Today is my last weekday as a non-working human.
(Note: I use that term “non-working” with a heavy accent of sarcasm.)
I have only been doing very scattered freelance jobs as a web designer since I became unemployed in February of 2018. In April of that year, Mom had a seizure while driving that made her lose her license and I had to drive back and forth between here and Knoxville twice a week for 6+ months to get her to/from work/doctors etc. That ended in early 2019, at which point I had spent enough time with her to know that she was not going to be able to work much longer. She ended up being forced into early retirement later that year by which time she had also ended up having 4 more wrecks. So, obviously the next move was to get her to stop driving (harder than you would have thought), and move here which we did early 2020. This was just in time for the pandemic and for her to be diagnosed with End Stage Renal Failure and requiring dialysis 3 times a week. So, for most of 2020 I was Mom's dog walker and taxi driver until she decided this "retirement" thing was not any sort of fun and she quit dialysis to enter hospice and was finally free of pain and stress and worry in January of this year.
I'm only working 20 hours a week at first because I do have other obligations that require my time like volunteer positions with my kid's teams and freelance/personal projects I started during the last 3 years. They do hope to add more hours to that as needed though and so that 20 may grow a bit.
It will be nice to finally be able to contribute financially to the family, although we are lucky enough that with the big downsize in 2017 we reduced our budget substantially. So, while my sudden loss of income the next year was not ideal for our future planning, we were able to adapt as we were no longer "House Poor" as the people say. My income will not be anything that changes our lives by any means, but there is something weirdly satisfying to know you're finally getting paid for work you do because when you are a caregiver - whether for your kids or your spouse or your parents - no matter how much you love the job, no one ever pays you and this really complicates your feelings of worth.
(Thank you, extractive Capitalism, for brainwashing me!)
Donnie finds it very entertaining that I applied for this job, was interviewed, hired, and will start all during the tail end of his long and tenuous process of his job offer process. From start-to-finish it will have taken him almost 3 months from application to first day of work. It will have taken me 4 weeks. That's the difference between a "Senior Level Programmer" at a software/tech company and a "Branch Assistant" at a small library.
Oop! Do you see what I did? Snuck in the best news at the end.
Here's to possibly having found my dream job at 45. 🤞
Now, anyone want to buy me this mask to celebrate? (You know that the second I found out I got this job I searched ALL OF THE BOOK THEMED ACCESSORIES!)
So cool!!! Congratulations!
Congratulations! That's awesome!