You better check yo' self before you wreck yo' self

Ice Cube perfectly summing up my suburban mom work-life angst

Any of you who have talked to me in real life in the past 3 weeks knows I LOVE MY NEW JOB. Like that head-over-heels excitement when you just know “this is the one”. And we all know how that usually ends.

I’ve never been one for restraint. I either love or hate things and I know right away. Occasionally a good thing goes bad somewhere down the line. Maybe that’s just the nature of life.

But I didn’t take all that time off for nothing. I wanted to teach myself how to exist without all that BUSY and I think I did reasonably well. It’s slipping away from me, and I hate that. It’s like finally relaxing on vacation and two days after you go back to work, all the “vacation vibes” are gone because Bob in Marketing needs that document STAT.

Lovely New Job has about half my coworkers in Europe, so my day starts by 7am at the latest, and often earlier. I actually love this schedule because apparently I am a morning person once I actually get out of bed?! Baffling. And then I only have a few hours’ work after lunch and a whole, long evening ahead.

BUT. I’m still exhausted after a day of work so evenings have been less than eventful, mostly me curling up on the couch and scrolling Reddit while trying to maintain coherent conversation with my family.

So this weekend I’m determined to sort out this new schedule and figure out how to have more energy (and a life outside work!)

Being a contractor and tracking hours has been great to discourage me from working extra, though I’m tempted to boost my earnings that way -”if I just do a couple hours on the weekend”. No, girl.

Photo by Deniz Altindas on Unsplash

1. Exercise would help. It’s no coincidence that I’m so tired right when it got too hot to walk outside at any time of day, including 5 am. (90 degrees! WTF?). Gonna try adding a miniscule amount of indoor biking to my lunch break because I need mental tricks to make myself do exercise, sigh.

2. Sleep is key. I slept for 10.5 hours Friday night. I went to bed late and I probably need to keep the same bedtime most nights. On the bright side, Echo dog LOVES my 8pm bedtime because he’s ready at 7:30pm. At least I have company!

   1. No Coke Zero anymore due to the caffeine. Even one at lunch has me awake at 2am for at least an hour. Sad.

   2. Embrace the power of the end-of-work-day tiny nap. My friend Jenn, who also starts work super early, told me about this and it’s brilliant. I don’t sleep for long but it resets my brain nicely to “home mode”. Weirdly I also discovered the mindless task of loading the dishwasher or putting away clean clothes also resets me.

   3. Prioritize sleep. No late night scrolling, no phone beside my bed, and discipline about bedtime because I can’t control my mornings anymore. I bought theater season tickets and reluctantly chose Friday nights even though weekdays were cheaper.

3. More planned fun. I’ve been going easy on plans because of the transition, but that means I mostly work, eat, sleep, and scroll on my phone. That is not the recipe for an interesting life.

   1. One night T and I went to see the Moulin Rouge musical on her request and it was excellent and I survived the mid-week late night.

   2. I’ve been slowly getting back to lunching with my friends and I missed that!

   3. I have one more module of my government class left, and I want to enjoy it instead of just getting it done.

   4. I’ve been taking C out to coffee or lunch frequently because this was their last week of summer break and soon they will be in school and theater rehearsals and I won’t see them at all during the day. (sniffle). Also with my new schedule, I’m not driving the kids to school anymore.

   5. TJ and I hosted a Caltech alumni dinner at our house last week and it was surprisingly fun for a bunch of strangers showing up :) We could do this again even though we need “peopling recovery time”.

4. Offload (some of) the bullshit.

   1. We pay someone to clean our house every 3 weeks.

   2. Kids have regular chores that matter (feeding dog, dishwasher, gathering laundry). I also offer C extra money for bigger chores I won’t get to these days like organizing the pantry and fridge.

   3. TJ has been a star here - he is now kid “form guy” and “prescription pickup guy” and “take kids to mid-day appointments guy” and “please figure out dinner guy”. This vibe is so different from having two working parents and scrambling every day to fit all this in. <insert rant about capitalism here>

   4. Kids take the bus after school, making our commute 10 min round trip instead of 1 hour+.

5. Introspection. I need journaling and meditation in my life, more than ever. I need to figure out how to avoid that trap of “work comes before everything” that I’ve been falling into for 25 years. Therapy would be nice but our COBRA health insurance is garbage. I need to keep the “gold star syndrome” at bay and learn to stop depending on that external validation. (Lifelong struggle, ask me again in 10 years.)

I can be good at my job without letting it take over. I need that embroidered on a pillow.

Got any tips for me? You guys came through on my other work post and now I’ve got a notepad by my bed for anxious thought disposal and I planned a week’s worth of outfits at a time (will absolutely write more about that!!). Hope you all are having a lovely weekend and enjoying the summer!

Baby come back