Changing Course…

Well, the big news is that I’m about to become a stay-at-home mom again.

I think I’ve been working my way back to it for a while… been counting down the months until Bubba Hubby finishes law school and it finally hit me that I was really just prolonging the inevitable… and I was starting to make myself miserable in the process. It’s like I was turning off all the other important things in my life thinking I’d just work as much as possible—make as much money as possible—until that glorious day when I could quit working and go back to being just mom (and, I suppose, all the dozens of other things I have stopped doing since committing so much time to my away-from-home job).

After spending a recent evening out with some of my “mom” friends, the decision to just quit became clear. It’s the time we spend together that my kids are going to remember. It’s not going to matter to them, in the long run, if that stuff involves spending more money… or not. This is what my friends were saying to me and I know that it is right. It’s the “stuff” that I am missing with the kids. I was talking with them about our homeschool plans for the year and it was very clear that this is what they are missing. Remember all the cool things we used to do? The painting. The paper mache projects. The endless nature outings. The adventure stories. The book making. The games. The crafts. The experiments in the kitchen.

Perhaps I should have been able to juggle everything… but the fact is that I wasn’t. I was putting lots of their ideas on the ‘to-do’ list and actually doing very little. It was time for that to stop. So I wrote my letter of resignation and I turned it in.

It was difficult. Way more difficult than I imagined it was going to be. There is a lot I love about my job and, most of all, there are a number of people (co-workers and customers) I have become quite fond of there. Yet, I am really looking forward to coming back home.

The morning after hubby and I made “the decision” that I was going to quit, I woke up with more positive energy and enthusiasm than I had felt in months. It’s wonderful to take a leap and realize, once you’ve hit the air, that you were absolutely right to do so.