Do or Die, and My Favorite Drug

Friday, I was having kind of a shitty day at work. I was the only one in the office from my team, which by itself wasn't bad, but it wasn't great, either. I was also having a rough time at home. The Boy was scheduled to come home from camp Saturday, which was good but also stressful. Jack informed me of work schedule for the rest of the summer and September, and it totally sucks. When the three pistons of work, kids and my marriage (notice I don't include anything about my own personal life in this list, because it doesn't exist) all down at the same time, it is it a huge drag.

I didn't pack a lunch on Friday, so I had to punt for food. I could have ordered from Peach and had something delivered, or I could have bought food from the little refrigerator we have in the lunch room. 

Fuck that, I thought. I want a burger. I trekked over to a Belltown pub.

"Do you want a seat at the bar?" the host asked as I was dining alone. The World Cup Brazil versus Belgium was on the three televisions behind the bar.

"Sure," I said. I sat next to a couple who was watching the game. Brazil was down 0-2. The woman's ninety-four year old mother lived in Belgium during World War II. The mother was watching the game from her home in Iowa. I didn't have the heart to tell this woman I was rooting for Brazil. 

Watching this game felt familiar. Two weeks ago, the Boy's soccer team played a tournament in Burlington where they played five games in less then forty-eight hours. The first three games were qualifiers, and the last two were elimination rounds. The Boy's team made it to the finals for their group. For the last game, the boys (young men?) played an equally matched team from Portland sponsored by the Portland Timbers, the MLS team. The Boy's team was sponsored by the Sounders, Seattle's MLS team. Civic pride was at stake.

Both teams played hard. I've never seen a youth soccer game where there was so much heart from both sides on the field. The ball went back and forth, the players charging and sweating and grimacing. Every kid was fully engaged with the game. Parents on the sidelines dropped their usual conversations about life and kids and vacations to focus on the match. It was do or die for both teams.

It was awesome.

So there I was, in a bar on a Friday, watching the same thing play out in Russia between two of the top ten teams in the world. There was no holding back, no doing "just good enough." To lose is to die. These grown men, among the best athletes out of 7.4 billion people on earth, reminded me of the Boy's team in that last game. The size of the audience and the number of people who cared about the game was different, but if you were a parent on that sideline in Burlington in June, it might as well have been the quarter finals of the World Cup.

I am so glad the world has found a replacement for gladiator sports in soccer. Instead of people actually dying, they just feel like they have died when they lose. Sports Illustrated reported that

"Neymar has admitted that suffering elimination from the World Cup with Brazil was the 'saddest moment of my career' and claims he is having a hard time 'finding the strength to play again'."

To paraphrase, he felt like he died. I am sure something in him did die--the dream that he probably had since he was a little kid that he would lead his country to a World Cup victory one day. The dreams of his country died, too.

But Neymar lives, and will play again, even though that doesn't diminish the pain he feels today.

Sometimes life sucks not because you just lost the big game, but because of the thousands of smaller details of your life add up and weigh you down. It isn't one, big, terrible thing like cancer. As a mom, it is the lack of control over everyone else's mood and schedule, being at their mercy, and having no way to escape.

And then my favorite escape came to the rescue...

This week, I am taking Claire-Adele to orientation at the University of Maryland. I have to take three days off of work for this, which I really don't have. I wasn't dreading this trip, but I wasn't exactly thinking of it as a full-filled, exciting vacation as the main gist would be how I am going to part with my first born and approximately fifty thousand dollars. Seems kind of lose-lose. I texted my old friend Kendra who I knew from Chicago who now lives in Bethesda, Maryland to see if we could get together. Kendra is loads of fun.

"Want to see Hamilton?" she texted me back. This summer, Hamilton is at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.

Hell yeah I want to go.

"My husband said I should go with a friend, but he said I couldn't spend more than $300 for a ticket."

I was so excited I couldn't sleep Thursday night. Kendra and I both searched online. The cheapest tickets I could find for Wednesday night was $500. Ugh. I was still hopeful.

This morning when I woke up, Jack was sitting at his computer. "There are Hamilton tickets for $299."

