This week was prep week for a new show. Prep week is always a more relaxed because I can pretty much set my own hours as long as I get my work done – I’m not bound by a daily rehearsal schedule. Ironically, though, this week didn’t get a lot of my “me” tasks check off because I used a lot of my work flexibility to take care of kid stuff – there were a few school bus pick ups that I took for the Husband, an appointment for one kid, and the baby had an Open House at her daycare.
This all meant leaving the office early, but also meant I worked through lunch a lot so that I could leave early, and lunch is usually when I take my daily walk. I’m still trying to track my 1000 hours outside and this week I think I had two hours total. It’s a little ironic that when my day is dictated by the rehearsal schedule, I seem to have more time to slot in things like my daily walk and exercise. When my work life is more flexible, I feel like I have to fit in more family/ life admin stuff since that stuff is harder to fit in around my rehearsal schedule.
Some thoughts from this week:
– We had some fans installed this week – a bathroom fan (finally no steamy bathrooms post shower. Also good for the walls), a bedroom fan (just in time for 50 degree nights. hah!) and a wall fan in the kid’s room (because a ceiling fan was a bad idea given the bunk beds). One night this week, we left the kids home with my mom who is visiting and the Husband and I went to Lowe’s to look at ceiling fans at 9pm. Date night, I guess. I was a little taken aback when I walked into Lowe’s and saw:
I’m not even ready for Hallowe’en yet!
– Out of the blue an old friend/work colleague reached out to me. We had done summer stock together twenty years ago when we were both fresh out of college, and then taken a couple of those road trips one does when one finishes a gig and is twenty and unemployed and has nothing better to do than see how far you can get on a tank of gas. Our professional paths crossed fortuitously in the years that followed, but then he got a teaching job at a University and I stopped travelling as much so we fell out of each other’s orbits. Anyhow, it was lovely to talk to him and catch up and see where we’ve each landed. It’s funny, when you’re twenty and starting out in opera and have thoughts of all the big companies and big ideas you want to work for, and then what you find you wants when you’re forty is a spouse and a home and to come home and cook dinner for them.
– Speaking of which… Listening to this Squiggly Careers podcast episode about how to take control of your career.
This has somewhat been on my mind lately – there have been lots of changes at work and it’s not so much that I am questioning if I want to be where I am, but it’s more that I’m wondering if there is anything wrong with wanting to want to be where I am. That’s to say, I think personally I am in a place right now where I don’t want to travel and gig and where I want to be able to take my kids to the school bus and snuggle with the Husband on the couch at night; to do that, perhaps I am giving up some career ambitions. And I’m okay with that mostly, but when I work with people who are doing the constant gig and hustle, I do think about how different my life is from that. I am definitely a little jealous of those stage managers who get to to take a show to Europe, but those opportunities don’t happen overnight – they come out of cultivating relationships long terms, and while pre-kids – pre-marriage, really- I might have been able to invest myself in developing relationships that might grow into an international career, it’s not something I can come to as easily now. I think there is taking control from a point of making career things happen, and taking control in terms of being happy where one is. And I’m in the latter. I know there’s a world of new technologies and ideas in companies across the world, and it’s been really fascinating these past few weeks learning about how different people work. In a way, the changes at my company mean that new ideas come to me rather than than I go to them. Is it a complacent place to be? Maybe. I think that’s okay for now, though. The podcast hosts did have one self-reflective exercise in the podcast that I liked – Take five minutes and finish this sentence in as many ways as possible: “Wouldn’t my career be amazing if….” That might be a good exercise for me to ponder.
-A shout out to Kae’s post “If you See Something Say Something” on taking time to express gratitude to others. I was inspired to write to my daughter’s swim team coach from this summer. The guy was just did so much to build skills and team spirit with the swim team kids this past summer, and I had been meaning to write him since August, but never did. So prompted by Kaelyn’s post, I did. It reminds me of the unit in the Happiness Course (aka Yale’s class called The Science of Well Being) that talks about gratitude, and one of the assignments was to write a gratitude letter – something I think I can think about and execute more regularly, I think.
On the aspiration docket this rainy rainy weekend – We were going to go apple picking, but the weather does not look ideal for that. It’s my last two day weekend in a while, so my weekend aspirations are trying to maximize family time and also life admin items:
– skating lessons for the five year old. Swim clinic for the ten year old
– Attic clean out
-Ten year old’s Halloween costume. Manageable chunk – maybe we will design and get supplies.
– going to a play then dinner out as a family.
– Supertitle work for my next titles gig.
– Seasonal sort and cycle the kids clothes. The weather’s getting cooler so I need to make sure we are set for long sleeve shirts, sweaters, and pants.
-meal plan and grocery shop for next week.
– try to squeeze in some outdoor time between bouts of rain.
– maybe an afternoon of hanging out and watching a movie on the couch.
What We Ate:
Saturday: This was the three year old’s birthday dinner at a local Mexican restuarant.
Sunday: Kitchen sink ramen. Ramen with whatever veggies I needed to use up thrown in.
