And the Dust of a Foreign Road in Your Hair

My daughter and I are back in CT for a little R&R at the beach and a visit with family. We return to North Carolina today and will be there a whole 4 days before we depart for Georgia. I used to think that the life of the tumbleweed was for me, but I am longing for a little continuity and focus.

Each trip this summer brought an area into relief: Boulder reminded me that I have solid professional skills, Chicago showed me that there are ways to combine career and family, and CT revealed that family, like everything, is what you make it. I know there has long been the distinctions of "family of choice" and "family of origin", but I figured they were for people with lousy childhoods. I see now that people opt in and out of those distinctions over and over, guided by any number of reactions: duty, generosity, indifference, fear, desire to belong.

My daughter picked up some new behaviors this summer. Thumb sucking. Asking for a series of food items when she doesn't want any of them. Exaggerated blinking. Time will sort out whether they are the brief trying-ons of a toddler or something that I'll worry about longer. I am constantly questioning whether my decisions have benefited her on balance.

Maybe I should have stayed put this summer and gotten my daughter acclimated in her new hometown. Maybe I should have put her in daycare while I was in Chicago. Perhaps I would have been better served by bearing down on the job search rather than taking mediocre-paying consulting gigs.

I have more of a sense of freedom than I did at the beginning of the summer. Each trip exercised some dormant muscles, though I think a meeting I had in Charlotte just before I left for CT was really helpful. It was with a headhunting firm that had found my resume on the internet. From when I walked in to their offices the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I met with one of their Career Consultants -- a confident, round guy with a background in sales. At the end of our hour-long meeting, during which he attempted to get up to speed on my resume which he had obviously not read, he dropped the kicker: he wanted me to pay THEM to find job leads! To the tune of $3500!

Now, I had asked Aaron to work from home so that he could cover child care, I had read the bios of the various people who worked at this firm. I had had my hair done and dressed carefully as though this was a legit interview. And all that prep and coordination put me in front of a used-car salesman.

I smiled, shook hands, and left. When I got home Aaron had his hopeful expression on and asked me how it went. The best way I could describe it to him was "Thank you for your time. Next!" And that wasn't a bad thing at all.