Today I cooked.  I don’t mean just lunch or dinner — this was a marathon.  Yesterday, I cooked two chickens.  Today, those became Green Chile Chicken Enchilada casserole and Chicken Tetrazzini.  I made a huge batch of red beans and sausage for beans & rice.  All of these will be wonderful to re-heat through the week.  For breakfasts, I made two kinds of muffins — Harvest Muffins with carrot, zucchini, apple — very healthy & very delicious – and Mocha Banana Chocolate Chip, not so healthy but oh so yummy…  Plus two dozen sausage kolaches and a dozen cream cheese kolaches.  Whew!!

I’m tired but in a good way.  I accomplished something!  I know that Harold is tired of fast food and I’m tired of being too beat to fix dinner when we get home.  Then there is paying for breakfasts and lunches every day for work.  It’s killing my budget.  Mainly, though, I just wanted to do something nice for my family.  Maybe it’s partly the idea of getting to a man’s heart through his stomach.  I think Harold’s heart (spirit) needs some extra love right now. Work is not going well these days.

Of course, this all makes me feel even more deeply that I belong at home.  This is what I do well.  This is who I am.  Caring for my family and caring for myself by expressing myself in creative ways — writing and cooking and writing…

It was a very good day!

I recently reviewed a book about a woman who said she had worked in a field all her adult life and said she was there “accidentally”.  It was a difficult review to write since I truly disliked almost everything about it — the style, the grammatical errors, etc.  I found myself wondering, as I read about one disastrous job situation after another, why in the world this woman didn’t find something else to do.  She explained her actions as being necessary to making a living.

It suddenly hit me tonight that one of the reasons this book grated on my psyche so much was that it reminded me of me…

Like the author, I worked most of my adult life in a field not related to my college degree (Psychology) or to my dreams (being a counselor and a writer).  My first retail job was an after-school money maker while I was in high school.  I continued working at the same place through college as I could work around my class schedule.  When I finished my bachelor’s degree, I kept right on working there, my excuse being I might as well not look for anything else or go to graduate school since I knew we’d be moving when my husband came home from Vietnam.

And we kept moving.  So I worked in retail because we needed the money, the jobs were easy to get with my experience, and it was a field where much of the workforce was transitory.  I made a few attempts to go back to school for a Master’s degree but with a family and the constant moving, it seemed like one step forward and two back.  The dreams seemed further away and I guess I settled for expedient.

To be fair to myself, I should mention that I was very good at retail, moving up through the ranks to buyer and manager.  I managed to make a fair living.

There it is again — making a living…what does that mean?  For me, it brought in needed income and kept me from the hassle of serious job-hunting.  Maybe I wasn’t hungry enough.  Maybe I wasn’t confident enough.  Maybe I wasn’t in tune with myself deeply enough.  I know I wasn’t brave enough to give up all that another path through life would have demanded.

For years, a friend and I have traded comments about what we want to be “when we grow up”.  You know, I think I passed that threshold a long time ago. And, it’s the looking back and the realization that I’m near the end of my working life that has caused this angst.  That and the fact that I have once again “settled for” an expedient job which is totally unfulfilling.

Life is lived through a series of choices.  I made choices.  Here I am.  Would I have changed anything?  Looking back, maybe, but at the time, they all seemed to be the right choices for that point in time.  I even read somewhere that all the choices we make are the ones we need to make — to learn from them, to complete the process of becoming the unique being that each of us is.  If that’s true, maybe I haven’t learned what I needed to.  I just know I feel quite unsatisfied, unfinished, unfulfilled.  That sounds, even to me, somewhat harsh in light of the wonderful blessings I have in family and friends — they are truly my treasures.  Yet, when I look back at the hours I spent working, I wonder if I accomplished anything but earning money for that family.  I didn’t make an impact on lives, on my community, on my environment.  I feel that I should have. 

I always wanted to follow the precept of this passge from Colossians: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men…” (Col 3:23 NIV)  I think I gave my best effort to all my jobs.  I believe that’s not just important but required of me as a professing Christian.  But I do wonder if I honored God’s creation, me, by being less than I could be?  (Bothers me a lot on my current job, as I don’t always give 100%.  No motivation and bad attitude — not good.)

Self-awareness has come late to me, maybe too late.  I have no answers for me.  But, I want to find a way to tell my daughters that they need to live and work their dreams, and not just make a living.  What kind of an example did I set for them all those years, working way too many hours at jobs I didn’t like? I wasn’t that good a mom to them, spending all my time and energy on those jobs.  I don’t want them to settle for that.

Making a living is just not enough.