The Return of the Unemployed

As you can see, I have been blog-absent for half a year--only making it to day 3 of our 10 day Scotland trip, and then dropping off the face of the blogosphere in July.

In my defense, two significant (but unrelated) events happened in July that brought this about:

(1) I got pregnant

(2) I got "unofficially" promoted at work. This means my boss departed, my work load doubled, and I received no recompense in salary or title.

What did happen is that I got unhealthily busy at work at exactly the moment when my body was working on building another little person. The end result is that for the next several months I worked, ate, took some Tums, worked, and went to bed. Thus, my disappearance from our fledgling blog.

Happily, something else happened in early December that brought about my return, and I have politicians and revenue-hungry executives to thank for it (literally--I am probably the only person in my company to be grateful for it). The war in Iraq ended, our troops pulled out, and my company reduced its corporate staff by 60%, and gloriously, I was among the reduction.

Before the cuts came, I had pulled my boss aside and let him know that if I wasn't on the list, I should be, as I was going to resign in a few months anyway, so would he please take that into consideration. It was an odd conversation . . . essentially: "Sir, could you please fire me?"

And this is how I found myself, one beautiful December morning, eating a donut on my couch at 8am in the morning, blissfully inaugurating my unemployment.

The transition from dashing around as a frenetic, over-worked defense contractor to a puttering housewife has been shocking easy and exceedingly joyful. I thought that maybe I would feel a sort of "ghost limb" connection to my missing BlackBerry, which had been my faithful, around-the-clock poltergeist for nearly three years. I felt no such thing. It was near immediate mental liberation, and mostly I was left to wonder at the luxury of being able to take my time with activities that I had normally rushed through in order to get to work on time, make dinner before 7:30 at night, and get to bed in time to get up and start it all over again.

All that, and the fact that my head feels miraculously uncluttered, leads me back to here. Josh's two conditions for my unemployment were (1) that I write; and (2) that I have dinner on the table by 6pm every night. So far I have failed at both, but thus begins my effort to accomplish the first.