My social life is in the crapper

When I was younger, I always used to wonder why my parents had no friends. I mean, looking back, I guess they did have a few – a neighbor or two, maybe a golf buddy for my dad – but really, they didn’t socialize much.  I sort of thought they were kind of lame in that regard.

Now that I have a kid, I totally get it. At least for the baby years. Given Henry’s 7:15pm bedtime, getting out and doing anything social on a weeknight means a quick, rushed dinner, and so it is usually reserved for special occasions. On Friday nights, I am TIRED. This leaves the weekends, which frankly are more tiring that the weekdays. Then there is the planning aspect – it’s difficult to plan things with other people, because I never know when exactly is going to be a good time – when Henry will not need a nap and I won’t need to pump and I can use our car and blah blah blah. Plus, many of my friends have their own kids, so they have all the same problems.

We usually manage to do one social thing every other weekend. Last weekend we did a quick 5:30 Sunday dinner with friends. This weekend it was more or less just us. The weird thing for me is – I’m getting to the point where my husband is really my best friend. 

Now, to some extent, he’s been my best friend for a long time. But the thing is – I’ve always ALSO had a girlfriend filling that role – and now I’m not sure I do.  For a long time, I’ve had a best friend, T. She lives in Australia (she relocated there years ago, but we were roommates together right out of college). T is the person I could tell ANYTHING, no matter how embarrassing, how gross, whatever. We Skype once a month and used to do a yearly trip (I would visit her, she would come back to the US, we met in Fiji once), plus email. But now that I have Henry – it’s hard to keep up with any of that except the Skypes. Sometimes it takes me a week to respond to a basic email – I see it, and I mean to write back, but I have so many little things to do that it just doesn’t get done. I still consider her a good friend, but you lose something when you don’t make the effort to keep up as much. And that’s all on me.

And then I have had a local best friend, A. A and I had a rough time last year – she said something that really hurt me about how I was “wasting energy” by being sad about my miscarriages. She apologized the next week, but I never really got over it. I mean, I understand that she didn’t mean to hurt me, and I forgave her for that, but what she said is so much a part of who she is and how she thinks about things. It makes me want to keep my guard up around her. Add that to the whole being exhausted/scheduling difficulties thing, and we don’t get together much right now.

So … is this how I become my parents? I wonder if they just lost touch with all their friends when they had babies and then never managed to rebuild the relationships or create new ones. I don’t want that to happen to me.

My employer poops on flexible work arrangements

 

I kind of hit my breaking point at work a few days ago. My boss is a great guy, and I think that he genuinely likes me, values my contributions, and wants me to succeed in the company. So, he had been given me all kinds of opportunities – he was going to make me a project leader, he was going to give me two direct reports (I’ve never managed people before) and he was going to give me a group of students to direct in their internship.

The thing is, I’m still new to this company. I mean, I guess I’ve been here 11 months, but it was broken up right in the middle by my maternity leave. I go to meetings and a lot of times have no idea who most of the other people are, or, if things go off on a tangent, what the hell they are talking about. There are politics I don’t understand yet, and I’m always afraid of making a gaffe. I feel like I’m out of my comfort zone the vast majority of the time.

Also, I’m introverted, and I would prefer to spend most of my time at my desk, working.  (Not that I can’t relate to people, I just find it tiring to do it all day long.) The new roles my boss wanted me to take on mean a lot of meetings, a lot of careful handling of situations.

Plus, there is the fact that I want to work part-time, and the new responsibilities would mean more work, not less.

Anyway, I’m not usually one to say no to people. But I was so overwhelmed by everything I was going to be taking on, that I just kind of exploded. (In a nice, professional way, of course. I furrowed my brow and such.) Over the course of a week, I met with my boss every day to work out how to make things better. I told him that all this stuff was too much, that I could take on one of the new things, maybe two, but not all three. And I told him that I knew it was probably a non-starter, but that I wanted to work four days a week.

He looked surprised and said that he’d have to ask his boss. Now, I pretty much knew this wasn’t going to happen. There are a couple of women at my office who have had babies over the last couple of years. One tried a flexible work arrangement (4 10 hours days, with the fifth day off), but it didn’t last long before they told her to go back to a normal schedule. Another, who had her baby a few months after me, asked to work from home one day a week, but her boss said no, because if he let her do it, he’d have to let everyone do it. But even though I knew it was a long shot, because he didn’t dismiss it out of hand, I started to get excited about the idea.

When he came back after talking to his boss, he said that the only part time options my company offers is for 20 hours a week. (I wanted to do 32.) That’s not really an option, both because I can’t really afford to cut down that much, and because it would be pretty hard to do my job. What he suggested, though, was “working from home” with Henry there one afternoon a week. Which means, of course, that I wouldn’t really be working. And I would be getting paid for it. But I would be sort of trapped at home, and if people called me, I would have to at least answer or get back to them in a reasonable timeframe.

I really appreciate that he’s willing to try this out for me.  And I guess we’ll see if it works. I mean, it’s not like I have any other options. It seems like most employers don’t hire part-time workers (at least in my industry). I know people who have been full time and then scaled back to part-time after having a kid, but not people being hired part-time.

The bigger issue, I think, is that I don’t really have any sort of passion for my career. At best, I find it mildly enjoyable, most of the time I find it a mild annoyance, and sometimes I hate it. Is that how most people are? I would quit this job in 10 seconds if I won the lottery. Is that normal? Or should I start thinking about a new career?