenty to ask about, lots of material, but the asker isn’t always sure if the other person wants to go there. I want to go there. I think. Or at the very least I like having the time to pay attention and to have someone pay full attention to me. Perhaps I am starved for it, I’m starving for something, and I have to make a plan on how to feed myself, to fulfill the needs that my current life isn’t meeting.
Some of the recipe sounds deceptively simple: create a professional life. I’ve been going to a career counselor over the last couple of months, which has been extremely useful, and I think I’ve come up with a new career. (No, I am not telling. Telling often takes the energy out of such plans.) The career will involve grad school. It could involve having to fulfill prerequisites -- taking required classes before the big plunge -- or even taking the (gasp) GRE. I don’t want to spend another few years putting off a job. I don’t want to get into debt again. But I do want to do something that matters, something that I enjoy, something that feels right. Still, I imagine myself at the end of school, possibly in my late 40s, with a few thousand hours of interning (paid, I hope, oh please) awaiting me. And in the meantime I am a drag on our family income, more output than intake, more dependent than independent.
What are the alternatives? Go back to being a librarian? After being out of the full-time game for seven years? In a place where the salaries aren’t as good as Washington, DC, where my competition is much more eager and up-to-date on the technology? I don't want to go back. I don't think I can.
Hmm. In this case, examining too closely makes my heart race and the task ahead of me seem impossible. Better to do it, to not worry too much, to prepare myself, to make sure I have a back-up plan, an escape hatch.
Part of my reluctance, my fear, part of the reason I've been at home for so long, is an underlying worry about my parenting: what would happen to my relationship with my son if I had something outside these walls, something of my own to think about? It scares me. I picture myself running off, becoming unavailable, failing him in some fundamental way. This is not a rational thought, but is a reaction to a childhood where my needs didn't matter, where my mother had a hard time parenting and doing other things simultaneously (we could talk about the link I've clearly made between her inattentive parenting and tumultuous relationships, but that is a different topic altogether, the stability versus sex post that I will probably never write). For me, the kid is paramount. I've sacrificed a lot of myself for this child. I've done it willingly. And I am afraid of what will happen if I stop, if I have an outside life.
If I don't do something, if I don't create something else for myself, if I don't pursue an income, I'll continue to die inside. That's not good for him, either, to have a mother who is absent, maybe resentful, depressed. I can do two things at once, be a person in the world and a parent. Maybe I can even do three things at once and be a partner, too, a loving and available half of a couple.
One step at a time, right?
I have been feeling blocked lately (in more ways than one) and sat down this afternoon while the boy and his dad were out to see if I could figure it out by writing. And here it is.
Photo: Me and the boy, out of focus in Yosemite by my husband.
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