You know how when you are going on vacation you spend the whole day thinking Thank God I am going on vacation tomorrow. I could not do this for one more day. If I wasn’t going on vacation tomorrow I would end up lighting my hair on fire, swinging naked from the conference room light fixtures, and muttering about the blood seeping out of the walls.
Or something.
And why is that? Because we know the end is near. Vacation is right around the corner. There is light at the end of the tunnel and we are hyper sensitive to all that means.
Which is exactly what is going on with me…but the total opposite.
Everywhere I turn there is something else to make me feel guilty and rotten. A relatively innocent comment by a co-worker becomes a sign. An article on Yahoo! is directed at me. A Twitter debate feels personal. A Facebook post seems antagonistic.
I can’t escape the guilt this week.
In the two minutes of the work day that I wasn’t in meetings or on the phone, I went online and somehow ended up on Yahoo! Shine. I don’t even know how since it is not a regular virtual destination of mine. It was meant to be. A message from the universe. Somehow in my “free time” during my 12 hour work day today, I came across this article on Shine.
And after reading it I wanted to curl up in the fetal position under my desk.
According to the author, the five reasons one parent should stay home include money (daycare, more restaurant meals and “work clothes” means it might make sense for one parent not to go back to work), bonding, stress, energy and time. Something about better loved children with fewer behavioral problems and more sense of self worth. That and regret addled parents approaching the Pearly Gates with only one thought: if only I had hugged my kids more and Terry in accounting less.
If I ever hear the tired old “no one ever wishes they’d worked more” deathbed analogy I really will stick Q-tips into my ear drums until they bleed. I, for one, will not wish I had spent more time discussing instantly redeemable coupons (IRCs–it’s been a while since I’ve thrown an acronym your way) or entering my hours into a time sheet. But I’m also not going to wish I’d spent more time doing laundry, making intricate dinosaur shaped triple layer chocolate surprise cakes from scratch, running marathons, shopping for the perfect black pants I have yet to find, or talking about the best/worst dressed at the Golden Globes either.
I’m guessing that on that ol’ mythical death bed where we get the luxury of saying our goodbyes, voicing our appreciation for our loved ones and admitting our regrets (and I could be wrong; let’s hope it’s a while until I find out), that for most of us work, in whatever form it took in our lives, doesn’t really come into the conversation either way.
When I have the bird’s eye view on my life, and I’m on the outside looking in, I hope that I can say I did everything to the best of my ability. That I never phoned it in. That I gave my life (whether as an employee, a mom, a friend, a blogger, a sister, a wife) 100%.
No regrets.
Working from home or downtown; working in a cubicle or a corner office; wherever my career ( or decision not to have one) takes me–in the grand scheme of my life–it will be a footnote on the bottom of a page in the back of an otherwise multi-dimensional, technicolor pop-up book of a story.
But I might wish that I had read fewer articles on working moms versus stay at home moms and the “mommy wars.”
Those are hours of my life I am never getting back. Hours I could have spent on Pinterest.
