Category Archive

This week begins my true true stay at home mom role. I’ve been working 20 hours, over three to four days since we moved and while that does not sound like a lot, it is when you are trying to manage work and a kid. And by that I mean a work life and a kid life. Really delving in at work and getting things done, then completely shifting gears at home to entertain and care for Mr. E, when all I really wanted was to be with him all the time.

What I’ve learned is that I don’t make that shift too easily. On the days I worked, I came home and couldn’t get into the Mr. E groove, on the day(s) I was home I found myself cramming in all the SAHM things I wanted to do, since I only had one to two days to do them. In short, I could not find balance. Now I am working one and a half days in the office with a little bit of working from home. A is working 40 hours, in the 9-5:30 fashion. I couldn’t be happier, and neither could she.

I can’t explain why I love being home. There is something relaxing about hanging out with Mr. E, playing silly games, and dancing to childrens music for hours on end that feeds my soul. I wrote often while I was on maternity leave about how peaceful I felt, a feeling completely new to me. Well I’m already beginning to feel that peacefulness again. Sometimes I forget that I was on a career path. And until not too long ago, didn’t have any intention of stepping of my path.

There are times when I feel as though I am seeing myself in a mirror, and just can’t believe I gave myself permission to apply the brakes. To listen to the voice that told me I wanted to stay home, and to chance the resume void that SAHMs inevitably create. While A and I ate dinner tonight and chatted about our days, she excited to be back to working full time, me ecstatic to be home, I told her how odd it feels not to know when I will return to full time professional work out side the home. It really could be years. And I am okay with that.

Maternity leave is officially over.

There’s a post brewing in my mind about how sacred the time was that we spent together while I was on leave.

Tomorrow, I will pull on the Mei Tai and Mr. E will come to work with me. Should be interesting. I can’t even begin to imagine what it’ll be like to go back after this long. Thankfully, it won’t be for long.

Two days ago I was looking at a calender for 2008 and plotting out when I’d return to work if I delivered at 38, 40, or 42 weeks- which are all well within the range of what’s to be expected. Now granted when I go back to work I will then leave my job on June 15th when my “contract” is up and we move across the state. Once there, everything is a big question mark.

But back to me looking at the calender. I realized how sad I was at the thought of going back to work, even for 6 to 8 weeks. I’ve been telling myself - and everyone else that once we move I’ll mostly be a SAHM, while I work a very flexible and part time gig with my Dad. Child care will be provided by my SIL and/or my hours will be worked around A’s work schedule in effort to avoid day care. My Dad has gone so far as to say, just bring the baby to work. Which I would not do with regularity because I know I’d get nothing done.

Those feelings of sadness were eased by knowing that when I do return to finish the school year A will be home with the baby and that we know for certain that Moon will be home with one of us from birth till through August, at least. I am truly thankful for that. But for the first time I began to accept the reality that I have no idea if I’ll be able to stay home. I am cozily balled up in my fantasy of staying home while A works. But the truth is, we have no idea what our life and financial situation will be after we move. The  unknow has let me carry out this dream of being a SAHM and I’ve begun to truly believe it will happen. I know we will do anything with in our power to make it happen, but that may not be enough.

I find myself incredibly jealous of women who can easily make the choice to stay home. By this I mean those who have the financial resources. The privilege. I remember telling my mom I waned to stay home (back before the plan to relocate, which does make staying home more attainable) and she knew that in our current situation we’d never make it after giving up half our income. And she kind of gave me the are you crazy look? Yet, she and my Dad still scoff at how my brother and SIL put their son in day care at 17 months since they didn’t need to.

If I get to stay home we’ll be living on a shoe string. But I’ll be with our baby. That is what we both want. We don’t have anything against day care, and do respect that each family makes a decision that is best for them. We think avoiding day care is best for us. This is a huge shift for me. When we first started ttc I never imagined I’d stay home, let alone want to stay home. The shift came after all the pain and effort it took for us to conceive. Through that process I began to want this baby more than I ever imagined possible.