Monday: Butternut squash flatbread from Milk Street’s Tuesday Night Mediterranean. I pre-made the filling and chopped some cucumbers to eat on the side so the Husband just had to fill the tortillas and pan fry them when he got home. This was quite tasty. Vegan, with optional cheese. I did grill the leftover halloumi to go with it – I’ve never done that before, and it was quite tasty.
Tuesday: White bean and tomato stew from Bare Minimum Dinners. This meal was kind of brilliantly simple – cannellini beans, garlic, tomato paste, water, ditilani pasta. On the Husband’s suggestion I made a double batch and the ten year old took it for lunch in her thermos all week. Vegan, except some people added cheese.
Wednesday: Mushroom and Grape Tartines from Milk Street Tuesday Night Mediterranean, with a quick panzella salad on the side. I was originally going to make a greek salad, but part of the tartine recipe called for hollowing out the baguettes so I decided to make a panzella salad with the bread pulled from the baguettes. That felt like a really frugal food decision!
Thursday: My mother made chicken wings and stir fry. Thank goodness because Thursday night was pretty activity heavy.
Friday: Pizza and Movie – we watched Thirteen Lives, a movie from this year about the Thai cave rescue. Overall a really gripping movie – the story is so tense, even though I knew the outcome. I do wish the movie had devoted more time to the story of the boys in the cave and how they managed, though I imagine twelve boys surviving by meditation sessions led by their coach might not make for gripping drama the way cave diving does. I also didn’t love the kind of “white savior” aspect of a bunch of white men saving a group of Thai boys, but in truth when one looks at any kind of high risk elite activity like cave diving, then the socio-economic truths of it is that it is indeed a white man’s game. For a podcast version of the story, we really loved the first season of the podcast Against the Odds which looked at the story over six episodes. The kids were captivated by this podcast.
I noticed all the Christmas stuff out at several stores this week and was like – WHAT IS HAPPENING?!
I think a lot about career trajectories. I hadn’t really started any career when I had kids (I was 7 months pregnant when I finished my graduate degree)…and so there are definitely some pangs of envy when I see others that have very well-established careers and didn’t slide into the stay-at-home/work-from-home situation I find myself in now. I’m happy where I’m at but then sometimes wonder, would I be happier if I had taken a different course of action? I’m slowly realizing that my end goal is to be able to spend time with my family, to enjoy good food and good memories with people I love, and to have enough money to live comfortably and we’re checking all those boxes now! Without having to wait for years and years until a career winds down…Reframing it that way has helped me feel a little less…mediocre…for not having a big career.
Also, your meal plan all sounds SO good – creative and varied!!!
I could barely see the Hallowe’en stuff at Lowe’s because the Christmas stuff was so front and center! It was a little bonkers.
I like your re-framing. That whole “work to live” or “live to work” dichotomy, is good to ponder. If you are indeed checking your boxes, then what does it matter if you don’t have the big career that you see other people having. When I stopped travelling for summer, after I had just had my second kid, I had to quit social media because I got so wistful seeing all the other summer music festivals that my friends and colleagues were working at. But once I got off and wasn’t so plugged into that world, I think I was able to be more content with staying home with my kids and working at home.
I am so upset when I see Christmas decor in stores in September and October. Stop trying to make it happen three months early, capitalism!!
I realized a few years ago that I’m not ambitious in my professional life at all. It was a hard realization because in school I was an overachiever and I suppose I always imagined myself in some high-powered position with meetings and travel and pencil skirts. Instead, I’m just trying to figure out how to get a paycheck that allows me to pay for health insurance and my dog’s vet bills and there’s not a pencil skirt in sight. But once I admitted to myself that this is what I really want, it made me feel happier and more settled. Maybe I’ll regret the choices I’ve made in ten years time, but for now, this works for me.
… and the Amazon Christmas toy catalogue just appeared in the mail this week. I’m all for planning ahead, but this just stresses me out!
Being able to pay the health insurance and vet bills seem like a good bar for being content with life, I think. I hope you never regret that!
I am so glad that you went ahead and thanked your daughter’s coach!! 🙂 And I’m glad my post could be of inspiration to even one person. (I felt a little funny initially writing that post, because I didn’t want it to seem like I was “bragging” about thanking my son’s coach, if that makes sense?! But I feel like it’s an area I need to continue to work on, too, and hoped maybe it would encourage others as well.) 🙂
The career thing is a very interesting topic. I definitely have not been one to really aspire to “climb the ladder”, if you will. In part I think I don’t have a personality that is well suited for like, a big title or lots of spotlight. Makes me very nervous and uncomfortable! I also really just care more about having time with my family, the boys, etc. than any of that. I like to work, and I like earning a good salary and having an interesting career, but I feel pretty good where I’m at. I just don’t feel a drive to want to keep pushing it higher and higher, I guess.
You definitely encouraged me! And the coach wrote back and was glad I wrote, and heaped more praise on my kid. So that felt good in general. I feel like I want to see if writing a gratitude email/ text can to be a weekly or monthly habit.
Every so often people ask me if I want to have my boss’s job some day, or work at a bigger opera company… and while it sounds exciting from a career point of view, it also sounds like a lot of more work, and not my personality. I think you’re right that climbing the ladder isn’t for everyone, and it always makes me sad that being happy where you are isn’t more valued in workplace culture.