Fed Up to Freed Up

This month, we have been revisiting and updating everyone on old posts. About a year ago I wrote this post about being tired of my job and my husband being gone all summer. Fast forward a year and I would have written the exact same blog post. There isn’t a single thought or frustration from last summer that I didn’t also have this summer. I could feel my work life endlessly repeating the cycle of being promised more but then having it taken away because of staffing issues. And my husband was gone a lot again, but the one bright spot was that his school program was coming to an end and he wouldn’t have to be gone any longer. After the first week in August he would be home for good.

But still I felt dissatisfied. As I talked about in my last post, I talked to my manager about how unhappy I was at work and he’d come up with something a little different for me but he wouldn’t commit to a specific start date and while he was adding a lot more responsibility, he wouldn’t promise me any more money. I felt like I was trying too hard to make it work when it wasn’t really what I wanted anyway. I was forcing a square peg into a round hole. The job was not going to change, so I had to change. 

A few days before my husband came home I was talking with my mother in law about a trip she and my husband had planned for when he got back. Spontaneously I said I should just quit my job so that I could come with them. I meant it as a joke, but as soon as the thought was verbalized, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What if I just quit? Even if the proposed changes my manager offered took place, I had still been certain that I did not want to work with my company for more than another year at the most. We had a bunch of money saved up, and I had barely spent any quality time with my husband in the last year. He was finally going to be home for at least 2 months straight, and the thought of going to a job I hated every day while he was here seemed like such a waste of time. 

So I spoke with him about my crazy thought and he told me it wasn’t crazy at all. He said I was never going to look back on my life and wish I’d worked more. And then, still needing reassurance, I spoke to my lovely flower friends, and they wholeheartedly supported my plan. I was shocked and incredibly blessed to have such an amazing support system around me. I’d never been one to neglect the adult, responsible things and take a leap of faith like this, but I felt so loved that I knew I could do it.

So here I am, two weeks into unemployment and I haven’t missed work one single time. My husband and I have been having amazing sex, and we’ve already been on 2 awesome trips. We just got back from a week in Banff National Park and it was probably the most beautiful place I have ever seen. When we started driving into the Canadian Rockies, I started to tear up because it was so breath taking and I couldn’t believe I was lucky enough to see it. I had to stop my husband in the middle of a hike where we had sparkling glaciers all around and thank him for being the kind of husband that loved me well enough to take on my unemployment with joy and go adventuring with me without skipping a beat. I don’t know what is ahead of us, which is can be scary, but right now I am more joyful than I have been in a long long time, and that is worth celebrating.