So this is happiness
There is a great deal to be said about knowing yourself.Yesterday as I was driving to work, I was congratulating myself on my happy life and my great good fortune.
(Hey, look, you were looking for a change from yesterday's gripe fest, weren't you? Suck it up.)
I used to be a lot more successful, professionally speaking. I had the ear of the bigwigs and was respected in my own right. I was trusted, I made things happen. When I got married, I lost a lot of that. No longer was I important, my work barely mattered. I was not invested in my work. There was no longer a drive to stay late or take my work home.
Now, this isn't because all of a sudden I became a lazybones. I merely changed careers and found myself much less...necessary, and my stature went from "professional" to "female." Not even kidding.
It was hard adapting to that. It was hard on my ego to suddenly be earning 2/3 of my old value. But, I came to terms with it. I got married to a wonderful man who is also my best friend. We built a home together in the far "suburbs" of Madison and began filling it. Then, three years later, we added a baby to our happy home.
I used to be a mover and a shaker, and now I am a wife and mother who also works.
My priorities have shifted. Yes, I'd like to be important and productive, respected and powerful again. But, for now, I have more important things to do. If that means I've betrayed the Feminazis, so be it. They've never really concerned me. I don't have anything to prove on that front.
In my old career, I was the first woman they had hired for a management position. In addition, I was hired in a highly technical capacity. When I say that this was always a man's field before, I'm not kidding. Yes, my sex was a burden in the beginning. But then, so was my youth and my appearance. These curls have a tendency to make me look younger, what can I say?
Moreover, farmers are not the most accepting of people. They've been schmoozed and b-s'ed by ever chemical rep to ever come down the pike (I wasn't in chemical sales), so they weren't going to be snowed by some Sally-come-lately.
No. I had to earn my respect. And that was a real accomplishment. It was an accomplishment that really meant something to me because my last name hadn't done it for me: I did it. (I should explain that my family is in the industry but that I wasn't working for them, or even in the same immediate sphere of the industry.)
I earned the respect of the President/CEO and earned a promotion to a much more challenging position. And that was even better, because I worked with people who admired me, respected me, and sought my opinion on all sorts of things. I had a future.
Which is not to say that everybody liked me. There were a lot of people who did not. Yeah, I'm the "bitch." That's what male insubordinates used to call me when I expected them to work. That is, when they weren't speculating about my sex life. Boy, were they ever wrong.
I am an achievement-driven goal-oriented person. This has not changed in the slightest. I still want and expect myself to perform. But now, ...now I am a mommy and a wife. My personal professional goals have been set aside for a while so that I may concentrate on those new roles.
The funny thing is, back when I was important, I wasn't really happy. I was lonely and I wondered when I would start living my life. I was sad quite a lot of the time and involved in a long-distance relationship that seemed hopeless. But today I am living that life and it feels really good. I am happy. Happier than I've ever been, I think.
My ambition is still there, in the proofing oven trying to rise, but I'm okay.
So this is happiness.
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