Before conceiving my career path was my priority. And I am at cross road where if I want to strategically advance my career now is the time to make the next move. But our journey lead me to this desire to spend every possible moment with the baby. I do think the challenges we faced drives this shift. At the same time, our expanding family unit shifted our priorities to wanting to live in close proximity to family. In embracing this, I have essentially decided to put my career in the back seat (maybe even the third row). There are no where near as many opportunities for me where we are relocating to. Yet, I couldn’t be happier about providing our child with the opportunity to grow up with his or her cousins, aunt & uncle, grandparents, and many other extended family members.

We have no idea how this will all play out. I am holding on to the hope that I will stay home and we’ll just find a way to make it work, and I am working on accepting that my dreams of being a SAHM may not turn out just as I expect them to.

Most days I am equally excited about the birth of Moon because for the most part it also means an end to the job I have come to dislike. Yes I will go back to work for four to six weeks once my maternity leave is over, but it will be in May/June and I will just be there to close out the academic year. So I won’t be dealing with all the things that make me most crazy.

I’ve given a lot to this school and my job in the last three years and I knew when I made the decision to stay on for a fourth year that it was a “me” year. I was not pregnant at the time, but I planned to stay so we could continue to aggressively ttc and I knew if we stayed on track I’d be eligible for IVF coverage in January. I stayed in a last ditch attempt to get pregnant. Not long after making that decision, I became pregnant and then I felt I had to stay for the sake of consistency and benefits and all that stuff.

As I ‘ve begun to settle into the routine of this year (I speak in academic years…) I’ve remembered the things that make this job so hard: the long hours, the weekends worked, too many demands on my time by too many people, one crisis bumping another, being a supervisor, working really hard and feeling like I’ll still never get it all done…and so I begin to feel down about the job and this also moves me into a semi checked out place where I sometimes confuse late January with our due date and instead think of it as my stop work date.

And then, from time to time, when I step out of my office - even though this means I fall even further behind in my administrative tasks - and sit down to connect with students (yes! students, those creatures I spent my graduate years preparing to work with, and who usually inspire me) I gain a wave on energy, a sense of how to make meaning in my job. And then sometimes when I am walking across campus (or through the grocery store) and I see one of my students, and they wave and smile and I do the same, I get the same warm feeling.

Being that this is my fourth year in my position, there are some students that started their education here the same year I came to work here, and we’ve moved along this path together. While there are so many things I fault this school for and so many things that frustrate me about my job, it’s these students that I will have been with for all four years when we move on in the spring, as well as the others that were here before me or came after I started who’ve inspired me, that I will miss when I move on.

I’ve made peace with the fact that I need a break from higher education and given myself permission to step off the track even though I labored through graduate school to get here…some day I may find myself back in academia, but for now I need a break. A real long break.

When I was in grad school they warned us, most days will be thankless, but every so often you’ll have a moment where you’ll realize it’s all worth it. Up until now, I’ve had minor instances where this has occurred. Today, for the first time since I finished grad school (four years ago), I had my full on, you made a difference in my life and I am sorry I was such an ass to you while you hung in there with me experience.

Well really it started yesterday. I received a phone call from a former intern of mine who graduated last year. I’ll just say that he was one of the toughest students I’ve worked with, questioned and fought me all the way, did nothing to make my life easy, did the least amount of work required to keep his job, and there was one time when his conduct was so out of line that I was near firing him which resulted in a meeting where we exchanged dissenting opinions about what was expected and when I called him out on his behavior he lashed out and eventually got up, walked out of my office and slammed my door. I of course when running after him and ordered him (I’ve never ordered a student prior or since this incident) back into my office if he had any intentions of saving his job.

