Sticks and Stars

I’ve been feeling somewhat dissatisfied with my job lately. Remember how I used to looooooove it? Yeah, not so much anymore. I’ve kind of fallen into a rut where I do the things I know (which also happen to be entirely routine and mindless) and I never have the opportunity to learn more. Or really, more importantly, I never take/make the opportunity to learn more. It would be nice if it were that simple, that I merely have to say, “Damn it, I’m going to learn PHP and you can’t stop me!” but it’s not. It’s hard to just “learn” something without a context (and I’m having a hard time fitting myself into the existing context) and it’s also hard to take the time to learn something when there’s plenty of other no-learning-required work to be done.

I had lunch with my old boss a couple weeks ago and bitched at length about my job (as I warned him, he caught me on a bad week) and it was really good because we talked about lots of tech stuff and he reminded me about what excites me about doing this work. And when I complained about not knowing the stuff I need to know, he said, “Well, you can learn it.” When I made a doubtful face he scoffed and said, “What, you think there’s something that you just can’t learn?” Which made me laugh because of course not. Of course I don’t think there’s stuff I “just can’t learn.” And that really started to put things into perspective.

Yesterday I gained a whole bunch more perspective when I was reading an article about a woman running a web development business who worked to build a community of non-techie women helping each other with tech stuff through her business. After reading the article I sighed with envy and thought about how I would like to build a community of non-techie women helping each other with tech stuff through a web development business, and then I let my brain wander for a minute over joy I get from web development work. After a few minutes of wandering I sighed, shut down those thoughts, and briefly lamented over the fact that I can’t do this work that I love to do because I just don’t know enough/don’t have time/don’t know where to begin/am so far behind others who do know/don’t want to handle billing/blah blah bullshit.

And then it occurred to me that I really can’t go on like this. I am really unhappy with my job, like to the point that I start crying when I tell people that I’m unhappy with it. It could be so much more than it is, but the combination of being stuck in a rut and the change in management that greatly shifted the atmosphere in the department makes me realize the importance of working toward something that is more meaningful and exciting, and that’s not what I have now.

So the end result is that even though I don’t know enough to start my own web development business/don’t have time/don’t know where to begin/am so far behind others who do know/don’t want to handle billing/blah blah bullshit, I have to push past all that and do it anyway. Because that’s really what I want to do and working toward that is going to make me happy.

It’s hard for me to imagine it, it’s hard for me to imagine myself in a place where I could support my family in my expensive city solely off the income from my own little business, it’s hard to imagine so very many aspects of what it would mean to run a business at all, but I can think of small steps, I can think of what I can do right now, and if that makes me feel like I’m moving toward something more productive and interesting, then that’s probably enough to keep the tears at bay for now.

My three initial goals toward starting my own web development business:

1. Subscribe to the feeds of some blogs discussing web development. I know that the blogs I read shape a lot of what I think about during the day and refocusing my thoughts toward current issues in web development can only be a good thing.
2. Clean my office. My office has lately become the landing spot for all manner of crap in my house and it’s entirely unpleasant to spend time in there. Considering that it’s supposed to be my special work space, I really need to realign my priorities toward keeping it clean.
3. Get the tedious assignments done for my current school course so that I can move on to the next, much more promising course. The current coursework is mirroring my tedious day job and it’s taking me a ridiculously long time to force myself to do what feels like busy work.

Those three goals feel small and attainable and possible and it makes me happy to think about getting them accomplished. The whole big picture is hugely overwhelming and it’s not even clear to me whether it’s realistic, but if I just keep taking small steps toward it then maybe I’ll ultimately get there. And if not, then at least I’ll get somewhere…and maybe I’ll be happier along the way.

I’m writing a whole lengthy post about whether or not my desire to escape to the woods with my children is realistic (per Peg’s comment) but it’s not quite done and I didn’t want to write about it anymore at the moment.

Things are a little bit better. I shouldn’t even say that because every time I sit down to write a post and start with that, some big pile of crap falls into my lap, forcing me to delete the “Things are a little bit better” start and change it to “I hate everything.”

I do want to say, though, that I really appreciate your comments. Even just “That sucks!” or “Keep your chin up!” or “Want to find the cheapest viagra online??” They all make me feel so…acknowledged? Validated? Not so fucking alone?? I don’t know, but I know they make me feel better. I never acknowledge them (except that if you ask me a question I will likely post an answer…eventually) but oh how happy they make me.