"What?" I said, looking at his screen. Saturday, seats in the first row of Tier 1 were $500. The Kennedy Center must have dropped the price as the day of the show was getting closer. I texted Kendra. She wasn't there. Did everyone know about this last minutes drop in prices? If they did, these tickets wouldn't last. I bought the tickets. If for some reason Kendra couldn't make it, then I'd figure something out. For an hour, I sat waited for her text.

In the meantime, I had to two tickets to Hamilton for Wednsday night. The problem of getting rid of an extra ticket was peanuts compared to the thrill of having them. The escape is what I imagine what a shot of heroine is like, when it creeps into your veins, and nothing else matters except the high.  Jack and Claire-Adele were screaming at each about her getting her driver's license. Suddenly, I was less pissed off about Jack's schedule, about my son staying out super late last night, about the crap at my job. I was floating in my Hamilton glow, the anticipation of seeing it again.

Just as the grit in of life's gears was wearing me down, sometimes things fall in my direction. Two weeks ago, the Boy's team won the tournament with a goal scored in the last ten seconds. And Kendra can join me for Hamilton.

Shoes

I think some of the people I work with think I have an excessive amount of shoes. I was showing my collection to one of my co-workers and I pointed out my Prada's. He blanched.

"They cost way less than a thousand dollars," I said. I am sure he thinks I am a princess. I am not a princess, by the way. I am a queen. Claire-Adele is a princess. I took a feminine archetype class where we learned princesses are women with little to no real responsibity, nothing to look after like kids or pets. Motherhood is the next phase. Women who survive motherhood become queens.

I digress.

They are probably right--I probably do have too many shoes and I have probably spent more money on shoes this year than I did on rent my first year out of college. (I just did the math and its not even close. I spent more on rent.)

So why? Why do I am I spending so much money on shoes? Why?

First, I used to not be like this. Really. My financial hero is my friend Carla who saves so much money. She bakes hew own hamburger buns, paid cash for her house. She wears old, not fancy clothes but has traveled (and travels) all over the world. Whenever I think of money, I ask myself, "What would Carla do?"

Carla would not own a pair of Prada red velvet shoes. So why do I?

A few years ago, Jack worked too much. It was intolerable. If the shit hit the fan and our marriage imploded, Jack would probably marry some chick in her thirties who didn't have kids and wouldn't care how much he worked. The chicky would get half of the nest egg I spent twenty years saving, which would piss me off.

How do I know this? I've seen several divorced guys in their mid- to late-forties get remarried to younger women. The new women don't have kids, so the new couple has time to take awesome vacations and decorate their new home.

Basically, I didn't want Jack's next wife to spend my money on Prada shoes and trips to Paris, so I decided to buy Prada shoes and take vacations myself.

Tuesday

This is my first Memorial Day since I started my job last August. Last Tuesday, I went to lunch with several members of my team, and the conversation turned to plans for the holiday weekend. One person had plans to go to Oregon, another was going camping. Another was going to host a barbeque with friends.

"What are you doing, Lauren?" they asked. What should have been an innocent question gave me a pit in my stomach. Jack would be working all weekend and I would have the kids. I wasn't sure if they had plans or not. Jack and I did have plans to see a play Saturday night, but that was it. The pit in my stomach grew larger when I thought about the Tuesday after the holiday weekend, when everyone comes back with tales from their holiday.

Being a doctor's wife, I have experienced every holiday, birthday and anniversary alone, all more than once. That is part of the deal of working a field that requires 24/7 coverage: someone always has to work.

I hadn't thought about the loneliness of the Tuesday after a holiday weekend in a long time. Before, I was a stay-at-home-mom, so I didn't have to go talk to a group of colleagues about my weekend, what I did or didn't do. Northeast Seattle is a ghost town over holiday weekends. My friends are usually not available because their families are often just as busy or out of town, too.

Thursday, I was feeling super cruddy about my lack of plans for the weekend.

So I made some. I texted Ellen and Carla to see what they were up to. They both had half a day open. I didn't want to just walk Green Lake for the 3,000th time. I dusted off three books of walks in the Seattle area. We picked walks outside of Northeast Seattle. Carla and I walked Interlaken Park and ate lunch at the Volunteer Park Cafe. Ellen and I went to the Boeing Creek Park in Shoreline and then Richmond Beach. Yesterday, I took the Boy to Duthe, a mountain bike park where he rode a trail called Gravy Train with thirteen roller hills jumps. I logged about 30 miles biking for the "Bike Everywhere Challenge."

