I have been working my entire life. I started filing taxes at the tender age of 16, with babysitting money and have NEVER not worked in some form all through high school, college, grad school and after. I got married, bought a house (well the bank still owns almost all of it), got a dog, and started happy home making. Then, after many years of trying to have kids – and then giving up on it all together I got pregnant. Whoa.
“I finally broke through to management and it is only UP UP UP from here I told myself.”
I tried to keep the part-time job in addition to my full time but just couldn’t keep up with a baby and 2 jobs. Then I got pregnant again. My kids are 15 months apart. Apparently you can be ‘hyper-fertile’ after being infertile. Returning to work after delivering child #2 I was offered a management position which I excitedly accepted. This was going to be IT. I finally broke through to management and it is only UP UP UP from here I told myself. I LOVED IT. I enjoyed every minute of re-organizing, scheduling and dealing with employee conflict. I dealt with computer issues, upgrades – the works. I was good at it!
What I didn’t realize is that management meant salary – not hourly pay and that I would be on the hook for many more hours per week than I worked previously because ‘that is the way things are’ for a manager. I didn’t get paid for the ‘extra’ hours. It sucked. I left early in the morning and came home late at night. I always worked through lunch, and had no breaks. I received urgent ‘fix this or that’ calls at all hours and on weekends. My dream job was turning into a nightmare.
I was fortunate that my mother in law was able to watch our children for nominal cost during this time. Things sort of went into a crescendo of stress, overwork, and poor treatment by my supervisory staff– Brian and I talked about me leaving my position – a place where I had worked for 10 years and knew inside and out. I started applying for work in alternate departments with my company and outside the company. We made a plan to give work about a 3 month notice and had a little tucked away we could coast for a few months without me working if I still hadn’t found a job. And then my in-laws informed us they were moving! Not far, but far enough away that it would take us 1.5 hrs to drop off the kids and get to work. One way.
We started looking into the cost of daycare and mind blown! Child #1 was in part-time daycare/preschool and Child #2 was still full time at Gma’s house. Full time for both kids at a decent care center was going to be more than our mortgage- by a lot. Fortunately right about this time we had paid off the car we purchased 5 years ago when the kids were on the way, and Brian had just finished paying off his student loans. We had a little extra cash in our pocket than before and maybe…. just maybe we could make it on one income…
I stopped working October 2017. I have been home for the last few months and out of the time at home watching kids, re-learning how to cook (Brian did it all because he was always home before me!) I decided we needed to return to our happy roots of making and selling art. Since December we have started creating our business, designing this website, and trying to envision a future that will let us be completely independent of corporate work someday.