Changing my life

I have done it now. I have put my notice in. I have no job to go to and no immediate plans to find one. What kind of idiot puts their notice in during a recession? I am surrounded by people at work worrying about redundancy and I know some people who have already been made redundant and who are coping with the knocked sideways shock of it all. I feel almost guilty for walking away from a job in these circumstances but I am doing so, and it is not even a job I hate.

Work has been a huge part of my life for the last twenty years or so. When my first marriage failed I had to earn some money so I was pushed back into the world of work when my children were quite small. I remember vividly going into Manchester for an interview, wearing my pre-children work clothes, feeling like a child dressing up, and finding that walking along the pavement in my high heels with no push chair in front of me felt strangely naked and vulnerable, as if my children were my protection. But work was a help, a structure for the day, scaffolding which supported me when my foundations were still shaky, something I was good at. I vowed then that I would never be financially dependent on anyone ever again.

As my children got older I worked harder and longer. I married again and my husband was massively supportive, taking over vast swathes of home life along with his own job so I could work away and climb the ladder. I have had a lot from work: purpose, expertise, clout, money, intellectual challenge and great company. It has been my own thing where I have been nobody's daughter, wife or mother, just me, operating on my ability, sometimes high on adrenalin, making my mark. Sometimes it has made me sick, with worry or literally, and often it has made me guilty, especially when my children were younger and nothing was ever enough, either at work or at home. But it has been, with my family, the focus of my energy for a very long time.

I am still not 100% sure I am doing the right thing in walking away. The process of re-evaluation though has been going on a long time, since 2004 in fact. In that year my elder daughter discovered that she had an ovarian growth. She was twenty four, young, beautiful, in love, living in London and doing a ferociously low paid job that she loved. She needed an operation and I was in the midst of the last push to the highest aspiration in my job. I wanted to be with her so I jumped off the conveyor belt, took some unpaid leave and, when I went back, resolved to cut down from the frantic travelling and sixty/seventy hour weeks that had been my norm. She was fine, her lump was benign and the time with her was precious. I cut down to four days and the following year we moved to Wales to fulfil a long held wish to live out of the city.

We had only been here for about three weeks when I became ill myself (there is a blog about it further down the sidebar somewhere which was a way of writing the experience out of me). Life was turned upside down. This too was an ovarian growth. When after six months or so I emerged shakily on the other side I had the profound sense of having been given a tap on the shoulder: "Hey, you, weren't you f***ing listening the last time?" Not rational, I know, I know.

So I reduced my hours to half time, determined to find the time to do other things, to garden and write and spend time with my much loved parents while they are healthy and energetic enough for the time to be a pleasure for us all, not waiting until they are crumbling and so am I.

And I have done other things. I have made the very beginnings of trying to create a garden out of hill and stone and rough grass, scratching so much at the surface that it would barely be visible to anyone but me. I have started to learn Welsh but am still not even in the foothills, just trundling along the approach road. I have devoted a day a week to looking after my grandson, now nearly three, not always loving it as I have never been great with babies and very small children, but gradually finding real satisfaction in slowing my pace right down, sitting on the floor, playing the same games and reading the same stories and knowing that this is special for him.

But it is hard to do a job which is a 100% job with a determination to give it only 50% of one's time. It has become harder and harder to feel that I am doing a first rate job and that matters to me. I have swung from allowing it to take over and to begin to eat up my time and energy again and pushing back fiercely, knowing that I will not be true to myself if I don't spend time on non-work things, doing them properly with just as much commitment as any job. When I leave my hillside I rarely want to go, however good it is when I get there, and in fact if it weren't for staying with my younger daughter when I am in London it would sometimes be nearly intolerable to leave. Seeing her gives me a personal reward for being away from home and stopping doing that will be a real loss in stopping work.

So I am going to stop. What will I do? I don't know yet. Some more of the same: gardening, yoga, Welsh, family. Something new: I am to be treasurer of the Blackden Trust, a blog in itself. Something else.

Sometimes you just have to hold your nose and jump in.

Dear God, I hope it will be ok.