Back home for work

And she'll have fun, fun, fun til the bank takes her house awaaaaay.

Can I just tell you I am loving my new job?  I love working from home.  Actually, now that I have gotten a very broad overview training online, I am in the office this week while I wait for my computer to arrive and get set up.  Next Monday I will wake up, open the laptop and...probably panic.  But then I will find a starting point and move forward one step at a time and it will be great!  I am going to have a bit of a learning curve but I am enjoying it.  I feel energized by what I am learning not wiped out by it. Who knew you could have that experience?

I am also feeling a little guilty.  I suppose not unlike when a woman quits her job to be a homemaker, or the way my mom felt when she retired.  Am I doing enough?  My mom used to call me when she first retired and tell me she had watched Matlock for 2 hours and then ask me if it was OK.  I never thought about whether I was allowed to be a bum for an hour or two or a whole day, I just did it.  And in her retirement I released my mom to embrace that same attitude.  But now that I am home but working I am never sure if I have done enough.  Watching 2 hours of Matlock definitely does  not seem like something I have permission to do.

And I am nervous.  I am making less money at this job but with the idea that I will generate at least a little self employment income by the time John returns to school in the fall.  I am unsure I am allowed to sit down or stop working until I have made that happen.

So I sort of wander the house feeling a little twitchy and wondering if I have justified my existence for the day.

The woman teaching me this new job has been doing it for 6 years.  She knows what needs to be done, when it needs to be done and it all sort of just flows out of her by instinct.  So breaking it down and teaching it to me has been a bit of a chore.  I feel like she is going all over the place and I am not sure I am tracking.  I know in a few months I will start to develop that same sense of knowing what needs to be done, what can wait and how much time I need to spend each day and on what.  I will have developed my own system and be able to jump around and track things.  I know this because when I was a homemaker I had that down.  I had a system, I had a plan, I could go from one unrelated thing to the next and back without missing a beat.  I knew I could spend an afternoon watching Matlock and still get the house picked up and dinner started by 5pm.  Or I knew I could skip making dinner and we could go out.  And of course some days I just let it all go to the pit because I knew tomorrow was another day and I could pull it back together then.

This is the the vision I keep in my head as I go about each day feeling a little twitchy and wondering if I have yet justified my existence.  Eventually I will find that balance.  I will know how much I can do in a day, how much I need to do in a day and how to prioritize it all so it gets done AND I have time to do my nails.  (I miss Melanie time.)

Never a dull moment here!  We press on.