Blog Plans and Embracing the SAHM Life

 I'm gonna quit apologizing for updating this since I literally only did it for myself. If you're reading, hi, you're awesome, I hope you get something from this, if not talking to myself is 100% my speciality.

It's been summer. During the course of the summer the trend of the pandemic and everyone's general mood has shifted dramatically. In June we were all embracing full vaccination and return to school and we were going out and doing things...in small numbers and slowly. Now the Delta variation is all over the place, too many people are still unvaccinated and it feels like January again except this time with the need to reopen. So....yeah. I'm going with caution but moving forward. James will start school five days a week in two weeks with masks and they just announced a vaccine mandate for school personnel. I kind of hate the idea of a mandate...I'm much more libertarian with stuff like that than most of the friends I hang out with...but I do understand it. Mostly I wish information was good and the mandate wasn't necessary but it turns out we have to live in this reality and not the one in my head.

We did travel this summer and go see family. I tried not to worry. The nice thing about seeing family is we actually don't go many places while we are at the family summer cottage and the family is all vaccinated. Masks are still required in airports and on planes. I'm glad I live in a place where science is being followed and we don't have to send my kid to school in Florida or Arizona.

It was actually a lovely trip. We were in Michigan for three weeks. I don't know that I would want to be away for three weeks every summer but having been so long since we had been there it was nice. Family came and went from the cottage so we saw all the family and an old friend or two that lives there and my husband and I got away just the two of us for three nights which has never happened. We have had exactly one overnight trip just the two of us since James was born, back in 2017, and not at all since Max was born. It was much needed and I'm hoping it won't be another four years until we do it again.

Everyone is gearing up for fall. The school supplies arrived today and my teacher friends and family are all headed back to work. We've made the decision to keep Max home from preschool for another year and I'm happy about the decision. Hoping the Delta variant will ebb a little bit and we'll be able to do something...maybe some toddler gymnastics or something? Not wanting another year stuck at home...for either of us. He loves to climb now and is very athletic.

It's been nearly a year now since I found out my very part time job would not be returning. I've applied for a few jobs since then and nothing has worked out. I'm not generally very excited about working full time just now and part time seems impossible to find. What I've figured out in the process of submitting applications is since I am privileged to not HAVE to work financially but would like to get back into the work force in the long term I can be picky and a job has to feel worth it to leave Max for me to want to do it. Trouble is when you've been out of the work force for seven and a half years no one wants to hire you and certainly not for any job that might be a stretch for you. And I've had a career for a decade and a half in which there are notoriously more trained people than job openings. So I'm not set up for raging success. After getting crickets on an application I was, if I'm being honest here, really overqualified for (but excited about,) I've decided that I really need to embrace what is now and so this fall I'm not going to be looking so much. I guess I'm part of the alarming trend of women who are dropping out of the workforce but what's a girl to do. I'm going to work on writing more, I'd like to finish the draft of my novel in verse before the end of October, I'd love to find some water aerobics if there's a way I can find childcare for Max and work on being healthy and really try to enjoy the time with Max while he is still so little because I know that window is going to close fast. (James is still adorable and wonderful and fun to spend time with but he definitely has crossed over the line that separates "little" kid from whatever comes after that.)

To be completely honest, it's not easy. I love my career, I've always defined myself a lot by what I do and not knowing what comes next or how long it will take me to get back into the career world is really difficult for me. When I was subbing I felt a little more grounded and connected but right now no one wants librarian subs and that's not something I have any control over.  I'm also feeling a little burned by the people I was working for because I did apply for a job with them and was passed over (and pretty impersonally so) after working for them for four years. I don't expect to get a job and I know everything is competitive but I would have appreciated at least getting the phone call I was told I'd get rather than an impersonal email after so many years of working for them. So I am feeling more than a little burned by the work world right now and that's a different mentality than it was when I first became a SAHM. I feel like the mommy wars should have been over back when my mom was a SAHM in the 1980s, but prejudice against moms in the work force, not to mention age discrimination and assumptions about your skills when you are trying to get a job involving digital literacy in your 40s are alive and well in 2021. But as I tell James so very often the only person in the world I have any control over is me so I'm going to embrace this opportunity to heal and be right where I am in life. A year and a half of remote school has taken a lot out of us moms and to be home with just Max and everyone else back on a (more or less) regular schedule without me having to spend time fighting about the direction of the math assignment will give me the time I've needed to take care of myself, my writing, and my family and so perhaps the job rejections are giving me a gift of time and I will try to take it that way.

Towards that end I'd like to keep the blog up. I no longer have enough to say to write every day like I did in the spring of 2020 but I'm going to aim for once a week on Thursdays which is a LOT more than I've been doing lately. It will still be pandemic life but also just my life, writer life, SAHM life, whatever comes up. It will also be stream of consciousness (I always have to look that one up, how does Blogger not have a spell check??) unedited because...you know...I gotta be me!

Media consumption: where to start?? I read a lot on our trip and after a week of not much reading when we were first home am back at it. I'm working on a novel in verse so lots of novels in verse. I reread The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary this week which is a fantastic first month of school book and today I will finish Closer to Nowhere which is a newer novel in verse with two POVs: the kid with the traumatic past who is trying to move forward living at his aunt and uncle's house and his cousin who resents him having taken over her family. It's really lovely. I'm also continuing my quest to read all the Newbery winners, hoping to get halfway through them before the next round of awards are announced in January. This week it was a reread (on audio) of The Midwife's Apprentice which is really good and Kira-Kira which is really annoying. I also read The Yggyssey, which the only way I can explain that is it is Daniel Pinkwater and he can't be explained and am currently slowly reading two different things. One is Why She Wrote, stories of the lives of women writers in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries told in graphic form and based on the podcast Bonnets at Dawn which I want to try...it's just a brilliant book. The other is Letters to My Daughter by Maya Angelou which is fantastic but this book is less than the sum of its parts and is only making me want to read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings which I haven't read in over 20 yearss.

As for TV/movies, Josh and I are starting Schitt's Creek which we've never seen, enjoying it so far. I'm dabbling in TV right now...watching Big Love again because I started it on the plane but the HBO Max app on my Roku box upstairs is awful so I switched to Offspring on Neflix which was good but had LONG episodes. Then I went looking for some comfort TV after a bad day and tried Seventh Heaven which was too cheesy and 90s even for me. So now I'm rewatching some Grace and Frankie before launching into the new season of that. I want to find the 1990s Charmed but I can't find it streaming anywhere I have access to right now.

Today I'm grateful for James's new therapist and that I don't have that job, libraries, my husband, Pixar, coffee, books, comics, sleep, friends, fall, family, photos, love, and cookies.