Back to Full-Time

Funny, but not really.  I just got done telling everyone we saw in July how lucky I was to be working part-time and how great it was working out for us.  Knock on wood.  Then, WHAM.  The day I get back in the office, I get hit pretty hard.

To make a long story short, I'm heading back to work full-time, and I'll make no bones about the fact that I am not happy about it.  Last week I was approached with what appeared to be an ultimatum - either come back full-time, or perhaps not have a job.  After taking about 24 hours to get over the shock, we began working through all the possible resolutions, from quitting altogether, to figuring out how we can make full-time work.

Here's the thing.  As a career person, once you have kids, some moms realize they want to do nothing but stay at home.  Some go back full-time right away with no qualms.  I judge no one in either of these situations.  For me, personally, it is somewhere in between.  I feel like I am a better mother when I have a few structured hours away from home life, and the time then spent with my kids is much more quality time.  It is simply not in my personal value system to work full-time; so this full-time situation is not sustainable, and this is what I told my manager.

So, Scott and I did decide pretty quickly that right now, having me stay at home full-time is not where we want to be at...perhaps in a few years, with a bit more prep time, but not now.  Once we reached that point, knowing I really didn't have a choice, I had a few more discussions with my manager to figure out what the possibilities were. 

Where we landed is that I will work three days from home, and two days in the office, and it has to average no more than 40 hours a week.  I'm a single mom much of the time, and there simply are not enough hours in the day to run the household and work more than that.  Well, so technically there would be, but then household chores and projects would suffer, and that would make me very stressed out.  I'm hoping the three days at home will at least give me the opportunity to do laundry, get dinner, squeeze in a workout over lunch, and run some quick errands, and I won't have to spend the extra time getting myself ready in the morning.

Also, the seed is planted with my manager that a return from maternity leave will hopefully be a good point to re-evaluate.  So, best case scenario, I come back from leave part-time.  Makes it kinda hard to plan for child-care though.

So, over the weekend, Ang and I made a trip to Ikea for a little desk that will fit in the bay window of our bedroom, which now will double as my office.  Sigh. I think I need to add a few flowers and work on the view a bit more...