bringing home the bacon

As of yesterday, all of the people that I couldn’t stand working with at my old job have been laid off. So here I am eking out a freelance career, constantly wondering if I’ll find enough work, tallying up the dumb ways we waste money, thinking about how I should be promoting myself/networking better but am not … and now I can add “endlessly debating whether I should have just stuck it out at the old job.” Of course, a ton of people got laid off there yesterday and it’s quite possible that I would have been one of them had I stayed.

To top it off, my lovely boss from that job was laid off from her subsequent job. If I may restate the totally obvious, this economy can #suckit.

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Recently I was talking to someone who works in HR about how I recently left my job to go freelance. By way of explanation I said “Well, my boss left, and after that … you know.” (Eloquent!) Of course, she did know; she says she hears this all the time in her work. It got me thinking about why it was that I loved S. so much. (We’re still in touch, as she is now my editor’s boss over at my About site, but we don’t talk every day anymore.)

First, she was a great communicator. Clear, constructive, funny, friendly, open. Another editor I once worked for would return copy with the words “pls fix” scrawled at random in the margin (fix what?!). Not S.; she could tell you just what you needed to do, in a way that made you feel quite capable of doing it. She would also share everything she could with us about what was going on elsewhere in the company. While she was discreet when she needed to be, she didn’t see any value in withholding information just to bolster her authority.

She was also a great protector. She shielded her staff from pointless bureaucracy, ugly people, useless meetings, and waste-of-time tasks. When she left … oy. Then we really knew just how much she’d done for us.

Not surprisingly, S. was motivating. Because it was so clear she cared about us (see items 1 and 2 above), we naturally wanted to please her. She made it easy by offering plenty of support and trust–like embracing my idea to telecommute from 1000 miles away. She knew how to praise our successes and gently help us fix our mistakes.

Lastly, she could drink me under the table any day of the week. I miss that lady.

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(I’ve been learning a lot about SEO lately. I should probably include some pictures of David Beckham in his skimpy briefs to bring in a coupla more page views.)

So today was my last day of work. More accurately, it was my last day in the employ of a big ol’ company (and not to sound dramatic, but it feels like I’ll never, ever, ever be a salaried employee again). From now on, I work for ME. While I have editors and oversight at my new gig, my day-to-day tasks, how much I work, and when I do it is up to me. If I work more, theoretically I’ll be paid more. Which translates, for me, into “if I goof around all day on Twitter while my kids are at school, I’ll be staying up much later than I’d like to catch up on writing.”

This is scary. For the past couple of months I’ve been juggling both jobs (oh and a few other freelance writing gigs thrown in for good measure) and it’s meant a lot of burning the candle at both ends. While the kids are at school I work, unload the dishwasher, work some more, fold the laundry while on a conference call, work, write a blog post, work, etc. I take 5 or so hours off for kid pick-up, play time, dinner-bath-bed, and then it’s back to working again until I roll into bed, by midnight if I’m lucky.

I know this is the new reality for so many of us. Forget balancing work and family; we stretch and contort and juggle family and home responsibilities with not just one job, but several. Blogging is a quasi-job (I just “earned” $200 from Parent Bloggers Network for my recent blog blast post!) too. The lines between “work” and “family” are so fluid they’ve become nearly invisible.

I wouldn’t trade the flexibility I have now–the ability to run to school to help out for 15 minutes at 11 a.m., or to stop working at 2:30 p.m. and start up again at 9, or to file a story from anyplace in the world with an Internet connection. But there’s something to be said, sometimes, for leaving work at work. And when you work at home, you just can’t do that.

Image: Not-David-Beckham demonstrating the patented one-armed push-up ice-cream-eating technique.

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After months of hemming, hawing, ranting, and raving, I quit my job last week. It was so hard to snip that final thread. I’ve had this job since before my kids were born, before we moved to Mayberry, before I got married. I’ve been through 8 bosses in my 8-year tenure, and only one of them (#6) was worth staying for. When she left, I knew things would change, and probably not in a way I’d appreciate. Still my heart sank at the thought of voluntarily leaving a job that allowed me to work in my chosen industry, part-time, from home, 1000 miles from the office.

But sometimes telecommuting isn’t enough, you know? So, the end, I gave my notice. I’ll still be there (well, here/there) through the end of next month, but having one foot out the door is awfully nice. Meeting request? Decline! Annoying task? Forward! Old email I never did follow up on? Delete! Yoga class during business hours? Don’t mind if I do!

I have some freelance work lined up–including developing a new site that’ll be live in a few weeks, so I’ll share it with you then (because my paycheck depends on its traffic!). I’m not going to give up working altogether. As I’ve often said, a big reason why I work is to justify sending my kids to child care. Not to pay for it, but to validate my need for them to be out of the house at regularly scheduled intervals. So they’ll do their thing, I’ll do mine, and we’ll meet back up again for our usual end-of-day R&R. Which usually involves neither resting nor relaxation, but we like it anyway.

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