Here I Am

One year ago today, I was laid off.

I won't lie and say I knew it was coming, because I didn't. I knew it was a possibility, but I also knew that my job was between me and another person - and logically, I was the better choice to stay. I was better at the job. I had a better attitude. Period.

She also knew I was the right person to stay. After I covered her to go on a month long vacation (which meant I couldn't use my vacation days - so they were forfeited upon my termination. NICE.), she spent the last month before I was laid off looking for jobs. While she was at work. While I covered everything else. While I trained someone new that was brought in from another region so they could go back and do their job effectively. I listened to her whine every day about the lay offs. I stayed positive and did my job. It wasn't just a job to me, either, by the way. I truly enjoyed it - I felt like I had actually found a career where I could grow.

How naive. Seriously.

I should have kept my job, but that's not the way things worked out. I have since found out there was nothing I could do to keep my job.

Certain things I didn't want to believe about the company I had (HAD) so much respect for turned out to be true.

For a long time, I was really angry. REALLY ANGRY. Okay, I was sad first. Then I felt rejected. Then angry.

I slowly started to feel normal and actually relish being a stay at home mom. I won't lie and say I didn't (don't)miss my income. Being supported by someone else takes some getting used to. As does going days without real adult conversation. Though Thomas the Train and Diego and saying 'no' ten thousand times a day is lovely, the urge to talk about something other than kid stuff is still there.
Which led me to make several new friends - here - of all places. If you can't get out and meet people, I say bring them to you - via the internets.

Summer was amazing. It was the first summer since I was a kid that I remember playing outside every sunny day. Going to the beach. Gardening.

Then, at the end of summer, life happened, in a bad way, in a cancer way, and everything that had made me feel so hopeless and rejected all of the sudden seemed minuscule.

How I embrace my life and what I have been given has greatly changed. Priorities have shifted.

Things I thought I understood,ideals I'd embraced, definitions of normal - all those things have been obliterated. Some in a good way, some in ways that are so ugly and disturbing that getting my head round them has been difficult.

But. Here I am. One year later. February 11, 2009, I sobbed hysterically. Asked myself why. Sat in the dark and worried.

Today? I don't even think I'd cry about losing that job. There has been a tremendous shift, I have been forced to be an adult - REALLY be an adult. Not just a girl posing as one.