Talking about stuff I should know by now.

A few years ago my husband was in his first full time “career” job after college. Long story short, they screwed him over and laid him off. It was a painful experience.

We’ve spent the past few years trying to heal from our anger at those people, anger at God for allowing us to go through it, from feeling betrayed, and trying to move on with our lives. We took jobs that weren’t “dream jobs”, but that we thought would be good to help us heal a move on. And it has been. We work for a great organization that is very open to all kinds of people (which in and of itself has been healing to meet such a diverse group of people), an organization with high ethics and standards, and that we take a lot of pride in working at. Both of us could see ourselves here for a long time.

Yet for some reason, we’re both open to moving on. Somehow, within the past several months, the place that we’ve come to as a result of years of healing is now being hindered by the very jobs that helped to bring the healing. Is that weird? Does it make sense? We’re now realizing that what we’ve been doing has been perfect for the time we’ve been doing it, but the things that we want to do with the next several years of our life - well, work interferes with it. Be it scheduling, the physicality of it, logistics, etc. The things we care about - our church community, each other, friends and family, and eventually our own family - are all things we have to say “no” to, or at least put off more than we should, in order to “do our job”.

I was talking to someone at my church about this tonight, and he said something simple and profound, something about a time in life where you realize work has to revolve around your life, not your life around your work.

Wow. Afterwards, I thought, “yeah. so?” because it DID seem so simple. And the more I thought of it the more I got it. As we get older, our priorities shift, our goals change - or perhaps they don’t change so much as mold into something different than we thought they were. When we were in our 20s, it was all about being happy at work, making money, finding out who we were. We didn’t care that our scheduling was, essentially, shit, because we still saw each other at home, at least enough (at least we thought that then). We moved to a different city a few years ago after he got laid off and didn’t have many friends so we didn’t realize we weren’t seeing them. We were church-hopping so we didn’t have community. And we were far from being ready to have kids.

All that has changed in the past year. We chose a community to live in, bought a house, have decided what church community to invest in, have made several friends, have a small group, and are wanting kids. We’re in a VERY different place than a few years ago.

Several years ago I tried my hand at an in-home based direct sales business (what woman HASN’T tried some sort of ‘direct-marketing’ job?) I was actually quite good at it, but was at my height when 9/11 hit, and being young, new, and having a young and new team it just fizzled out. One thing I respected about them as a company was that they taught their consultants: “God first, family second, career third”. As a woman in my early 20s I thought, “that’s nice” at the time, but didn’t realize WHY that philosophy was so important. Now I do. Because now, if it means I can see my husband, friends and family more, volunteer at organizations I care about more, then it doesn’t matter to me as much what I do with a “measly” 40 hours of my time a week.

So a lot of this may seem like rambling of learnings without an end point, and if so, that’s okay. Any of you ever gone through this? Any thoughts? Advice?