In order to deal with my day-to-day responsibilities, I have to employ a great deal of balance. It took months after I began working to get a good balancing act system in place. As my work schedule shifted, so did the other aspects of my life so everything could move like a fluid water balloon jelly filled plastic bag cohesive unit.

It was pretty rocky at the beginning. I began working when my son – a.k.a. littleman – was nine months old. I had only held a part time job during the three month period prior to that. My new job/career meant daycare and a whole slew of issues I had yet to encounter. First, there was the issue of getting littleman too and from daycare. As my job is in another county, and takes me approximately 35 minutes (with no traffic) to get there, my husband – a.k.a. geekboy – got stuck with graciously volunteered to provide transportation. The days when I’ve had to take littleman in usually involve getting to work late and/or leaving work early. The next step was for me to learn my job. While I had done legal work clerking after law school, this was different. I had my own case load and I was responsible for managing that case load and all the fun that goes with it (I’ll spare you the details – in this post at least). It took me a while. There were a lot of reasons why. Mostly though, it was because there wasn’t adequate training after all the state wide budget cuts, and the person who was “training” (and I use that term very loosely) me had no idea what he was doing either. After I was able to get the appropriate guidance, training and practice, I became much more efficient at my job. In the beginning though, I worked late a lot and brought a lot of work home with me. There were many nights when geekboy fed, bathed and put littleman to bed. There were days at a time when the only glimpse I would get of my son was when I would peek in on him when he was sleeping. That was a truly heartbreaking time. [Read more...]