Empty Nest Preview

As I write this, Action is away at a Summer Intensive, i.e. ballet camp, and Skibbie has already returned to college for pre-season conditioning.  (She's going to be a sophomore this year.  Time is going by too quickly.)  After work, I find myself struggling most nights on how to cook for 2 people and what to do afterward.  

I'm having flashbacks to the early years when Big Daddy and I were first married.  We were both young and ambitious, so working late during the week was not uncommon.  On the weekends, we would struggle to figure out what to do after the home chores were completed.  We were young and had lots of energy back then so chores were often done by noon.  We didn't have tons of money, so we usually ended up hanging out on the couch and watching TV.  There was no internet back in those days.  Finding out what events were going on in our city was not a small task.  Our fallback was to drive to Pensacola to go to the beach.  Sometimes we would just walk around the mall. 

These days, I have a job that requires no mental input on my part (by design) and I'm out the door walking to the parking garage at 4:30 pm on the dot.  By 5 pm, I'm home and pondering what to make for dinner.  Big Daddy is still ambitious, so he still works late and usually arrives home by around 7 pm.  Skibbie has inspired me to get in shape, so I've found an adult ballet class to attend one night/week.  I'm planning to try a different class this week as well.  If it goes well, I will have a planned activity 2 nights each week.  I wish I could find something for Big Daddy and I to do together one night that would get him moving as well.  We could all use more activity for health. Damn desk jobs.

I've been thinking about the concept of time lately.  Mostly, I've been contemplating the passage of time as a type of currency.  Time has a value, though it cannot be bought or sold in traditional ways.  I can purchase the service of others to complete tasks so I can use the time in other ways (cleaning services and lawn maintenance are a few examples), so I suppose that could be a form of buying time.  The absolute truth is that once the time has passed, it's gone, never to be recovered.  Never to be re-lived.  No undo button.  No reverse.  No do-over. 

The concept of wasting time is weighing on me.  Each hour and day that passes at my no-brainer job feels like a waste.  Three years has passed since I first started this job.  The oil market has crashed during my time at work and I've seen the company cut the staff in half.  It's a miracle that I still even have this job.  When I started, I needed the no-brainer job due to my overwhelming personal commitments (large charity project, sick parent that passed away and left me with guardianship of my disabled sister, and raising my teenagers).  I needed this no-brainer job to force me to get out of bed each day.  I needed the free time at work to find services for Turtle.  Now, much of that has been resolved, and I feel the next chapter of my life needs to be written.  There are only 24 hours to be used each day.  How I utilize that time each day seems wasteful to me right now.

So, what's next?  As usual, I have a wide range of useful skills, but I've not a mastery of any one that leads me to be an expert in any area or down a path to one particular career.  They say to find a job that entails work that interests you.  When so much interests you, how do you choose in the real world?  I recently read that the path to choosing your career should be the ability to answer the question, "What do you do?" with your dream job.  What is the ideal answer to that question for you?  Looking back on my life, that answer has varied as I have aged.  When I was in high school, the answer would have been "prima ballerina"; in college, "international marketing director"; as a young mother, "A+ #1 volunteer"; as a mom of teenagers, "flight attendant"; as an empty nester, who knows (model? grey hair is in style right now, right?!)  Side note:  had I seen the Rockettes when I was in high school, I would have dropped ballet for tap immediately. 

All I know right now, is that today is the first day when I actually didn't want to come to work.  And that's not a good thing for me.