On deciding

Yeah, I basically suck at this blogging thing. But whatever. I'm glad it's here when the impulse strikes, and it's nice to know that my failure to maintain any kind of regular blogging habits has no real consequences. (Besides the fact that hardly anyone reads the blog, about which I don't think I much care.)

So, today I Wednesday whined (or rather anti-whined) that my family has decided to return to the Bay Area, to my being the primary bread-winner, and being once again on a "track" that's familiar, if not altogether satisfying, to me.

And then I had a long conversation with my next-door neighbor, whom I have always liked but rarely managed to hang out with, who, after hearing that we're most likely leaving, began to give her spiel about why she thinks this is such a great place to raise kids AND to, in effect, suggest that there might be work for me in her husband's school district.

Now, she said nothing I haven't heard/thought endlessly about before vis-a-vis the fabulousness of this place for children, and the idea of teaching high school students has never much appealed to me, so this conversation really should not have had an impact on my perspective.

And yet... What it did, I suppose, was bring home to me how little effort I've really put into finding a new professional life for myself outside academia. The "writing of my own script" that I romantically gestured toward at the end of my last post seems too quickly to have become a pipe dream easily abandoned for the comfort of a familiar, already-scripted narrative in which I play a sometimes central, more often marginal character. (Of course, I can choose to rewrite THAT script; my becoming more creative about how I live my life doesn't depend on my quitting my job.)

I should say that the decision to return was initiated primarily by my husband, who has come quite solidly to the realization that he can't imagine staying in this job for the long haul, and can't justify asking me to give up my career for something about which he feels so uncertain. And clearly, there are more professional opportunities for him out there than for me here.

I guess my point is that I'm still not sure what I want. Perhaps I never will be. Perhaps that's not such a bad thing. Perhaps it doesn't matter what we decide, but what we do with the decision.