Choices…

I’ve taken a hiatus – still written a lot so you might see it up here in a flurry one day.  I’m back now with what might not be a popular post.  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I value.  That’s where all the etiquette and niceties come from isn’t it? What you value, what you see as important and hold as key to your happiness.  Above all else I value my family.  I will never be grateful enough for the family that raised me, or the family that I now have the privilege of raising.  I adore them. Those three little faces are my and my husbands whole world.  So why is it that I’m leaving them in a month to go back to work full time?  Choices.

I play the scenarios in my head at least 20 times a day – how can we make it work so that I can maximize my time with my babies during these fleeting moments when they are so small, so impressionable, so full of love and wonder and need?  It doesn’t seem to work.  Any way we slice it I need to leave them in someone else’s care.  It’s not that I don’t enjoy or feel fulfilled with my career – in fact I love the prospect of what I’ll return to – and I value where I work and what it stands for – but I feel empty inside when I think about leaving my babes five days a week right now.

Unfortunately this is the world we choose to live in. The city we choose to own a house in.  The clothes and toys and vacations we choose to “need”.  I want nothing more than to have the will power to throw it all to the wind.  I want to tell all those women who fought so hard so that we would have the choice to work that they only created a society where we still don’t really have a choice – instead now we have to work. It seems so wrong.

I want to be stronger. I want to be able to put my ego aside and be happy with whatever we end up with so that we can raise our family the way that we wistfully spoke about seven years ago when we first got married.  At what point did “choice” become a scary word wrought with opportunity cost and lost chances?

A dark return – and not entertaining to say the least – but fear not I have recipes and party tips galore right around the corner.  Until then my friends – please share with me what you value most and how you marry your choices to that which you hold dear…