work-a-day mom

This month's unschooling "blog carnival" is on the subject of unschooling parents engaged in gainful employment, and I thought I'd chime in:

Every morning around 430 George gets up and makes me coffee. He's sweet like that. Now that it's turned cold, he also builds up the fire in the woodstove. We sit in bed together, drinking coffee for about half an hour, and then its up and breakfast and put a lunch together and find the mp3 player and if its Monday I grab the week's laundry to leave in my locker and its out the door I go, to change into my plaster-covered work clothes in the restroom at work, before clocking in.

This is where I work, if you're interested and/or have a hankerin' for some really fancy crown moulding:

http://www.castdesignsupply.com/

George's sweetness in the mornings carries me through the first part of the day, and often the whole day. Most of my coworkers aren't terribly sweet, so the thought of dear, sweet George at home with the kids is a kind of balm when the negativity starts to peak. Its amazing to me how negative some people can be. I'm not talking about cynicism, per se. Its more of an attitude of "I just don't give a shit". About everything. Today one fellow was complaining that the preacher at his church gave a sermon on "Love" - went on and on about it. The other guys commiserated: "You shoulda walked out." I stood there thinking about George, curled up against my shoulder just that morning saying "I love you" and "Thanks for being nice to me." Sweet.

Sweet was the first compliment I ever gave George. I remember him wriggling and glowing with embarrassed pleasure. He's still sweet. He's been fretting about all the things he can't do now that he's hurt his shoulder again (did I tell you? He slipped and fell on his bad shoulder and its hurting again. Bummer!) and he's kind of fallen into a rut with the kids so I've been helping him and them think of projects and games and activities and just Things to Do Together. Especially indoor things, since its chilly and damp and its a hassle to keep both woodstoves going (house and barn). This week I've come home to sweetness and smiles. Not as many dishes are getting washed, but I'll help him catch up on the weekend. I'll take smiles over dishes.

Okay, to be utterly truthful, most of the time I'll take smiles over dishes. There are days, though, when I come home and shudder. Not that I was a picture of tidiness when I was the at-home parent! But there are days when I'm worn out with Doing - casting and cleaning and patching and cleaning and sanding and cleaning (plaster is messy!) - and the idea of coming home to wade through the detritus of an unschooling day and have to wash my own coffee cup is enough to make me shudder. Some days I sensibly take an emergency chocolate break before I go home, but sssshhhhh! don't tell on me!

I'm glad to have been on the other side, as it were - to have been the one at home. It helps me to envision the happiness that led up to the scraps of pink and yellow and blue cupcake wrappers all over the house, the pile of muddy shoes, the trail of sugar leading halfway to the stairs (or maybe from the stairs), the total absence of spoons. I'm lucky that way. I can piece together the stories from the scraps and smears and random comments.

I'm lucky, too, that I had time to absorb all the sweetness that comes from living an unschooling life. Not that every day was cupcakes. Not that I was (or am) always the sweetest person in the world. But to live in a home where sweetness is valued! To live surrounded by love, sometimes inconvenient, sometimes stuck all over with juice and cat hairs, sometimes grumpy or awkward or just plain tired, but love, nonetheless. It makes it easier for me to go to work, just knowing I'm supporting that kind of life for the kids and George.

Most of the time I enjoy my job, even if I'm not always thrilled with my coworkers. I like being on my feet most of the day, and I like creating things. So much of what I do at work comes down to attention to detail and dexterity - I love that. Its satisfying. I like the fact that so much of what I do teases at the very edge of what I already know - I'm always learning! I love that part. I love the fact that the Ops mgr runs up to me in a panic and blurts out questions like "do you think you could cast xyz in some material you've never even heard of before?" I love saying Yes! to those sorts of questions. So I have no idea what he's talking about! I'll learn!

I really like working for a small business, too. That's something I've done before and it fits my skills and lifestyle and quirky ideology all at once. I certainly can't support small local businesses by buying from them very often! The owner and ops mgr are sometimes amused and nonplussed at my starry eyed idealism. I come by it honestly, though - my parents and brother are all idealists (yeah, I'm on to you, dad) in their own ways.

I love the fact that I can go home to a family where optimism and enthusiasm are part of the daily life. I remember the homeschooling days of trying to shove Ray into learning, and the school days of homework and stress and above all, aversion to learning. That was ugly. That's the kind of attitude I run into with my coworkers! An aversion to learning and trying new things. Even when one of the guys gets excited about learning something new he has to temper it in front of the other guys - shrug and find something to complain about. Now and then one of them will share a little enthusiasm with me. They know I'm safe, in a way. I still jump up and down and clap my hands when I get to try something big and new and impossible.

I miss my days at home sometimes, but I'm fascinated by the new relationships developing between George and the kids. He's still getting his feet under him, in some ways - his troublesome shoulder combined with his guitar making keep throwing kinks in the wheels. But he's figuring out how to do what he does and be a full time Dad, too. That's exciting. In a way, its part of what makes the whole having to go to work thing more than simply a chore I'm slogging through for the sake of the family. We're all learning to do and be differently than we were before. It only looked impossible from the other side.

