Tuesday, February 22, 2011

House Post

Almost two months after I resigned from my job, I am finally feeling like my house is MY house. After living here for just over eight years, I have finally found some peace in this dwelling. It is more to me now than just a place to sleep, do laundry, eat, bathe and check my e-mail. Even though the serenity is limited to alone time (i.e. the times when kids are at school, and the husband is sleeping - he works nights; and when the husband is at work, and the kids are in bed), it's still there. My brain took two whole months to settle down.

I worked in the financial field for ten and a half years, and none of it was ever comfortable or peaceful for me. I'd come home, and be thinking about work, while still having to run a household. It is also my responsibility to manage the finances at home, so I literally have been a round-the-clock financial person for that long. It has always fallen naturally to me, to do the finances at home. For whatever reason, perhaps my attention to detail, I attract people who can't keep a check register and/or have a poor concept of money. While working, and trying to raise a family, I was also schooling myself for the financial licenses. That took about seven years, having to do book study, between helping with homework and trying to be a wife and mother. All that, and still the job only paid enough for me to just stay out of the poor house. Enough was enough. I needed to get ME back.

I haven't felt at "home" in my own house, since about 1998, when my ex-husband and I started living in separate rooms - a trend that exists in my current home, with my current husband. I don't seem to have the wifely instinct. How can a person have any domestic capability, when their brain is always "working"? When any vacation time taken for the actual paying job, is spent with in-laws, on their schedule. When there is no meaningful connection or conversation with a partner, no time for friends, or no quality time alone.

Two and a half months to finally figure out, again, what it is I like to do. Me. There's a me. A me who's pretty decent. In retrospect - like WAY retro - I was pretty cool. I didn't know it then, but I was.

Just in time to start looking for another job. I'm going to take my time about it, this time. Every job I've ever taken has been done in desperation for money to pay bills. Never was there a conversation with me about what I WANTED to do with my life. Never was there a college fund, to set me on my path. It is up to me, in the end, to take responsibility for what I do. So, this time, I'm taking it slow. I'm not going to settle. I refuse to be pushed into doing a job that makes me so uncomfortable that I feel like throwing up all the time, just so I can make money to pay bills, because I have a family to feed, clothe and house. Because, really, I just made myself sick doing that. The blood pressure, the meds, the stress. Forget about it. Fagetaboutit. I gotta make this ME feeling stick. I gotta make the serenity feeling stay, or at least be very readily accessible. It's up to me.

Friday, February 04, 2011

Haunted


What do you do, when there are black holes in your past, and suddenly in your early 40's, you begin to remember them being the equivalent of a V.C. Andrews series? What happens to you? I'd be interested to know how this manifests itself in others. With me, it's been a lifetime of unexplained phenomena, like ghostly experiences, rages, depression, sleep walking, repeated failed relationships. Here's the upshot ^