A prayer has been answered

One of the things I've been battling with over the past year is my career. Prior to becoming a mom, I was very pro-work. I draw a lot of my self-worth from my work performance, I do a lot of my socialization at work, and, let's be real, I like earning my own money and not having to answer to Left-brain for the money I spend. But my past choices made it so that I couldn't afford to work near the house, and so, since September, I've been getting up at 5:30, leaving the house by 6:30 to drop the baby off at daycare so I could get to my job at 8AM, then leaving my office at 5 or 5:30 to get home by 6:30 or 7. Unless I work my part-time job, and then it's 9 or 9:30.  And do it over again the next day. Not working was never an option, since I provide our health insurance, and taking a paycut to work closer was not an option (Necessity has now made me really awesome at understanding insurance lingo, asking the right questions, getting receipts and keeping track of outlay of money, one of the few blessings of this entire past year). But it's meant that Babygirl gets parented by her father for most of the week, and that cuts me, deep down. Not because he's not a good dad, my husband is an excellent father and he takes awesome care of her, but because I wanted to be able to be there for her. She crawled for her dad first, and I was jealous, I'll admit that. It's been hard to go from being the mom who totally was responsible for everything to handing her over to daycare that first day and letting someone else care for her to feeling like my only contribution to her is reading to her at 5AM because that's the only time I have to give her. So I have been praying, desperately, for something to happen to get us out of this situation. I'll be honest, I was thinking in terms of winning Powerball, but something better happened.

I've been given a chance to work my same job, but from home (OK, winning $650M on the Powerball would be better, but that ain't happened, so this is more realistic). I start at the end of June. I'm still in a bit of a daze, not sure how this happened, because it came so quick, but it's a tremendous blessing. Financially, my benefits are cheaper, and I won't have 500 miles' worth of gas to purchase a week, so that alone puts $100 more in my hand per paycheck. I won't have to haul the baby out in the snow in winter. She is still going to daycare, I was adamant with Left-brain about that, because that's not professional, but I got in a minor fender-bender in February on the way to work, and my fear is that I'll do that with the baby in the car one of these workdays. At least this way the risk is less. And I'll have more free time to invest in being a parent that I didn't have before, a win-win for me. AND, now that I have my sewing machine up, I can work on that during my lunch hour. I also wanted to be able to be more present in my community, and that's finally a possibility.

I made a promise to myself not to squander this gift I've been given. I am really starting to put things in their perspective on the whole anyway--work is no longer my life, its primary role in my life is that it gives me money to provide for my family, but it's not the be-all and end-all, because a job can be taken in a second--but this gives me a real second chance, and it comes at a time when I need and appreciate it. Hopefully, I can blog a bit more--I realized I have been sadly absent from this blog for most of the year, but then again, there are weeks when I feel sadly absent from my life in general, and that has got to change.