Peer pressure made me get off my duff and make plans, whereas in the past I didn't have to report to anyone about my weekend. Even if my colleagues don't ask about my plans, that is fine. I know I had a good weekend.

Ellen crossing the creek at Boeing Creek Park. This trail was super sketchy, which was fun.

Cognitive Dissonance and the Other Side

Earlier this week, my past and present lives collided in an unexpected way.

Tuesday, I went to charity breakfast for Literacy Source, an organization that teaches adult immigrants and refugees to speak, read and write English so they may find gainful employment and fully engage in American society. Nancy Pearl, famous Seattle Librarian, Pulitzer Prize jurist for Fiction, and long-time supporter of Literacy Source, was the keynote speaker. She gave us her top picks for summer reading. (See below if you are curious.)

My attendance at these charity breakfasts, lunches and auctions has greatly diminished since my days as a stay-at-home mom, volunteer and community activist. Still, when my friend Barb invited me to this event, I said yes.

It was a year ago last week that I started training for my job. Since then, I've been buried in settling myself into my new roles of working mom and data analyst. I now have "colleagues" and "co-workers" instead of "friends," but really they not much different aside from gender. (Most of my stay-at-home mom friends started out as a volunteer colleague or someone I met through a non-profit.) After the initial phase of drinking out of a fire hose was over, work felt familiar, comfortable in fact. Why? Because I was returning to my past-past-life where I was in consulting and project management. Returning to work was like riding a bicycle...while simultaneously drinking from a fire hose.

Barb picked me up early Tuesday morning. I hadn't seen her in a while. She was one of a very early supporters of my campaign for school board. She is a perennial do-gooder with a massive heart and a fierce brain that wants to solve all of the inequities and injustices in the world. And she isn't smarmy or self-righteous. She is nice and she is kind, one of the kindest people I know.

"Tell me about your job," she asked, as have many other women I know.

I told her I was part of Apprenti, an organization that brings women, veterans and people of color into tech jobs. When I told her I finished my training and am in a data job, she looked confused, as have many other women I know.

"Wait," she said. "You are one of the people in the training?"

"Yes," I said.

"Oh, I thought you were running the program," she said as have many other women I know. "Tell me about your job search. You have such great experience. It must have been easy to find a job."

"Ummm, no," I said. "Finding paid employment after being a stay-at-home mom for seventeen years is a tale worthy of Tolkien." Like Bilbo Baggins, I was seriously kicked out of my comfort zone complete with second breakfasts and whatnot and thrown into a world of grand adventure where I was breathed on by Smaug, the evil tech recruiter who told me I should consider being an administrative assistant. Yeah. Would you say that to guy? No. (Sorry. In my rage when I look back at my job search, I am repeating an existing blog post. My bad.)

Barb, bless her heart, thought my job search entailed me looking up really cool jobs online, and then picking the best one.

Ha! I started a full-throtle bitch session on how hard it was to find a job. Poor Barb. I felt sorry for her having to listen to me rant.

I got back to the office from charity breakfast filled with gray haired middle-aged women. (Women who support refugees don't have time to dye their hair. C'mon! We have better things to do.) At work, I did work related stuff. Once in awhile, I'll check my personal email at work, and 95% I have nothing interesting or urgent. In my email, a friend invited me to a dress rehearsal of the Seattle Opera's Aida. I also had an email reminding me of a fundraiser for Maria Cantwell, the U.S. Senator from Washington. My arts and culture life collided with my political life.

Then, the greatest clash of all--I was invited to attend the Gala for the Apprenti program. As an apprentice. So I could sit with people and they could see the benefit of the program. I am used to being on the giving side of these things, not the receiving.

And yet. I replied to the invite, which the program director replied back: Do you want to bring your husband?

And let everyone see I am married to a doctor? Good god no. Why would anyone donate money to the cause that provides upper middle class white women the opportunity to return to the workforce in a professional position? When I told Jack I couldn't bring him, he said, "You don't think people will donate money to support ladies who lunch?"