Because I consider myself an educator, I tried really hard. I kept at him and I tried to meet him where he was. To say he did not get how his actions impacted other people or that the world did not revolve around him, would be an understatement. At times I was so frustrated. And probably not always patient. But after the door slamming incident, we began to repair our working relationship and rebuilding trust. I tried my best to foster growth in areas where I knew he could succeed and spent many hours in conversations about his worries about graduating and becoming more independent. You know, a grown up in the world taking care of himself.

I invested time. And energy. And I’ve done this with countless students. And I did not think I was making any difference with this one particular student. In a way I was relieved when he graduated because the idea of working with him for another year was exhausting.

So back to the phone message yesterday. Out of the blue I received a message from this former student of mine. He starts off by telling me he’s now working in my field and he is so sorry for being such an ass to me. He goes on to say he gets it…all the things I did…and that he really wants to take me out to lunch to talk. And then today we ran into each other at a campus event and he just kept telling me over and over how sorry he was and that he now understands where I was coming from and why I did everything I did. And he told me that I was a good supervisor. That I had made an impact. That he respects how I did my job, and again that he was sorry for being an ass. We spent over an hour talking about the growth he’s experienced in a very few months. I told him how much I thought he’d grown and I thanked him for all the things he said to me. In some way I felt like we had come full circle. And he could finally see beyond his needs. He’s become a little less selfish and has started his way towards becoming an adult. A person who can put others before him, and responsibilities before his own desires. Four months ago, he could not do this. And my heart smiled know in some way, I had an impact on him. That the work I do matters. They weren’t lying to me in grad school that it’s rare that former or current students come back and tell you that you mattered, but what they neglected to tell me was how amazing it would feel when it does happen.

Today is my first day back to work. I go with mixed emotions. Excited to get this year started - every day gets us closer to meeting our baby, excited to meet the new staff we’ve hired, excited to have some sort of routine again. And then there’s the part of me that can’t believe this is my fourth year in this job. It was supposed to be a one or two year gig that I seemed to be trapped in. As I got ready this morning, I wondered what I’ll be doing a year from today?

I already feel like I am back to work because I’ve been so stressed for a couple days. That fun loving free summer feel washed away and my body is stiff and I am back to not sleeping well. Huh, a sign that it’s time to move on? And I spent most of last night looking for my palm pilot - which is no where to be found.  I must have been so excited to finish work last spring that I threw it somewhere with abandon. This only causes more stress.

And so my days lounging in the blogoshphere are over, but I’ll still be around at night.

Happy day to everyone.

your pager only works if you turn it on.

Today’s incident of clipping my on-call-for-work-pager to my pants, leaving the house for hours, and realizing only after I’ve returned home that I forget to turn it on, has happened way too many times this academic year…maybe it’s a sign. Thankfully there were no emergencies.

I’ve always wanted to be a mother. This I knew from a very young age. I also always wanted to be the opposite of my mother, in that I wanted a career. I wanted to wear nice clothes and go to an office everyday. My mother worked from home, and did it so she could be at home with us.

I went to college, searched for a career, and found myself in grad school. I was passionate about what I was studying and became deeply invested. My teachers were some of the very greatest as were my classmates. We were pushed to reach the best we could and my desire for a real career intensified. I still knew I wanted kids, but they were second to my career, and A. spoke of wanting to stay home. That sounded perfect to me, I could have my career and my family. I never gave one thought to staying home. I thought it was a sign of weakness. Why after working so hard would I give it all up just to stay home? I quivered at the idea of a blank period of time on my resume.

After grad school I did a national job search, and A. was willing to go almost anywhere I got a job. We moved to Western MA and once I did start my job I had little time for us. After just two weeks on the job, I went into a six week period of working close to, if not more than 60 hours a week. I don’t think A. knew what she’d signed on for, but she never complained. Each year it’s gotten a little easier, but there is no escaping the busy times when I work till 11:30.

