Career Woman

Over the last several months I've been facing the tough question of what's next in my career, and in the process have had the startling revelation that, um, I'm having a career. When I graduated from college and moved to the East Coast it was in search of a job. Something to pay the bills until my real life started, but at some point I made the transition from having a job to having a career, and that was so not in my life plan.

I was very blessed in this process. I applied for my current job on a whim -- I was semi-qualified and the job seemed interesting but I never expected in a hundred years for my application to stand out enough to be offered an interview and later an actual job. And I was doubly blessed that I not only enjoy the work that I do, I'm also very good at it. I'm not saying that to brag; being very good at my job is hugely rewarding and I feel tremendously lucky that, having sort of stumbled into my career by accident, it was something that I'm good at.

Because I never meant to be a 30-something career woman. My real life plan was to go to college, fall in love, get married, struggle through the lean years, and then support my husband in his career while I stayed home and raised the babies. I got a college education because I love knowledge, because that's what you do after high school, and also because I wanted to show my kids that we as parents valued education. And when marriage didn't happen during the college years, because I knew that I'd have to support myself for a few years before my Real Life happened.

And then marriage kept not happening, and in the meantime I was getting very good at my work and making decisions that were making work into a career. So here I am. And as I've been exploring my next career move (a new office? a new position? overseas?) I've realized that this IS my Real Life, and it's great. It's obviously not without it's challenges -- I'm busy and I can't always keep up with everything that needs to be done and it can be lonely and I still yearn for marriage and children and honestly, making career choices can be terrifying and hard -- but it also affords me a lot of opportunities to serve and a lot of flexibility.

So now when I think about a possible future marriage and possible future kids, I realize that it would be very hard to walk away from this career of mine. Not that I would necessarily have to, but I like to hope that I would want to stay at home and have a new Mother career. But I think if that time ever comes it will be hard. That life no longer seems like it's my Real Life waiting just around the corner.

In related news, I just got a performance-based raise at work. I celebrated by buying myself a pretty.