OMG I'm the Breadwinner!

Its been a long few months, but things seem to be settling down. I'm certainly not anywhere near as stressed out as I was this past fall, thank goodness!

Work is going okay. Turns out no-one in the whole shop knew a blessed thing about plaster, really, so I've been turning that around, looking things up online and asking "well duh" sorts of questions like "can we have a thermometer for the Water?" The boss thinks I'm some sort of genius . Too bad he can't pay me a "genius" wage! But at least I feel like I'm helping a small business get itself together in a serious way as well as helping my family in a serious way.

There was a little friction early on with the other employees - three rednecks with chronic drug problems and an older guy who used to drive buses and has no other skills. The rednecks were a bit nonplussed at the idea of a girl doing a man's job, so I came out to them, which actually helped quite a bit. At least it gave them a different box to put me in. Going out on an installation job helped, too - they expected me to balk at the idea of going up to the top of the scaffolding, but as far as I was concerned, it was inside! Woooo hooo! I could hold on to the damn Wall even if my vertigo acted up. Compared to working on the roof of my house it was a piece of cake. So I stood up there telling stories about building a house without knowing my ass from a hole in the ground until they were laughing so hard they could barely keep their tobacco in their mouths and that was the end of the issues with them.

The bus driver is more of a problem since he was, before I came along, promoted to shop foreman. Of course, he was promoted because he can't install for love or money and the rest of the guys could fix most of his casting mistakes out in the field one way or another. So here comes Meredith, who actually seems to get the hang of this plaster thing (its soooooo not rocket science - its not even cheese making!) Around the time its starting to be clear that I can cast circles around this guy (just let me get the R9 mold) the owner of this circus finally manages to hire a new operations manager and promptly tells Busdriver he's not the foreman of anything any more. Naturally, Busdriver takes this out on me by first being a general bastard, then insulting me full volume in front of everyone else, then claiming to the boss that I harassed him. Fortunately the boss didn't buy a word of it and started sending Busdriver back out on installation jobs (just for the patching) leaving me to take over the shop however I like.

Its a moderately entertaining job, as jobs go. I get to be on my feet most of the day, which I like, and I get to make things all day long, which is also okay, even if it is mostly crown molding for people with more money than taste. The best part is that the place is kind of a shambles, so I spend a lot of time saying "I know there's a better way to do this" and then figuring it out. I'm good at the figuring it out part. Most of the time, the tools I need are actually somewhere in the shop, its just that no-one knows what *that* box of junk is for. It just seemed too important to throw away.

How did a business get into this state, you ask? Lemme tell ya! Once upon a time there was a guy named Steve who was your basic geek with his own True Love and successful small business. He got cancer and sold the thing at a loss and this other guy named Tim lucked out and got a whole business on the cheap. And I mean everything - including a bunch of illegal alien employees who he foolishly got rid of, leaving absolutely no-one who knew anything at all about plaster.

Tim isn't the sharpest tool in the box. He's a veteran of the Iraq invasion, which isn't saying anything one way or the other, but he was a low level officer in Military Intelligence. Go ahead and laugh, he fits. He went to West Point but on a - oh, wait, are you done laughing yet? put your coffee down, there's another one coming. He went on a golf scholarship. Yes. He really did. His favorite story about West Point was that he was supposed to memorize "really hard stuff" (the headlines of the New York Times) every morning before inspection but found that if he got his shoes shiny enough, no-one bothered to ask him anything. Yup. Military Intelligence. Anyway, the West Point thing gives him connections, so that's how he was able to buy a business in the first place. Its his Chance.

Tim's first operations manager (since he at least has the sense to know he's not the sharpest tool in the box) was sort of a disaster and quit just before I arrived on the scene. He had some sort of brain injury - another vet - and even though he took a course of some kind on plaster casting could neither reproduce what he'd learned or teach it to anyone else. Utter shambles. The new o.m. is much better. He's been to college but, like me, would rather work on the physical and vaguely artistic side of things. In his case, cabinetry and painting interiors. He's also done photo processing. So he knows how to use a hammer, paintbrush and a thermometer, which is good enough for me. He also has a quirky sense of humor and appreciates mine.

And that's about all there is to say about work for the moment. George is settling in to the stay at home dad thing. He's getting a lot more guitars done, that's for sure, now that he's not having to worry about paying the bills. So that's good. I've shifted my energy, in terms of quilts, to entering various quilt competitions. I've done a few small quilt shows, but I just got a bunch of slides shot so I can enter big shows. The one weird thing is they (the competitions) have themes, so I can't just send any quilt to any show. I have to find one that fits the theme. Lovely.

The crow and the pitcher, back up at the top, there, are my own personal "theme" for last year. I call it "The Nature of Abundance". Forget pessimism, throw some rocks in the cup and make it full.