A. believes strongly in each person having “three corners” to balance out their whole being. The corners represent family, self, and work (or something like that). Perhaps this is why she never took issue with me investing ridiculous amounts of time into my studies and later into my work. I step back now and see that I have not invested equally in all areas, and I would say the career corner gets the most of my attention. But I see that changing.

As our journey towards motherhood has begun yet another lap, I am questioning my career goals. Grad school was easy for me. I always heard horror stories about how hard it is. Sure, I was challenged and worked very hard, but they were the two best years of my life, I had so much fun and grew more as a person than I ever had. Likewise, I am good at my job, and am easily successful. So it’s no wonder working satisfies me. It’s something I can control and do well. Trying to get pregnant, well I’ve failed at that. My determined self wouldn’t give up, and kept getting back up to bat, as if I were somehow addicted to the thrill of trying, playing the odds that it may work.

Each cycle that I lost the pregnancy game, I became more and more wedded to mothering, as my work. After trying so hard for so long, and giving so much of myself: emotionally, physically, spiritually, how could I hand my child to a day care provider? I began to understand the meaning of mothering in a way I never had. I’m sure it helped that I witnessed my SIL as a SAHM and the many ways my nephew benefited from this.

As you may imagine my shift from professional career woman, to wanna be stay at home mom was very confusing. I have (had) many strategic plans for my career. My current position would last three to four years, then I’d be ready to move on, this year in addition to working fulltime I’ve been working an internship to position myself for my next move. I have a plan, but now I want to throw the plan out the window.

And then there’s the conference I just returned from. Nothing makes me want my career more than spending five days with 10,000 of my colleagues. How can that not invigorate me? Many of who had their families in tow…I think, see it can be done. I met a woman in a career-mapping workshop and connected immediately. We were both in places of taking the next year to ready ourselves for our next step. Then she tells me she recently found out she’s pregnant, and was upset. You see, she’d tried for a really looooong time, with no success. When it was not working she gave up the idea and redirected her energy to make strategic career plans. Now she’s caught in a place where she can’t decide what she wants, her career or to stay at home.

As difficult as the last 2 ½ years have been, and with all the ups and downs, I can honestly say I am happy that I have not gotten pregnant. I’ve had some amazing twenty-something experiences during this time that I would not trade, could not have had with a child. The time and trials afforded me the chance to really work out what I want from the mothering experience. I am not quite there, but at least know I want to shift my focus, even if just a tad, more on family and less on work. And for the record, I loved that my mom was at home with us. She has an amazingly successful career now, and rarely has time to hang out with us when we go to visit. I know that as a kid, I would not have been able to understand why she’d choose that over me.

I realize I have not addressed the financial side of staying home. I will in a later post. I dream about staying home, but am not sure that it’s even with in our reach. For now, I am enjoying the fantasy, but I think it’s important to address the reality, and the privilege.

I am having the time of my life…and doing a little work.

I could get used to palm trees, sunshine, 80 degree weather, men bringing me drinks while I soak up the sun at the pool (okay, I’ve spent one hour at the pool in the last two days and it was in the morning, so there was no drinking, BUT I’ve seen them bring drinks to people).

I think I forget every year how much fun this conference is. By day I am a professional recruiting potential employees and attending informative workshops, by night I feel 18 and party till the wee hours of the morning (was up till three this morning). There is something about the weather and energy of my colleagues here that makes it possible to just go all day and night. This year we are a group of more than 9,000, from more than 500 colleges and universities, and 28 countries!

The experience so far has also added to my many thoughts about my career…I’m in a place where I am trying to figure out if I want to stay in high education or leave the field all together. I’ve been crafting a post about this for months and after some of my time here, I have even more thoughts about it. I am sure a long post will ensue once I get home, maybe sooner, although I’m awfully busy here.

Check out the photos I uploaded to Flickr today. I will have more soon, but these were just so cute.