I hope to god the dear, kind, true-blue believers at Apprenti do not ask me to give a speech. It would be the worse speech ever.

"I want to thank Apprenti for saving me from a life of volunteerism, benefit luncheons, and driving my kids places. Now that I have a real job, I can buy Prada shoes and not have to explain or discuss with my husband."

Or worse, "Hey all of you tech leaders! Without this program, I would not have been able to enter the workforce even though I have really cool work experiences and a top shelf education. Two of my college professors won Nobel Prizes in Economics. Two. You have a shortage of workers and I know of at least three women who are stay-at-home mom volunteer types who have MBA's from kickass colleges. I know an electrical engineer who is now a Zumba instructor! I know bankers and tech saleswomen and software people who are now yoga instructors! Maybe make your workplaces suck a little less--as in not make them white collar sweatshops--and have you HR people have a little decency to look outside of their little boxes and hire a former mom! Seriously. You are bringing this on yourselves. You are your own worst enemy. Hire more women, stop harassing the women you do have and pay them equitably." (mic drop.)

Yeah. Those speeches will get people to donate money.

Not.

So here I am, freaking out, reading my email at work instead of working. I have to decide between Aida and Maria Cantwell. Oh the conflicts I have in my ever-so-privileged and connected life! So I decide on Maria.

It was the best thing ever. It was a small group at a home on Capitol Hill. It was not unlike the dozens of fundraisers I did when I was running for school board where I'd talk to people at the party over hors d'oeuvres, give a little speech and answer questions. I was too fangirl, starstruck to talk to the Senator, but she talked to the group of less than thirty people.

How in the hell did I get invited to this event with this rarified air? It was unbelievable. The next morning, I woke up and remembered: when I ran for school board, I'd attend events of other politicians, and I'd make a contribution. I must have made twenty contributions to local political campaigns over the past two years. Why? Unfortunately, campaigns cost money and good people need strong campaigns to win. I know the game because I've been on the other side.

So that is the lesson for this week -- I've been on both sides of the same coin. I've been the donor, to causes and campaigns. And I've been a beneficiary of the largess of others, as a candidate and as an apprentice. It just so rare for me to be looking at both sides of this coin at the same time.

Nancy Pearl's Book List

See the Scar and a Job Offer

The other day, Jack had a young patient who was dying. (As he is a pediatrician, all of his patients are young.) While I can't talk about the kid as it would violate HIPPA (not that I would), I can talk about the dad since he was not the patient.

The man was a younger dad, and kind of rough. Some of the nurses were afraid of this guy. Jack was in the middle of rounds on the ICU floor, when this father caught Jack's attention when Jack entered his daughter's room.

"If you want to talk to me, sit your ass in the chair and look me in the eye," said the dad. The mom knew what was coming, and scurried out of the room.

Jack did as he was told. He sat in the chair and looked the dad in the eye.

"Five years ago," the father said, "I nearly died. I was riding in the backseat of a car, and when I woke up, I was in Harborview hooked up to a bunch of tubes. I was shot five times."

Jack listened.

"I was dead. The surgeons took out the bullets and put me back together," the dad said. The man opened his shirt and showed Jack a large scar that ran from his neck down past his belly.

"That's impressive," said Jack, a guy who has seen thousands of incisions in his life.

"I've seen death. I've seen other people die," the dad continued. "I am not afraid of it. Look me in the eye and tell me: Is my daughter going to die?"

Jack came home from work and told me the story.

"He wanted me to understand what he had experienced. He needed me to know what he had been through so he could trust me," Jack said. "He needed me to see the scar."

He also realized something else. "You need me to see your scar."

A few years ago, Jack had been guilty of some very bad husbanding. I understand that people screw up and make mistakes, but it is nearly impossible to heal when the person who has hurt you doesn't want to admit that they did. In addition to screwing up, Jack had been reluctant to embrace my suffering from his bad husbanding. I still need an apology, an apology that acknowledges the pain and anguish that he has caused me.

