Tuesdays are Your Turn – Work/Life Balance (What’s That?)

By
Amy
Published: February 16, 2010Posted in: Advocacy, Asthma, Flu and Illness, Reader Response

From last week’s reader response comment section, which is replete with good material and you should totally go read if you haven’t yet:

On a similar note, anyone have issues with missing too much work because of staying home with their asthma child? My boss has said I need to find “alternate child care” for when my DD is sick.
- SnjMom

Sara already left this advice:

If you are in the US, check and see where staying home with an asthmatic child falls under the FMLA…they may not have to PAY you for all the time you need to take, but they may not be able to fire you. It may depend on several factors…but you may have legal protection…but there may be hoops you have to jump through first.

Now, I’ve been lucky. I never faced the sick day problem.

I’ve been living with a different career-related problem altogether!
(Isn’t childhood chronic illness fun?)

Let’s stroll through my work/life/parenthood/asthma balance dilemma in pictures, shall we?

Motherhood started unconventionally for me. We had no immediate plans for a baby although I’d always wanted children someday, no financial stability, no health insurance, even. There was me, a new college diploma, a boyfriend of eight months who would later become Mr. Asthma Mom, and a positive home pregnancy test. Some months later and almost six weeks before her due date, there was AG:

amy_n_baby_k

See? I’m about 12 years-old here.

Actually, I was 23 but still:

Total. Amateur.

AG was an easy baby despite the lungs, though. Look how cute:

what_to_do

She attended a small, licensed daycare home while I worked in development/fundraising for a private school in south Florida. What with my extra days off because of the school schedule, the relatively low contagion risk of an in-home daycare, and no other children yet, Mr. Asthma Mom and I were able to juggle our schedules to accommodate AG’s health. I mean, sure, she seemed to catch every damn illness going around and hung unto them for weeks at a time (read: “started flaring and we didn’t know it”), but we basically just toughed it out and used our sick days for her rather than ourselves. We were young; we didn’t get sick that often.

Point is, I left my job when AG reached 16 months because I wanted to parent full-time for awhile, not because of her health or because of employer/absence friction. My daughter would remain undiagnosed for almost a year afterwards, in fact.

Then we did this:

big_n_baby_sisters

We actually planned for our second baby, and AG and her Steadfast Sidekick have been inseparable ever since.

I won’t say those years were easy – they weren’t, not even close. On top of AG’s lung and digestive health spiraling downwards until we got them under control, we had massive debt leftover from college. We had no money. We never went on vacation. We couldn’t afford the extras and rarely spent anything on ourselves.

But I’m very, very grateful that staying home to raise our daughters and safeguard and boost AG’s health existed as an option for me at all, that it meant paying student loans off later rather than sooner and giving up just the luxuries, not the necessities. Those were choices I made and don’t regret and I remind myself, daily, that at least I had that choice at all.

My Job Search That Will Never End? That’s the collateral damage I have to live with, I guess.

All the time, I do try to keep that gratefulness in the front of my brain, even as this path back to my career turns into a long, slow slog of a journey, and I feel like I will apply for good positions and not get them forever, like some weird episode of the Twilight Zone.

Ridiculous, I know, but I default to pessimism.

Anyway, back to the story at hand:

When AG’s health improved, moving away from the Tampa Bay area and back to the Florida Panhandle seemed like a good idea at the time.

My family’s there, for one. And the beach is pretty:

m_beach

It is, however, a spectacularly bad region to look for a job after a temporary sojourn away unless you are A) part of the Good ‘Ole Boy network because that part of Florida is not Florida, it’s small-town Deep South, B) a teacher, which I am not, or C) the daughter of the owner of a local business where you can work, which I also am not.

I started freelancing, and after three years we moved to Colorado. We’re staying here for good:

me_red_rocks

Chronic illness affects the whole family. It’s a game changer in the worst way. Its reverberations can alter the course of a life.

And there is always a sacrifice to make.

AG’s very problematic and persistent asthma determined mine, but so did her age. And her sister’s age and my age and the nature of my husband’s career and a million other considerations unique to me and different for you.

Are you missing work like the reader above?
Are you struggling to get your career back like me?
How are you handling the work/life balance (or lack of balance)?