I made it. My flight landed early. I found my way to the shuttle to my first of three hotels. I had to stay at an airport hotel last night because the hotel I am booked in for the conference was sold out for last night. It was clear that I was a party of one upon check in, yet the desk person gave me two keys. I told him I only needed one and he said “keep it, just in case.” In case of what? In case I picked someone up? I was confused. I made it to my room and then went downstairs to have a glass of wine. I stood at the bar forevvvvvvvver before going to the front desk to get someone to pour me a glass of wine. Then when it happened, they were out of wine glasses so I got a plastic cup, and the bartender insisted I drink some really quickly so she could top off my glass, thus finishing up the bottle. It was a weird hotel. And I slept like crap.

I called in a reservation for a cab to take me from hotel a to hotel b. The taxi driver showed up 30 minutes early and tried to drop me off at the wrong hotel, which really messed up the meter…I’ve never paid so much for a cab ride, but I also don’t take them often. Checking into hotel b makes me feel like someone I am not. This is way expensive (work is paying) and is by far the fanciest hotel I’ve ever stayed at! It does not even feel like a hotel, that’s how nice the furniture, etc. is.

There is an amazing outdoor pool and today was a great pool day. Sadly, I spent the day in a huge room with no windows interviewing candidates for an opening at my college. I got most of them done today so hopefully I’ll get some pool time in tomorrow! Oh, and since this is a some what dressy affair, I wore dress shoes and now have two huge blisters, one on each of my big toes, so much for dress shoes— I’ll be in sandals for the rest of the conference! The conference officially opens with Al Gore as the keynote speaker tomorrow night. Then there’s two and a half days of workshops. But somehow, I question my ability to attend workshops with a pool, that I have to pass all day long…eeek!

I am having fun and reconnecting with lots of people. Folks from grad school, and others that I’ve meet along my higher ed career path. It’s fun to be so far from home and run into people I know as if I am walking down the main street in my town. Each year I meet new people at this conference and it’s cool to reconnect with them from year to year. Right now I am waiting for my grad school buddy (aka potential KD #1 - I’ll ovulate while here, I know that is such a bad idea!) to arrive.

Sorry for this pretty boring post. I’m not too inspired.

So you know we live on a college campus. I am exposed to lots ‘o crazy things everyday. My office is located next to my home in a structure much like an apartment- my office is tucked in the back, while out front there is a full kitchen, dinning area, and living room. There’s a full office upstairs and several storage closets.

Yesterday one of my students asked if she could use the office tonight for a sex toy workshop. One of my interns agreed to open the office and supervise the area.

A few minutes ago there was a knock at my door. When I opened it, it was the student, looking to get into the space and my intern was no where to be found. I let her in and told her I will find the intern (we don’t let students in the office after hours unless an intern is there).

I dial the intern’s number and ask, “hey were you going to open the office for the sex toy workshop tonight?”

And I realize how very strange my job is.

A. and I have been going through / preparing for lots of transitions. I started looking for a new job in December, A. started grad school this month, we’ve continued the ttc journey and hoped on the infertility train…and somewhere along the way I put my mind down and forgot to pick it back up. I was trying to do too many things, which has left me feeling totally out of control in all areas.

My brain has been overcrowded with how to manage all the details. If I get a new job we’d have to move, and hopefully buy a house (funny since this baby project has all but depleted our down payment fund). Would I still be able to ttc if I started a new job? As in, have the same flexibility to shoot off for ultrasounds, IUIs, and what ever else? And would a new insurance at a new job provide the stellar IF coverage I have now? And would starting a new job and moving dry my emotional well? I’ve noticed my will to job search wained in the last month. After considering all of this, and really wanting to put ttc first, I’ve decided to stay in my job for another year. I am so relieved after making this decision: we know where we’ll live for at least another year, I don’t have to spend my energy looking for jobs, and above all, I can fully focus on getting pregnant- emotionally and financially.

