Second Identities

It’s been a funny ol’ week for me this week. On Wednesday I had a job offer (practically) for my old career. I was searched out by an agency who had a job perfect for me in the local market town. Fultime, and a sinch with my resume, and I didn’t even know an I.T. jobs were available locally. It was a one in a million chance - and I had to turn it down. It had me wondering for a long time whether this family could work with re-organising the whole child-care thing after school. But as I work in the local kids club, I already knew that I wouldn’t be able to get my daughter into there fulltime, five days a week, as it’s already full. I wonder how many other parents have been forced to give up fultime work because there is not enough after-school care available in this village?

And then there are the school holidays - seven weeks of it coming up soon. So yes, we could have really done with that money, but there was no way I could have arranged for it, without family to help out around here.

It saddens me immensely that I have no control over the situation there, that such an opportunity came up so locally and I couldn’t do it. But it also sinches the deal somewhat. Only a day before the agency contact, I’d busily emailed an old work colleague who went off on maternity leave at the same time I left work, and told her how settled I was in this new life, how I did this, and that, and worked this little bit of work, and how comfortable (mostly) I was with it all.

Then the next day, of course, something was thrown at me to question it all again. Luckily it happened on a day where I was to go off and work my three hours at the local kids club, and it was on a day where the kids weren’t too irritating, and where I felt more at home. Still, it took another few hours the next day before I could bring myself to respond back to the agent with my decision. No, less a decision, than a necessity.

Fortunately yesterday as I was reluctantly making that communication, I found a day where I was helpful in being home with several deliveries arriving at odd hours. I’ve spent a lot of money lately on my daughter - crafts and gifts for her themed birthday party when it comes up later in the year, costumes for a reading day at school, a paddling pool just when it’s begun raining again. Books for me. Presents for father’s day - it arrives here in June. And I had a good time chatting with another mother from school that day during my daughter’s ballet class.

But it’s not always like that. On Friday I was crying because I’d been snubbed twice by the school mums in the playground, and yet they are all much busier than me with work, and other children and family around.

So I seem at a cross-roads of still finding that second identity of mine, no longer that career minded woman, but not quite so centred in this stay at home lonely niche as I thought I was a few days ago. I don’t have a solution for this, only perhaps a learning that many things can upset that fine line I still tread to re-establish my own self this year.