Careers And Working (For A Living, Not On A Highway)

I'm continuing my ever-evolving quest to evaluate my career and professional goals. I expect this to continue until I die, so please don't expect any great epiphanies. (Actually it may continue well past death-- I'll be the one lined up at the pearly gates discussing possible Seraphim openings with Gabriel.)

I've always been guided by ideology, something which I have worked hard these past few years to stop. I didn't go to law school after college, in a large part because of my professor's disdain for the profession. I went to acupuncture school to learn about alternative health because of a political interest in the health care system. I'm grateful for the people who informed these decisions, of course; they shaped me and allowed me to move forward in my real life. No one would have been well served by me in a cubicle and miserable for this past decade. (Well, the prostitution and pastry industries would have benefited-- but no one cares about them.)

I needed to be where I was, when I was. Now, as Jaime begins her career and evaluates where she is where she wants to be, I'm doing the same. I have time: I'm just over thirty, my kids are ready to start school in a few years. This is the chance to really think about where I want to be and how to get there. I'm really happy I spent the time I did, building myself and my family. It sounds self-indulgent, and maybe it is a little, but I know if I had tried to have a career at twenty I would have messed up something badly. Now, I have a stable marriage, two great kids, and years to really make a living. I could work from now for thirty years starting in two years and still be relatively young. Especially if J succeeds in hiding all the sugar in the house.

I'm off to write resumes and contemplate where I want to be in two years when both of the kids are in school. I feel strangely how my mother must have felt, when her kids were getting bigger and she went off to school to become a teacher. Oddly enough, my life has paralleled hers in this way. And perhaps I'll look back on my few years with the kids tiny, me at home, as the best of my life. But somehow I don't think so; I think the best years of your life are very much in how you live it, and in how you appreciate the moments in front of you. At least, that's what I'll tell Gabriel when I'm interviewing for the guardian angel job.