"You need me to see your scar," Jack said. I was just about to give up, throw in the towel, call it a hopeless cause, when he comes through with this. Why did it take an interaction with one of his patient's parent for him to get the message I had been trying to deliver for the past few years? Will this insight stick? Will he remember and adhere to this when he finally does see my scar? Do I want to even bother after banging my head against the wall for the past few years? Can I trust that he will truly see and accept it?

Perhaps the timing of Jack's insight correlated with a conversation I had with my manager the day before, a conversation where we discussed my future role and position, and a forthcoming job offer. Perhaps as I grow more financially independent, inspiration was easier for Jack to find.

Childcare "Professional"

After work, I was watering my orchids and the Boy told me about his day. He was home from school today for MLK Day. He did his Day of Service by helping watch our neighbor's four kids (ages 2 to 11) jump on our trampoline this morning. At the end of the day, he told me how he was better at with kids than he thought he was. He said the mom thought so, too.

"Maybe I could pay you to watch the kids for the rest of the day," the mom told the Boy.

"I am not a childcare professional," he said. "I am the next door childcare amateur."

I laughed at his story. "Claire-Adele is a childcare professional," the Boy told me. "She gets paid to watch kids." Claire-Adele has a job watching kids at a downtown health club.

"You are a childcare amateur," the Boy said to me. "You never got paid to watch kids." 

How depressing, I thought. My expression must have appeared on my face.

"But you are a really, really good amateur!" he said.

Oy. What makes a professional, just getting a paycheck? What about my years and years of unpaid, 24/7/365 experience? Doesn't that count because I wasn't paid? WTF? I've raised kids for seventeen years and I am a lower rank than my daughter who is seventeen? What gives? Or does "Mom" rank higher?

Addendum: I was talking to a friend of a friend at an event this evening who got divorced after 25 years. For most of her marriage up until it ended, she was a stay-at-home mom, full-time parent, primary parent, whatever. She gave up her career to raise her kids. The fact that she wasn't "working" during her marriage became a major issue in her divorce.

"Why is it someone can choose to be a nanny and that is a career, that they are professionals, but if a woman choose to raise her own kids, that isn't considered a job? What gives? Aren't both people doing essentially the same thing, except one is getting paid and the other isn't?"

I hadn't thought of that. Good point.

Friday!!!

When I got off the 74 bus downtown this morning, and I was walking up the massive hill to where my training was held, I thought, "Thank God it's Friday!" I don't think I've had that thought since I quit my job before Claire-Adele was born.

I finished my first full-time week of training this afternoon. This was the first week of nine-to-five* that I have completed in ages. When I ran for School Board, that was a 24/7 gig, so there was no celebration of the end of the week because it was one continuous flow of work. There were breaks here and there, but weekends were just as busy as weekdays, sometimes more so.

My friend Mary sent me a meme with a smiling woman that read "That moment when you realize that being a stay-at-home-mom means you never actually leave work." When I was** a stay-at-home-mom, I was always a stay-at-home-mom. Weekends meant the kids were home. While it might have been a break for them, it wasn't a break for me. To be honest, sometimes I looked forward to Mondays.

This week was a hard week, but a good week. My brain was crammed full of information. I thought it would be overload, but the opposite happened. It was like I was taking an SQL and Business Intelligence immersion class. The more I was there, the more everything made sense. I was feeling better when I left on this afternoon, but my brain was ready for a break.

Jack seems to be okay with me working so far. I thought this would be a bigger adjustment for him than me. He is used to me picking up all of the slack around the house and with the kids. This week, Jack shuttled kids to and from various lessons and appointments. This evening, Claire-Adele had to be someplace by 6:00 p.m. I told Jack I'd be home in time to take her.

"No," he said. "I need to take her. I told people at work I have to drive Claire-Adele and I need to leave by 5:00." Jack now has a legitimate reason to say no to extra work, and he is using it.

I even had good luck with buses today. The 74 buses run twenty minutes apart in the afternoon. I thought I was going to miss the 4:11, but it was running a few minutes late. I saw it coming and ran to catch it. Evan, my physical therapist, would have been proud of me! When I got off the bus in my neighborhood, I was smiling. I survived.

Maybe even thrived.


* Some days this week were 8:00 to 4:00. Same difference.
** That was the first time I used "was" in a sentence with "stay-at-home-mom."