Life on Clomid has gotten better. The first three days were hard, but I think my body has begun to process what’s going on and I am mostly feeling a lot better. Still have the headaches, and some hot flashes, but over all it’s getting better. Even so, I am glad my last pill will be to night. I have an ultrasound tomorrow and am excited to see how my follies are doing.

I have to attend mind numbing consultation meetings on the first and third Thursdays of every month. I’ve been doing it for two and a half years. The meeting consists of four of my co-workers, my supervisor, and the director of a pretty important office on campus.

Just before the meeting began today the director of said important office turned to me, after just noticing my diamond ring and asked,

“Are you engaged?”

I replied, “no I am married.”

“Oh when did you get married?”

“In 2004.” For the record- I was married before I ever met this man!

“Oh. I didn’t know. Well, what does you husband do?”

“My wife, A. works at - fill in department of college we both work at.”

And then he tried to recover, but really how could he? He was clearly embarrassed. The most troubling part, this man is the director of an important office that provides a very needed service to students, and this is how he thinks?!

I have a job interview!

For a job I REALLY want.

At a college I am surprisingly interested in working at!

I started to apply for jobs about a month ago. I’ve submitted four applications to date and am *working* on a fifth, maybe sixth… While I really want a new job, and hope I get one, the thought of leaving my current one mid-academic year terrifies me. And at the same time I know I need to put my needs before my employers, the institution has more than proven they’d never consider my needs above theirs. This of course means I’d leave many students that I really care about, and some I’d be happy to be done with. (All of us in education have a few of those.) It’s just a phone interview, but it’s the first ray of hope and it’s also proof that I can break into a new area of higher education, one I’ve wanted to get into for sooooo long.

A new job also brings up a lot of issues around ttbp (trying to become parents). I am a bit nervous about making a job switch while pursuing adoption and pregnancy. Mostly due to the fact that in order to quality for FMLA, one needs to be employed for a minimum of one year. My plan is to keep researching and trying, and if I get a new job before we make major progress on the adoption / getting pregnant projects, then we’ll put the brakes on for a few months, to bank the time towards one year.

Right now I am just excited that I have something to look forward to.

I hope my daily dpo update is not boring folks.

Today was a learning experience. I attended a workshop to learn how to administer an interest inventory tool. I approach such instruments with caution, and realized today that I’d identified an area I will struggle with if I go into career counseling. Gender pigeon holing people into careers. This instrument I learned about today requires a person to mark male or female and there is a comparison of individuals to the same and opposite gender with a large focus on the same gender. I was happy that another attendee asked the questions ‘how do we use this with glb, but more specifically trans students?’ The instructor’s reply, “good question, there is no research.” I remember that statement was so frustrating to me in grad school when I was studying transgender inclusion in higher education. I looked high and low for scholarly research on what we as administrators needed to be doing to make our campuses safe and friendly to trans students and most of my analysis was, there is no research (this was four years ago, maybe things have changed?).

I know I want to be a career counselor, and I think I will do it well, and I will do my own education to support my trans students, just as I have done in the past. I am just having a hard time thinking about the culture change of colleges I am setting myself up for. I am sure there are cool career counselors out there and I hope I end up working with them.

As for the tww, it’s hard. It’s almost over (or a new beginning is about to start). No signs either way.

Tomorrow we leave for Maine to see A.’s family to celebrate an early Christmas. There a little drama around this, but we are doing what we need.

but who’s counting?

It occurred to me that I have not follow up on any job search related stuff in a while, and what better time than the tww to write about it (read: continue to distract myself).

Some of you may have guessed I work in residential life at a college. This is my third year in this position and it is a high burnt out type of job. Some time around October I stared to feel like my shelf life had come to an end. Back in June I made a plan to use the next academic year to ease into a new job. For a long time I’ve been thinking about going into Career Counseling at the college level. I have the education I need, but I don’t have the experience…grrrrrrrr.