Anyway, things are a little better. They’re actually not great because my son got kicked out of school for the rest of the year (which is all this week) and I was only able to find alternate care for him for three days and I’m still worried about what this summer will bring, but I did talk to my boss and our HR department and if I run out of vacation time while attending to my son this summer, I can use unpaid FMLA leave, which is a huge relief. Of course, I’d rather not take unpaid time off, but I do have savings that I can use and it’s much more important that I keep my job and keep it on good terms. Really, my boss was actually pretty understanding about the whole thing, much to my surprise. It makes me wonder whether I was just projecting my own anxiety about this whole mess onto him and he never was annoyed by the whole thing at all.

At the moment, I’m working with my six year old’s school to claim that he has a disability so that he can get an aide who will essentially shadow him next year and help intervene when he starts escalating. I think the aide will be a great thing (I think every kid should have one) but it really irritates me that I have to claim that my son is “disabled” because he certainly is not. He’s just one kind of kid among many other kinds of kid, a particular type who needs his space, gets frustrated easily, and is very sensitive to stimuli. I understand that his type of kid isn’t one that fits terribly well into an underfunded, undersupported, understaffed, underresourced American kindergarten classroom, but still, it pisses me off that he’s the one slapped with this label, this huge label, that he will get to wear for the rest of his school career and maybe even his life.

I try to explain to him that the problem is with the system, not with him, that when a system is so overextended and undersupported it can only function with a narrow, narrow amount of allowed behavior, that anything outside of that allowance must be cast out and vilified in order to maintain the tenuous survival of the system, but of course he’s just six, his eyes glaze over at my first mention of “system.”

So instead I just keep whispering it to myself, to remind myself that this is all insanity, that if he were homeschooled I would be entirely oblivious to all of this and I certainly wouldn’t be trying to scrape up a bunch of bullshit that I can carefully package in order to justify the label “disabled.”

As I mentioned, my six year old has been having problems at school lately. This whole process of trying to intervene into the problems has been really involved and drawn out and stressful and at this point the school district is “requesting” that he have a psychiatric evaluation. They tell me it’s so that they can figure out how to serve him best, but both his counselor and his doctor say that it’s so that a psychiatrist can give him a prescription for some medication.

I am not thrilled with the idea of medicating my son, and by “not thrilled,” I mean, there’s no fucking way in hell I’m going to do it.

I’m thinking about quitting my job. I’m thinking about quitting my job and leaving my city and taking my boys to live with my dad in the country where they can play in the woods every day and not go to school and not be threatened with medication because they happen to be sparkly, odd-shaped pegs that don’t fit so well into those stupid boring round holes.

God, I am so fucking tired.

If anyone wants to see the photos from my boys’ recent photo session, you can view them here.

If you don’t want to look through all seventy plus photos, here are my favorites:

• My six year old
• My three year old
• Together (what you don’t see here is the poor, poor potato bug toward which their attentions are directed)

I think this and this are the best photos of their faces…sadly there were really no good smiles from my three year old, and here they are watching the trains, and here they spontaneously launched into, “Swiper, no swiping! Swiper, no swiping!!”

There are so, so many that I love (like this one and this one and this one), I don’t know how I’m going to choose.

It looks like my three year old is going to become a big, grown up preschooler at the end of the month. The preschool teachers at his daycare have lately been broaching the subject with me on a daily basis, and he requests to spend time in the preschool class at every opportunity. His current teachers and the preschool teachers feel that he’s ready and he seems to feel that way too, so when some of the current preschoolers leave at the end of the month, they are going to move him up.

He’s only been going to this daycare since October and it honestly took until February or March for him to get comfortable, in that he stopped telling me hated it and didn’t want to go, and stopped crying or pouting when I’d leave him. For a long time I worried that I made the wrong choice pulling him out of the home where he used to receive care and moving him to a center, but it’s good that I waited him out because he’s so happy there now. He knows the kids, he knows the teachers, he loves his “school.”

I just can’t believe he’s going to be in preschool! Isn’t he just a baby still?? When his brother was littler, he was the only one, all eyes were on him, and every parenting experience was so new. It seemed to take f-o-r-e-v-e-r for him to get bigger, to achieve each new milestone. But with my three year old, it’s all old hat, and my eyes are so busy tracking both boys, my own life, and our various horizons, that the days and months just fly by. I can’t believe how big he is.