Wishes
Well it’s over.
I’m mostly sad; I went back to work and Ronan goes to day care on Tuesday. It’s been a while since I posted, but we were so caught up with moving and then waiting for Internet access and then going to Buffalo and then the job started.
Ronan has no idea that he’s going to day care, and frankly, he’ll deal with it better than I will. I had my first full week of work and the students come back on Tuesday. I have no idea what I’m doing but that seems to be okay for now.
I’m full of wishes right now. I wish I had been able to make enough money online to live off of the income. I made enough to be proud of – I’m in debt but not irrecoverably in debt – but I would have liked to have worked on projects of my choosing.
I wish my old job wasn’t so oppressive and ignorant, so I could have gone back there without feeling like I would be a wage slave. The new job is much more low-key but I’m not exactly doing what I want or what I’m trained for. Hopefully I can work something out. Plus there’s no tuition for Ronan, and I can’t stand the thought of not being there with him if I stay in teaching.
I wish I had figured out that I want to teach college when I was eighteen, so I could have finished my PhD then and not be trying to figure out how to do it without my family eating Ramen noodles for five years. I will now probably wait until I retire to get that History PhD.
I wish I had the stomach for high-paying, soul-killing jobs so I could have provided for my family so we didn’t have to live in outer Brooklyn. The apartment’s nice but the neighborhood isn’t and the early morning trucks are starting to drive me crazy.
I wish I had more time to spend with Ronan. I will be at grad school on Thursdays and Fridays, so I will see him Wednesday night and then not until Saturday morning. It’s only for a semester but I can’t stand not seeing him for so long. This morning I felt like he had changes so much this week, and I wasn’t there to see it. It’s probably not true, but it was heartbreaking.
I wish I was a better husband. I have been grumpy and moody with the new job and the move, and being completely exhausted on top of that hasn’t helped. Terry’s tired and exhausted too, and while we had a lovely vacation, one overnight trip in sixteen months doesn’t make for a lot of alone time together. I feel like we’ve been in crisis mode for months.
Some of these wishes may come true next year, and Terry keeps reminding me that I don’t work in a coal mine. But with quitting my old job, Terry losing her job, finding a new job, moving, and having a kid on top of that, I told Terry we should get divorced and remarried and then have a second kid so we could hit all the major stress events before the end of the year. (We’re not getting divorced. Or having a second kid.)
I’m gonna go take a nap.