When things got really bad this fall, I was again motivated to start laying the ground work. I joined a career development professional organization and started talking to my boss out my plans. She was supportive. I met with the director of the career center at the college I work at to talk about things I should be doing to position myself for the transition. She gave me lots of great advice - since that meeting I’ve enrolled in a workshop to learn to administer an interest inventory tool. She told me I really need to seek an internship so I can gain career counseling experience, but did not know if her office had the resources to offer me such an internship. She did tell me about some local colleges that have internship programs and who to contact. Now my job already requires 45+ hours per week, so the thought of taking release time to do an internship at another college was not very feasible. She called me a week later and told me she presented the idea to her staff and they were in support of taking me as an intern since they knew me. !!!!!! I was so excited.

I met with my boss this week and asked her for the release time - she approved it and I’ll start my internship in January! I am so excited and feel so lucky that they decided to take me and that I can have such an honest discussion about what I need with my boss. She is sad that I am thinking of moving on, but does support me and is being super cool to let me do this. I do need to figure out how to manage my already overbook schedule plus the internship - hey, I survived grad school, so I can survive this!

The other exciting bit of news is that I dropped off my application for a career counselor position today! Fingers, toes, arms, and legs crossed that it works out!

I feel like I am about to start yet another post where I complain…it seems like that’s been the theme of my posts. This is unusual because (I think) I am an optimistic person. So that said, I will continue with this thought, but try to be constructive.

I’ve been struggling with the decision to leave my job. My current position is very demanding. I find myself working well above the scheduled 35 hours per week, and find many of the interventions I do to be emotionally draining. Last week I met with a student who is depressed and I had to do a suicide assessment of her - at 1am (the joys of being on call), after hearing her life story, I understood where she was coming from, and couldn’t find any words to begin to make her feel better.

I spend far too much time in meetings - more than half my workweek. I meet with the 10 students and the two professional staff members I supervise, then there are staff meetings - four in a week - I am in some way a member of four staffs, others: mental health meetings, community health meetings, judicial meetings, meetings with students that have a concern or problem, and others. All these meetings, which mostly take place during the business day, leave me with little to no time to actually do my work, so I stay late. I recently started counting my hours and found I worked close to 50 hours a week. I do NOT get paid enough to work this much, supervise this many people, and play therapist to countless others.

My “employment cycle” runs the academic year, this means, I am expected to start and finish the academic year and if I want to leave I am supposed to tell my supervisor in February, but keep working till June. This is one of the down falls of higher education, and more specifically residential life. While I think I will go insane if I stay another year (this is my third) I don’t think I can give my notice in February and not have another job lined up. I am also at a loss for what I want to do. Some days I want to leave higher ed all together. A thinks I am just burnt out from my current job and that I would really miss higher ed and the students if I left. She may be right. Problem is, I can’t even begin to imagine what I would do out side higher ed. I would love to make more money than I do now (ever will if I stay in this field). But my masters is in higher ed and is not all that transferable to occupations where there is money to be made (why didn’t I get a degree in computer science?). If I stay in higher ed, I think I want to work in career services or academic advising. I am meeting with a career counselor this week to talk more.

I’m trying to find meaning in my work, because I plan to be in the position until June and maybe one more year (but I REALLY hope not). Lately, I just feel annoyed, and like I am not really helping my students, and generally not invested in my staff.
Trying to get pregnant further complicates my decision to leave my job. If I get pregnant, I will likely have to stay. I fear that if I switched jobs while pregnant, I may run into some problems. In MA employer are required to give at least (least?) two months maternity leave, but only after an employee’s probation period, which can be as many as six months.

I want to like my job again, like I did when I first started this one. I’ve learned that I am happy in a job where there is a mix between “desk time” and “people time”. As an introvert, if find my current job, which has lots of people interaction, to be exhausting, but I know I would hate to sit at a computer all day. I am really good at administration, details, and projects that require intense concentration. I don’t want as much responsibility, but I want to remain autonomous.