holy crap, i got a job
 
A few months ago, I wrote about going on my first job interview in five years, and then never mentioned it again.  Well, obviously, I didn’t get that job offer, which was in my area of expertise (education and social justice) but had sucky hours anyway.  Now, here I am, about to start a job that doesn’t really have anything to do with my educational background and previous work experience, and It’s all your fault.  Heh.  Let me back up a minute.
 
When we moved to where we currently live three years ago, I had just finished two years doing what I had thought was not just a career but a calling.  The realization that it just wasn’t a good fit was disconcerting, to put it mildly, and my loving and supportive partner allowed me time to stay home and lick my wounds and heal.  Then, finally, we got pregnant, and my stay at home got longer.  We had always talked about me staying home with “the baby” at least for a little while, especially if our pregnancy coincided with a move or other lifechange that like.  Once The Pumpkin arrived and I became a full-fledged, full-time stay-at-home-dad, I realized what an honor and a privilege it was to be able to be home with her at such an important stage in her life.  I can only begin to understand how hard it has been for my wife to go back to work with her baby at home, even if it was with me—I hope she knows that I know what a privilege she has allowed me, to begin my fatherhood journey this way.
 
From the outset, however, we never intended this to be permanent.  Even though I grew up in a household where my mom stayed home, when I thought, pre-marriage, about what my future family would look like, I guess I always assumed that both I and my partner would be working, at least part-time.  And not just for financial reasons, but because it seemed to me that work should be able doing good works, that a job could be a mission and a career could be a calling.  Now, this doesn’t have to hold for everybody, but I also figured that with my personality bent, I’d end up with someone with similar ideas.  And though the everyday realities of the practice of modern medicine tend to grind things like “idealism” into so much dust, I know that, for my wife, the feelings that made her choose family medicine over some more monetarily rewarding speciality are still there.  Anyway, even before The Pumpkin arrived, I always checked the local job listings every couple of months, “just to see what’s there.”  For someone who had just crashed and burned in the classroom but still wanted to do something “that mattered,” there wasn’t much.  Add to that my little bout with existential angst, plus the fact that I had quickly integrated the role of SAHD into my sense of self, and well, I wasn’t in all that big a hurry.
 
Then, this fall, with The Pumpkin’s second birthday approaching, I saw an education job that I thought I’d like and could do well, and went for it.  Nada.  Never even heard back about why I didn’t get a second interview—I’d like to think it was just because I was honest about my reservations about how their “flexible” schedule would complicate my search for childcare (that and that I’m sadly monolingual).  But anyway, I kept up my regular scanning of the local job ads, and about a month ago, I saw something that seemed interesting.
 
Let me back up again.  Back in high school, I was involved with an extracurricular activity that could’ve led me in a couple different directions but ultimately helped me choose to go into education.  That connection might not be immediately apparent, as that activity was being a writer for a city-wide non-profit newspaper written by and for teenagers.  While my work there confirmed my love of writing and did make me think about journalism as a career path, instead it pushed me toward teaching.  Just as my work with the paper was about challenging traditional definitions of newsworthiness and giving voice to stories marginalized by the mainstream media—young people, especially urban youth of color—I saw teaching, especially the teaching of social studies, as a chance to re-center and re-cover hidden stories and voices, a la social history and Howard Zinn, and to teach young people to critically question received histories.
 
Now, ironically, after bemoaning the lack of social change work in the area in which I live, I found myself applying for a journalism job, of sorts, and as I said earlier, it’s your fault that I got it.  The local paper here has been really investing in niche publications and interactive on-line communities, even developing their own software platform to do it, as part of this new, internet-driven reconceptualization of journalism as a citizen-driven conversation, and now, with all these reader-written blogs being hosted on their sites, they need somebody to put a human face on it, manage, mediate, facilitate, etc.  The job, like the medium, is still new, and so the definition’s a bit fuzzy, but basically, I’ll be reading, writing and blogging for a living.  And I got the job, in no small part I think, because of you—because of the blogging community I’ve been privileged to be a part of for not even a year yet.  And though, on the surface of it, it’s not technically about social justice, or diversity, or change work, it could be—I’ve been reading “We The Media: Grassroots Journalism By The People, For The People,” in preparation, and the possibilities are really quite exciting.  So in a way, I feel like I’ve come full circle.  Weird, huh?
 
