Have you ever had one of those surreal mornings where you wake up, feeling kinda hung-over & disorientated, turn to your husband and say, “Did we just move to TX or am I still drunk?”
That would pretty much sum up our last three months or so.
The actual move itself was as painless and unexciting as it could be (we drove diagonally through Illinois, need I say more?), and we all survived more or less intact.* Since then it been a blur of 60+ hr work weeks for Codejnki and unpacking/job hunting/learning to survive as a housewife for me.
And trust me, I’m just barely surviving in this role.
how bad is it that you’ve spent so many evenings drinking while waiting for your husband to come home that you’ve developed a perfect Long Island Ice Tea recipe?
It’s not that I’m bad at this job. In fact I’m actually above average, at least in most categories. I keep the kitchen and bathrooms clean. I take care of the garbage and recycling. The living room is vacuumed on a regular schedule. I make sure that our pantry is always stocked with the essentials for survival (coffee, half and half, & beer). And I like to believe that my current over-achieving in cooking and cocktail mixing totally makes up for me blowing off folding the laundry until we literally have no clean underwear in the dresser drawers.
dude may have to go to the laundry room to find clean socks, but he also gets to wake up to homemade doughnuts & coffee on the weekend. Fair trade in my opinion.
It’s just that I’m not terribly happy in this job. You see, I’m the kind of person that thrives when a busy schedule is forced upon me. If left to my own devices I tend to revert to my natural slothlike state when confronted with something I don’t want to do; which consequently has done nothing to help get rid of the mountain of unfolded clothes in the laundry room or the size of my ass. I also hate to admit it, but part of my identity is connected not only to what I do for a living, but also to how much I’m contributing to the joint bank account. Saying that I was a librarian at such-and-such a college helped not only to satisfy my petty need to have a socially respected job but also came with a salary that allowed me the luxury of being able to drop a guilt-free $65 on a haircut and getting my eyebrows waxed whenever I just wasn’t feeling pretty enough. I wouldn’t dream of spending that kind of money right now, and let’s not even bring up the fact that most of society doesn’t consider all the work I do during the day “a job”.
So yes, to help us do more than just break even (and for my own sanity) I need an outside job (like 10% of the US population**, I’m in the long, painful, confidence-shaking process of finding one), but that is a whole other series of posts currently sitting in the drafts folder.
*mostly thanks to the movers and some kitty Xanax
**which I’m sure is higher because, since I willingly left and cannot collect unemployment benefits, I and others like me are not included in that statistic
