Staying home.
I’m not sure where to start on this one. This thought. This voiced path. Sometime in the past five years or so, things needed to give, but weren’t. I was white-knuckling it in a career I had loved for a decade that no longer loved me back. He was in school full time, the babies were in daycare full time, and we were too loaded up on calendar beeps to realize how lost we were. We took hold of the rigging and sailed through storm after storm, looking for shore or calm seas. Holding hope for one another when we each took turns forgetting how to believe in something better.
Three years ago, a career hop over with less white-knuckling and more family time, but so much still misaligned, the team went on a field trip. To a farm. Early morning. Misty sunshine. Dew on food and birds waking in the forests edging the line between river and field. I took a deep breath for the first time in millions of moments and that was it.
The dishonesty grew within the “honest” brand I was asked to lead and I couldn’t abide it any further. My heart would not let me play a dishonest game. My bones needed the soil and the light. After twenty years of work (with one three month stint of unemployment), I needed to seriously change it up. From pitches and presentations where clothes and hair mattered - from spreadsheets and meetings and meetings and meetings - to seeds and sowing, harvesting and sharing. I wanted a farm of my own sort and I wanted it now.
That was December 2019. A week before we all got Covid.
I won’t try to summarize the journey from then to now in a single sitting. I will say that, so far, it has ended up with all of us staying home. He now works entirely from home. I don’t fulfill a wage-earning role. Our children are no longer in daycare (by age), but also are not attending institutionalized schooling. They unschool and I am here as they need me.
We never planned this part. We wouldn’t trade this part. This is so much what we longed for. This is what we never would’ve dreamed of.
So don’t be surprised if, on occasion, part of what works for us waxes home learning versus romance or household or whatever else. Because that, too, works for us.