Sunday, February 6, 2011

Finding balance

There are toys strewn all over my living room. I've been meaning to vacuum the upstairs for days....um, weeks.  I have thank you notes to write, clothes to sort through, things to sell on Ebay, menus to plan and meals to make.  I have a family to take care of, and I feel like I'm failing at it. I'm behind on everything...
and my job in Ovid wants me to add on 8 extra hours a week.

Only temporarily.  And I have medical bills looming for my eye specialist and the procedures they want to do, not all of which insurance will cover.  And Rob's hours are up in the air; some weeks he can pick up overtime, some weeks he can't.
So the money sounds fantastic.

Working 50 hours a week while my home falls apart around me doesn't.

I'm not going to turn this into a treatise on women working.  I don't believe in cookie cutter families.  I'm not ever going to tell another family that their choices, unless clearly harmful, aren't right, just because they are not choices I would or have made.   But I do believe some things.  I do believe the Scriptural command to women to be keepers at home is not a necessarily cultural command, as it appears more than one time.(I'm not going to get into hermeneutics, either, but I generally fall into the camp of using easier, clearer parts of Scripture to analyze the harder parts)  I don't believe that it precludes women from holding jobs outside the home, as evidenced by other Scriptural passages.  What I do believe is that the spirit of the passage is telling women that their primary focus is to be at home.  In modern terms, you might rephrase it as don't save the world while your own household falls apart.  

Except that right now, I feel like mine is. 
That we're eating out way too much.
That I'm stretched so thin between work and class and teaching labs at the EMT class that I don't know whether I'm coming or going. 

And then Josh got sick.
Really sick.
Coughing, wheezing, temperature, needing-Mommy-sick.
Too-sick-to-go-to-day care-sick.

So I switched hours at work, with my sister coming in to work for me tomorrow morning and I will go to work for her Tuesday.

It gives me a lot of time to think.

And I need to cut back on work.
I need to find balance.  And balance is something I've never really been good at finding. 
I know what I need to do, but it will take a few weeks.  I need to probably quit one job and keep the other one at twelve hours a week for now.  I need to focus on my baby and my husband.  I need to clean out our cupboards and decide what we're going to eat.  I need to keep my house clean, and I want to open up my home and be hospitable.  I want my husband to be able to focus on working on the house instead of helping me catch up on laundry.

I want life to be different.
So hopefully this week, Rob and I can sit down and map out how this is all going to work.  And then make it work.

2 comments:

Katie said...

I just wanted to say that believing as you do (that there are no cookie cutter families, that the choice of whether or not a woman at any stage of life works outside the home is one to be approached with wisdom and under the guidance of Scripture but is not dictated, that nobody can "have it all," and that a woman's primary focus is supposed to be the home), it's incredibly encouraging to see how another woman is walking the line. Thanks for sharing.

Hope you were able to map out a workable plan. Sometimes it seems so hard with so many choices to find what the right balance is. Thanks again for sharing.

Stacie, A Firefighter's Wife said...

I pray you will find the right balance. Blessings,

Stacie