Life is filled with work right now. Not so much the nine-to-five kind. In anticipation of being a freelancer, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve started taking on a few writing\/editing projects now so I can smoothly segue into life as an at-homer. The at-homer part is pretty much a done deal. My boss knows that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m \u00e2\u20ac\u0153strongly leaning\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in that direction, mainly because it isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t economically feasible for me to do anything else. And unfortunately, my department can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t afford to keep me on as a part-timer (which would still be a wash between my salary and day care, but feels justifiable part-time; full-time it just seems dumb). I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m feeling pretty good about my decision, only because it does seem there will be work for me to do. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not so much a matter of requiring the income (which, of course, goes without saying), but a matter of personal sanity. As someone who has always identified through her career (or cool slacker lack thereof), I find the notion of becoming a stay-at-home mom (SAHM) frighteningly depressing. I need<\/i> to be working. I need<\/i> to be earning an income. I need<\/i> to feel like I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m doing something. I need intellectual stimulation and projects to complete. I like writing and editing. Listen, I respect SAHMs. Really I do. I just can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t fathom actually joining their ranks. It feels like such\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 well, defeat, after building a career for fourteen years, investing time in graduate school, and finding a niche doing something at which I’m good. I know that SAHMs work harder than many working-at-an-office moms. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve spent a long time on the baby boards reading about how horrible mothers who work are. It seems that many SAHMs are much more secure in their identities than working moms are. This is pure ego on my part, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m fully aware of that and that even as a freelancer, I shall in fact be a SAHM. But the idea of going to a party and someone asking me, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153So what do you do?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and only being able to respond, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I take care of my son,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d just horrifies me. How is that an identity? How is that a life? Of course, I could always respond with my true identity, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I am Jenny, master of the universe and ruler of all things,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but then they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d look at me like I was crazy, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have to smite them, which, really, is a good way to ruin a nice party.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Life is filled with work right now. Not so much the nine-to-five kind. In anticipation of being a freelancer, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve started taking on a few writing\/editing projects now so I can smoothly segue into life as an at-homer. The at-homer part is pretty much a done deal. My boss knows that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m \u00e2\u20ac\u0153strongly leaning\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1078\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}