Being back at work after maternity leave has been rough. Not just because of trying to balance everything, but because work is now different and it isn’t even me. Literally, my job is different. I had a set of tasks to do weekly, then one day I went into labor. Eight weeks later, I go back to work and things have all changed. We had a new full time employee hired on, leaving work scarce for me. No longer do I have a steady stream of invoices to work on.
To say this sucks is an understatement. I thrive on large workloads. I love having piles of things to do and keeping busy and using my brain. When that’s not the case, I get bored and, therefore, lazy. I’ve been given things here and there to do, but it all feels like shit work. Filing and scanning, for example. OR, conversely, I’m given a proper task to do but only half trained and when I need to ask questions the person I need is never there or completely fails to give me even 5 minutes of undivided attention. It quite honestly feels like I took 8 weeks off and was relegated to starting over when no one else here has ever had that pulled on them. The new person has more work to do than I do. I’m over paid and under utilized. I’m miserable.
I’ve contemplated quitting but there’s that pesky health insurance issue. Also, retirement benefits, which I guess is something I have to plan for now. So I try to make my day go by as much as I can alternating work with pure procrastination because I don’t know what else to do. If I work too hard/too fast I’ll end up with nothing to do at all. And I worry that they’ll realize they don’t have enough for me and they’ll use it as an excuse to let me go. And while I’m miserable, this isn’t the worst place I’ve worked so I know things could be much worse.
I end up daydreaming a lot. About gardening and canning and baking. I think about knitting and shop online for yarn and fiber (never buying because who am I kidding? I don’t have much time anymore for knitting what I already have). I think about being a stay at home mom even though I know that’s not the answer for me. I look at the internet for far too many craft project ideas. I dream about building a house. About having a farm and chickens and goats and sheep. About living in a big city with a cool apartment.
I saw a quote once about how what you dream about while working is what you’re supposed to be doing with your life. That’s probably true if you’re thinking about a different kind of job, but I’m not sure that applies to a serial hobbyist like myself. Unless I can monetize my hobbies, at least. And I’m not sure how to do that to make a proper living.
