Life lesson resume

Its time for me to get back into the workforce. For two reasons, one financial and secondly, for my own personal growth. I feel like its hard to make that leap though... even though its not a huge leap. So instead of throwing myself into reasearching and re-learning marketing, I have been obsessing about my inability to dive in. Why am I not able to just embrace this and go with it? I have two freelance opportunities, essentially being handed right to me, and I'm... well spending my free time on this blog. What's up with that?

In talking with a friend last night, I came to the realization that the clutter in my head is preventing me from moving forward. I'm distracted by all the things that have occurred in my life over the past two years and the ripple affect of those things is what is consuming me.

I tend to steer myself to what's familiar. That's where I'm comfortable, secure, confident. When I had my career, I was familiar with marketing services. I understood the business and the people that I was marketing. Being away from that for 8 years, has made me less confident about my abilities to market and my brain migrates to that insecure zone. What's familiar to me now is motherhood, being a wife, surviving and not surviving cancer. I actually feel like my life experiences could qualify me to work as a social worker in a cancer hospital or at a coordinator at a funeral home. Helping those that survive, or helping those who need to put the non-survivors to eternal rest. I'd take the stuff that I learned in college over the life lessons that I've had over the past few years.

Teacher gifts

My kida have spent the past nine months in their classrooms. and their teachers have been great. I'm very appreciative of the effort that they've put forth to educate my girls, but I'm not in a position to express that gratitude in term of an expensive gift. So today I thought I'd spend the day working with the girls on homeade teacher gifts. Their idea was easy bake oven cookies... which only produced 4 cookies for your efforts. With 4 girls each taking turns trying to make batter, that amounted to less then 1/4 cup... I was really rethinking why we were doing this in the first place and trying to figure out when I could get away to buy a few gift cards.

What you can and cannot do

Today I bundled branches from limbs that we'd trimmed ourselves during this past weekend. I did this because we cannot really afford to have our trees professionally trimmed. Its one of those things that, if we can do it ourselves, just do it and save the money. That being said, I finished the job while waving to the house cleaner that used to clean our house. She was at the neighbors, and she used to clean here. That was when we could afford that expense, now, well, we can't. I caught myself having a little pity party, wishing that we could have paid someone to trim the trees, and clean the house, but we can't, and that's that. If I were working full time, we could, but I want to continue to focus on the kids, and our personal lives as long as I can, therefore, I'm ok with doing it ourselves... Also, because I'm focused on our family and our personal lives, I was able to get the kids after school and drive to meet a friend for dinner. She'd moved away 5 years ago, but comes up annually to visit her mom. We try to get together 1/2 between her mom's house and mine (about an hour's drive for each). Her girls and mine are so great together, and she and I can always pick up exactly where we left off.
If I were working, life would get in the way of these encounters. But because I'm able to focus on life, important encounters like this happen. What a wonderful evening we had. I was reminded once again how important friendships are, particularly those who've shared big life moments with you, both in your life and theirs.