Moms: Helping Humans Navigate the World Since the Beginning of Time

Earlier this week, I was at training for my new job. At lunch, I headed to the mall and stopped at a Panera where I waited in line for ten minutes behind a flock of moms with their toddler children. This was ironic since I was returning to the workforce after years of being a mom and then I was surrounded by stay-at-home moms getting kids' meals.

I watched one of the moms in particular. She had short dark hair like me, was wearing jeans, sneakers and a shirt that was not "Dry Clean Only." Her daughter was about three years old. She seemed like a regular mom, like the hundreds I've known since Claire Adele was born.

"You can pick out a cookie, but not the one with the candy," said the mom to her daughter. "What do you want to eat for lunch? Here are your choices....  You want to say hi to Hannah? You can go say hi but come right back." The girl tripped and fell, and the mom waited a second to see if her daughter was okay before jumping in for the rescue. The mom gave the girl her hand and helped her up.

The woman was constantly teaching her kid in the ten minutes I saw her even though it looked like a low-key interaction. The mother didn't seem to be pedantic, fussy or high-strung. She wasn't teaching her kid to read, to math, draw or play the piano. Instead, she was teaching her daughter to navigate the world.

It took me getting a day job and watching someone else do exactly what I did for so many years to realize how much work is involved in being a mother, how it is a constant flow of nurturing. At times, the flow of motherhood is a gentle trickle and other times it is catching the violent end of a firehose. I remember the crises and the tantrums where I was drinking from the firehose, but I forgot how much goes into the other 98.9% of managing the tiny everyday drops the come so slowly that we don't even notice what we are instilling in our kids.

I think about the Boy and Claire-Adele. When I was running for School Board two years ago, we had something new in our family: money for dinner. I would give each kid twenty bucks and tell them to walk to Kidd Valley and get something to eat. What did they have to learn in the course of their lives to be able to do this? They needed to know how to

-- Determine when they are hungry without throwing a tantrum,*
-- How to safely cross the street,

-- Read a menu to decide what they want to eat,

-- Stand in line at a fast food place,
-- Communicate so they can place their order,
-- Calculate how much the food will cost, pay and get change,
-- Say please and thank you to the people serving their food,
-- Wait patiently while their food was being prepared, and
-- Have decent table manners so as not to offend everyone in the establishment.

I never sat down with my kids and had a "How to Navigate a Restaurant" lesson, but along the way, they figured it out over through repetition and my guidance. That is pretty amazing, not only for the kids but for the moms of the world.

Now that my kids are older, they need me less in their grille. They are out and about on their own, as they should be. I have other friends with disabled kids who are as old as mine, but their kids still need help navigating the world. My kids still need help, just less than they did when they were toddlers.

Moms need better PR. Here is slogan with enough gravitas to be worthy of a bank ("We make money the old fashioned way. We earn it.") or the armed services ("The few. The Proud. The Marines.") Here it is: "Moms: Helping Humans Navigate the World Since the Beginning of Time." Imagine James Earl Jones or Catherine Zeta-Jones saying it. Moms would become the most respected job in the world,

I wish every mother a Happy Mother's Day!

* We are still working with the Boy on this one.

Time Traveling, or Brigadoon?

I started my Apprenti training for my new job two weeks ago. The schedule has been kind of light, as I am in a class by myself. Ha! Seriously, my position is a one-off, where I am not part of a larger cohort of a dozen people all taking the same classes. I am fine being a solo student--it just means my class schedule has gaps in it here and there.

Last week and this week, I dipped my toes into Business Intelligence and using relational databases. I had poked around relational databases on my own while I was looking for a job, but I lacked the context of how and why a company would use the information aside from tracking sales and marketing data, and cataloging Brittany Spears albums. I would do exercises on my own and sometimes the system would crash. Now when I am in a class, and the system crashes, I either learn

• what I did wrong, or 
• learn that I did nothing wrong and the system has a glitch. 

The classes keep me from getting stuck in an infinite glitch limbo, which is good.

Last night, the Apprenti program had a reception for the new apprentices. I was talking to one of the program sponsors about my career prior to this program. Before I was a stay-at-home-mom, I worked in consulting where we would use proprietary software to create our flat file databases and do the analysis. The strategic marketing consulting firm I worked for had two programmers who designed the number crunching tools, which then the analysts like me would use to program to crunch the numbers.

