Work

Of course a gratitude list would do something sneaky and add the word “work” to the mix. Fine. I like a challenge. Sometimes. If the mood strikes correctly. I have a complicated relationship with work, not because I’m lazy. Because I’m not. Anyone who saw how much river rock, black plastic, and dirt were around this house and are now gone knows. I grew up in a home, at least early on, where both parents worked outside the home. Mom was an RN and dad was a surgeon. They were busy folks. And when I was a teenager, Dad worked a lot–clinic hours, surgery days, being on call. When he wasn’t doing those things, he was resting or fishing.

I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to be when I grew up. I did know that I wanted my life at home to be more important than my life at a job. While I took measures to become a school teacher and eventually began the path to be a college professor, it became really clear to me that those career paths and having a life at home and an identity separate from those paths would be almost impossible for me to achieve. Some can do it and I SALUTE them. As a graduate student and as an adjunct, I remember grading papers in bed late at night, on the weekends, whenever I could to get the job done. This was definitely moving the needle in the wrong direction.

During one summer break, when I had to find temp work because adjuncts don’t eat in the summer unless they’re working somewhere else, I got a job at a water company in the West Valley of Yakima. My days ended by 4:30pm. I had every minute of the rest of the day to myself. What a revelation. Was it a lot of money? No. But this was the first time I had a taste of that work/life balance I had dreamed of. After that, I didn’t do adjunct teaching any more.

After my mom passed, I moved out of Yakima to Walla Walla and a job as an administrative assistant at Whitman College. I had office work experience, so that was no problem. I understand the culture of higher ed. No sweat. And while I took a significant pay cut from what I’d been making at the water company, I had an even sweeter work/life balance. My apartment building’s front door to the front door of the Memorial building was a five minute walk. I could sleep in until 7am. I was home before 5:15pm. I could walk to the grocery store. I could walk to Pioneer Park. I could (after a couple of months 😛 ) walk to my boyfriend’s house. All of this was within just a matter of minutes from my place.

Maybe that’s where I get into trouble. I conflate jobs with work. I mean, it’s easy to do right? But I think for the purpose of this little exercise, I’d like to differentiate. Jobs are the things I did/do to allow/pay for/make possible (I’m having a hard time articulating it) my work. Now please don’t misunderstand me, jobs are where I meet some of the most fabulous human beings. A person spends more waking hours with their co-workers than their families and it’s truly wonderful when those people are good, funny, wickedly smart, playful people. They make going to a job more than tolerable but a delight.

Work and a job only overlapped for me once and that was as the business owner of Shop Eleven. I have never worked so hard and loved any work quite so much, but the work/life balance was not quite right. I had the shop opened on Saturdays and missed out on that weekend time with Bryan. When I closed the shop, I very deliberately chose to do few if any markets or jobs that would encroach on our weekends together again. That time was sacrosanct.

Work that fills me with gratitude is the work that I know makes a difference to others, to me, in an intensely meaningful way, and I’m deliciously exhausted at the end of the day. Usually, that takes its form in my backyard garden, baking for others, cooking a meal for a lot of guests, creating (jewelry, paintings, pottery, writing). Preparing for and executing the May fundraiser for our Mom’s scholarship is exhausting every time and I LOVE IT. This is the work I appreciate. Maybe I’m trepidatious to find a job that is the work I love because I fear it will affect the work/life balance I cherish.

Tip jar: https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Lubbers-1