Today is my last day in my current job. I know I’ve changed jobs more than once since I started this blog, but this is a bigger change than most. Bigger than any since I left the massage college & clinic I used to run (as manager, not owner) back in February 2000... I’m not leaving the public service yet, but I am moving departments. And I suppose when you’ve been in the public service for twenty or thirty years and worked in 10 different departments, leaving one isn’t that big a deal. But this is the only one I’ve worked in, and I’ve been here for over five years. It’s a large department, and so many people stay here their whole working lives. They move from one area to another (or in some cases they don’t), but never really consider moving on to another department. It is quite well paid and has good conditions (I’m actually going to be slightly worse off under the agreement in my new department, although they will maintain my current salary), as well as being large enough to facilitate many moves.
But still – it’s not my cup of tea, and I’ve really only stayed as long as I have because of the break for maternity leave and then coming back part-time – it is a lot harder to find part-time positions than full-time ones.
So, today is my last day. It feels weird. Because I moved to this area only 6 months ago, having hovered around the same area for the previous four-and-a-half years, I don’t really know the people here all that well. But there will be some who I’ll miss working with – who I might have quite enjoyed working with if I’d stayed – and there will be people who I still see from my old area (a lot of them are still in this same building, though not all) who I’ll miss.
I should read back over my old journal from before I got pregnant with Liam, from the first 12 months I spent working here, and see if I wrote about my career ambitions back then. In that first twelve months I really enjoyed the work. I was on a steep learning curve, and I spent over six of those months ‘acting’ at a higher level. Had I not gone on maternity leave and come back part-time I would expect to have been at that level long since. My director said as much to me last year at my last performance appraisal. As it is, I really have no desire to go back to that point.
Then, I think, I was enjoying building networks, learning my way around, developing my knowledge in various areas. I think I was seeing the work I was doing and networks I was building as laying down the foundation for future promotions. I had hoped to be at the EL1* level permanently before I went on mat leave, but then right around the time I got pregnant the money dried up and there was a recruitment freeze. When my acting ran out, the area I’d been acting in wanted to transfer me permanently (at my real level, not the acting level) but the area who ‘owned’ me wouldn’t agree, because they wouldn’t be allowed to recruit someone to replace me.
Anyway, so back then I think I might have been thinking along the lines of staying the public service for quite a while. Not in this department – I was never going to make a career out of being here – but moving around to others. I wasn’t planning, at that stage, on doing the Masters, although I had always had further study as an idea at the back of my mind. I also wasn’t planning on writing romances, but I of course I had planned – only half jokingly – to write my first novel while I was on maternity leave with Liam. So I guess I was even then hoping that I would eventually be able to leave the public service to make a career out of writing. But I’m not sure how serious I was about that then.
Since then I’ve gotten very serious about it, but has it become any more realistic a goal? Doubtful, I suspect. So should I give up this dream, and just enjoy my weekends with my family, stop trying to fit two careers in around parenting, and focus on this new public service job? It’s a writing job, after all, not fiction writing, but should still be rather more interesting than any of the writing I’ve been doing in my various positions in this department, even writing and editing the internal e-magazine, which I did for a long time. I’m sure that it will be challenging and skills-expanding. You know, the truth is, if they would let me work 16 hours a week – 2 days – I might consider it. Of course, if they would let me do that I would also have more time to spend on extra-curricular writing without it impacting so much on my family life. That’s what I was doing when I first came back from mat leave, and it really was much more bearable.
How do people spend their whole working lives doing 35-40 hours a week on jobs that don’t inspire them? How do they survive with the years stretching out ahead of them in which working will take the main part of their time? I mean, I get it if they are doing something they love and are motivated by – even if they then do 60 or 80 hours a week (not that that would ever be me) but if not… and especially for people with children. We really want to have another child, and if that works out we actually think we’d like another one after that. But there is part of me that knows that the more children we have the more we will be feeling these time pressures. We want to be able to be there for them after school, to go with them to sports of whatever activities they choose, to spend time helping out in each of their classrooms. Not to mention that we want to be at home with each kid before they start school, we don’t want them to be in formal childcare at all, if possible. And the more kids we have, the more time all that will take – which would be fine, if it weren’t for the fact that the more kids we have the more money we will need to support them, and therefore the more work we will need to do. I hate the idea of deciding how many children to have based on economics, but it may work out that way.. Then again the way it’s been going that may all be a moot point, we might not get to choose at all.
But back to the career ambitions. I’m sure that part of my current ambivalence to writing is to do with the fact that I haven’t really taken the revision of the novel in hand, and procrastination always makes me miserable. Part of it is to do with the fact that it is Spring, and I really want to be outside getting things happening in the garden. Back when we lived in a brand new house in Ngunnawal (on the other side of Canberra) gardening took up a big chunk of the time that could have been used for writing, but I didn’t mind back then. I did bits of writing here and there, but didn’t have a routine of writing – or only journal/letter writing, which somehow is easier to fit in without a strict routine (especially when you are sans kids, which of course we were back then). We had no garden to begin with, just dirt and clay, so getting a garden happening was a priority. Plus we were filled with dreams of semi-self sufficiency, so we got the vegie gardens happening first, then the native shrubs to attract birds, and the apple tree of course. And then the chooks.
And now all those feelings are coming back.
If there is one regret I have about my past it is that I didn’t do the work to establish myself as a writer (or establish that it was never going to happen) back when I had so much more time – back before children. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to put off becoming a mother any longer than I did – Liam was born when I was 30, and time’s getting on now with no second child on the way – but I wish I’d done more in that time before he was born. Of course I was doing other things – working long hours, saving money, travelling, growing a garden. But I also spent a lot of time doing nothing – sitting around watching TV, day dreaming, doing I don’t know what.
Then again, regrets are a waste of energy. I was doing and learning and imagining things then that have contributed to making me the person I am now. But I don’t want to look back in another decade and wish that I had spent more time establishing myself as a writer now. Of course, I also don’t want to look back and wish I had spent more time with Liam…
So do I have any resolution here? Not really, aside from the fact that a 6 week holiday at the beach would be nice. I think maybe I need to cut myself some slack, let the gardening happen, let my body continue to recover from all the illness of the last few months (did I mention that I got a cold, right before going back to work last week? And I haven’t fully shaken it yet – what is with my body this year?) and just not push myself so hard. But then I think I really only have Sundays for solid writing now. After this week I won’t have Wednesdays anymore. I can’t cut it back any further or I won’t be doing any. But the days are getting longer, and though I will be working more days in my new job, they will be shorter days. So maybe I can enjoy my afternoons with Liam in the garden, and feel refreshed enough to focus on my revising novel on Sundays and the odd evening.
And, I have a new job to begin next week, and they do say a change is as good as a holiday.
*EL1=Executive Level 1 – a somewhat meaningless term that just means the next level up from the top APS level. I think a lot of the more heavy responsibility starts at the EL2 level (above which you get only the SES, Senior Executive Service), which I hope never to experience.
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