"That's not transferable," said one of the leaders of the organization. I had never thought of it that way. When I was working in a small and nimble firm, we didn't have time to wait for Tableau to be invented. If we wanted to do that kind of analysis, the firm created its own program to do exactly what it needed -- no more or no less.

Now, I feel like I entered a time machine, flying from 2000 when my daughter was born to 2017. I look at the tools now and think of useful they would have been back when I started working in 1991. Even looking at my volunteer work and the number crunching I did -- it would have been useful to have some of these business information tools available then.

The inverse side of time travel is the coma. I try not to think of myself as if I were in a Brigadoon like sleep for seventeen years and am waking up in a brand new world.

Training Days, the Bus and Kate Spade

Dear Readers,

Now that I am starting training for my job, my blog will likely be less attended to. My drafts might be rougher as I have other things to fill my days. I still plan to write, but probably less often.

Thanks for reading,
Lauren

+ + + + +

I had my first two days of job training this week. I started on my birthday. The training was good, and relatively easy. It was a course in Excel, which I have been using since 1990. The challenge for me was using the PC version of the software instead of the Mac version which still has pull-down menus. The PC version is all icons. My muscle memory was challenged a bit, but I survived. I also learned some new things, which was good.

The biggest part of the day was riding the bus downtown to "work." The first day, I felt like a visitor on the 74 Downtown, that I was going downtown for a meeting just for the day. The second day, I saw some people I knew who rode the bus the day before. There is a little "bus culture" where neighbors who ride the same route at the same time chat as they ride. Two women at my bus stop were talking before they got on the bus. Two other people who live in my neighbor compared notes on their kitchen remodels. When I rode the bus every day to work when I lived in Chicago, the morning routes were as quiet as a library and the evening routes had more discussion as co-workers might sit together and discuss the day.

I even looked (somewhat) like the other working women. Between my stop and the Starbucks at the University Bus tunnel, I spotted at least four Kate Spade bags. I had a Kate Spade bag, too! Mine was the color of a salmon, a peach and a construction cone whereas the other women's bags were more subdued maroons and grays, but still I matched! My other Kate Spade bag is bright blue, but hey. They might have bought their's full retail whereas I bought last year's less popular model at Nordstrom Rack for half price.

The training I had was "Mentor Led" training, which meant the training team gave me a curriculum and several resources to learn the material: videos, PDFs to read, and exercises. The instructor was available to answer questions. She welcomed interruptions. She was friendly and easy to get along with. During lunch, I stopped by the downtown Seattle Public Library and visited their gift shop, which sells books for $2 and all kinds of stationary, bookmarks and bags. The store is a gem and run by volunteers. ("Why are you buying books at a library when you can get them for free?" you might be thinking. I don't have an answer other than I like books and this is cheaper than my overdue fines at times.)

Before I began my training, I thought I would be leaving the world I know behind. In the weeks before my training, I had been cramming in as many social events as I possibly could, fearing I'd never see my friends ever again. I met everyone I knew for lunch, coffee and walks. I felt like getting a job would be like moving to Mars and I'd be alone like Mark Watney in The Martian.

Ha! Instead, I was going to the center of town with thousands of other people. Where did I get this idea that working would be lonely? When I worked in St. Louis, I was the only person on my team in that office. My colleagues were in Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and New Jersey. I traveled a lot to meet them. We talked on the phone, but I had no one to eat lunch with, which was a drag after a year. Jack and I had just moved to St. Louis from Chicago, and I hadn't yet made any friends. In Chicago, I would occasionally meet friends for lunch and after work when I was wasn't eating with my co-workers. In St. Louis, I had no friends. Work wasn't lonely. St. Louis was, at least for the first year we lived there.

I realized work will add a new realm to my life, not take away what I already have. It will be different and an adjustment to be sure, but my life is changing anyway as my kids grow.

Time for me to grow, too.

My orange Kate Spade bag. It's not exactly subtle. I don't think anyone will ever purse snatch this baby.

My blue Kate Spade bag. This one isn't as attention getting as my orange one.