Pressing Pause

My mom’s post made me laugh. First, despite a certain dedication to the online panda cam – she does not spend endless hours on the computer. She’s never at home when I call, always out working, at appointments, at the grocery store and more and more, out of town visiting her father. Secondly, “fast-paced demanding career” makes my job sound much more important than it is, though when (in disbelief) I read the phrase aloud to my co-worker, she actually agreed with it.

So maybe there is some truth to it. Certainly my weeks fly by in a haze of conference calls and emails, fires to be put out and coworkers to pacify. To be such a presence in my life, it certainly started very innocuously. Like my mom – I am exactly like her despite early resistance – I went to college, met a boy, fell in love and got married. Unlike my mom, who early on joyously settled in to homemaking, I became a working girl and now, nine years later, am a working woman.

The crazy here is that I have always hated work. It cuts into my day and requires me to be awake hours before my choosing, with clean hair no less. This dislike, however, does not affect my work; I take it very, very seriously. As a person who aims to please, I spend hours making sure my work is perfect and even more hours worrying that it might not be. When things do go wrong, I call my mother and her advice is always the same, “Fire someone.” It’s meant to be a joke, a little phrase to make me get some perspective. It hasn’t yet, but it does make me think. Think about the fact that I’ve become someone who checks her Blackberry at stoplights. It’s not all doom and gloom though. I love the people I work with, my business trips border on glamorous and I make good money.

These days it’s with equal parts dismay and delight that I can say while I still hate working, I love my job. It affords me a life I really like and it is only when I am extremely tired (overwrought, my mom would say) that I think about the downsides. I examine the numbers beyond the paycheck and the frequent flier miles. What do I mean? Well, with this job, dinner gets pushed back to 9p, friends get seen once a month, families are visited twice a year and babies are delayed until my mid (maybe late?) thirties. On the day-to-day, I’m okay with these figures and so is my husband. So we go and go and go. But some days I’d really like to just press pause. Maybe rewind. Maybe push stop, and play something new.