And while I’m about to take on my first full-time, outside-the-home, traditionally-defined, monetarily-compensated job in three years, and yes, I’m nervous about that, readers of this blog know that they SAHD in me has other concerns.  Heh.  One look at the picture accompanying this post should give you an idea that my concerns are probably overblown.  Yes, that’s The Pumpkin with her back to the camera, earlier today at the preschool/daycare close to my work [“my work”—yeah, that’ll take some getting used to] that we’ve signed her up for.  La dra. took her the other day for the first time, and stayed with her for a half-day.  Being the precocious little genius that she is, she was, of course, fine.  She only got cranky when she was bored—the teachers are gonna have fun teaching her to sit in a chair and do one activity for an extended period of time.  Heh.  This morning, I took her, stayed with her through breakfast, and when I left and asked her for a good-bye kiss, her response was, holding onto the gate between the classroom and the nap/potty room, “This mine.”  Yeah.  I checked back in at lunch—she finally noticed me when she exited the potty room and sat in front of her lunch.  “Hi Daddy.”  Didn’t even get up, no excited waving, nada.  Of course, her teacher said that this morning, once she did realize I was gone, she cried for less than five minutes before being mollified by a puzzle.  I got there a little before lunch, and took the picture that’s with this post surreptitiously.  She was happily playing in the sandbox, though I wasn’t fast enough to catch her scooping up some sand and giving it to the other girl.  After lunch was naptime.  “Taking nap,” she said, so I told her to go to her teacher and she’d get her settled on her mat, and I’d see her later.  I still haven’t gotten any frantic calls, so we’ll see how she did when I pick her up in a little while.  [To those of you who commented on my earlier job-related post and tried to assuage my nap-related fears, thank you.]
 
I know this is a long and probably disjointed post, and rest assured that my transitioning back to work and The Pumpkin’s entry into preschool will be a frequent topic here, but I just wanted to note that I’ve been reading widely in the parentblogosphere and finding lots of psychic support:  Honglien 123’s post about career/family/educational choices and the subsequent discussion in the comments; Dutch’s adventures transitioning from a high-powered corporate lawyer to a SAHD; Daddy Dialectic’s Jeremy’s meditation on his accidental SAHDhood and return to the workplace; “former stay-at-home dad” Daddy Chip’s year-and-a-half-old piece about going back to work and the effects of being a SAHD on his identity; The Queen’s Dad’s musings about going back to work—or not—and his pointer to this awesome essay by a new SAHD who doesn’t know if he wants to go back to work or not.  And there’s been more, including comments and e-mails from people who’ve gone from being just people I read or who read me to friends.  Thank you, for all of it.
 
This is gonna be a big change, I know that.  But I’ve got The Pumpkin and la dra., and they’ve got me.  And I’ve got a whole bunch of friends, both those I see regularly and those I’ve never physically met before, to whom I can blog about all of it.
 
One more thing before I close.  The other night, we were at a party/bbq at the house of one of The Pumpkin’s friends from kiddie-gym.  The mom’s a SAHM who contemplates, if not going back to work, at least doing something outside the home to keep her mind stimulated, the dad’s a psychiatrist.  I had told the mom about the job when I had told a bunch of moms we hang out with at local storytimes that they wouldn’t be seeing me anymore.  So, as we’re leaving, I hear the dad telling a bunch of people he’s sitting with, who asked who we were, that our daughter is his son’s friend, her mom is a family physician, and her dad—
 
—is a writer.
 
You know?  I think I finally am.
Friday, October 27, 2006