It has been about 4 months since I last posted and a lot has happened. I am loving my new job. It is combining my love of educational leadership with the new challenges of budgets, forecasts, staffing, advertising and technology. Without really knowing what I was looking for when I started looking for new jobs, I have fallen on my feet in this new role. I feel like it is extending me and challenging me but still allowing me to apply my strengths, build teams, build curriculum and focus on good teaching, only this time in an adult environment. I consider myself very lucky. I now work much closer to 9-5 hours, have more flexibility to manage my own time, set my own schedule and even work at home when there are projects to be done and I need some time without interruptions. I now have every night of the week and every weekend entirely to myself. I do not bring work home. I do not have marking. No one emails me after 5.30pm so when I come to work in the morning there are not 30 emails awaiting reply. This new job allows me to work really hard when I am at work, but have a life when I am at home.
Which brings me to the question of what I want that life to be like. I feel like although I have much more balance now when it comes to work and home, I am yet to find a real focus for my home time. I walk my dog or take her for a run with the bike, I cook dinner but the bulk of my nights are taken up with sitting around chatting to my husband (not so bad) and watching TV. I think that if I lived by myself as I used to, I just wouldn't turn the TV on - I would find other things to do with my time. But with my husband being somewhat addicted to the TV I feel like as soon as it is on, the noise and the distraction of it makes me totally unproductive. It feels like I have switched my brain off and it is about time I started thinking and working on something again. I wonder how other people find the motivation to come home from work after a long day and actually do something constructive with their nights. Sometimes we catch up with friends and family and that is nice. Sometimes I read a book and that is nice also. Maybe I am not good at sitting still and being happy with that. It is a bit ironic that when I had all this work to do at home I resented it and put it off and avoided doing it and felt guilty, and now I have nothing to do when I get home I am wondering what I should be doing!
It is hard to get the motivation though. I am in the middle of my Cert IV in Training and Assessment at the moment and so I should be working on that and knocking a bit more of it off. But at night the comfort of the tele and my husband and the couch calls and I just don't seem to be able to escape it. I am finally writing this post tonight because my husband is on a boys weekend and I am sitting with the laptop, having cleaned the house, and finally writing this post which has been whirling in my head for a week or so now. Can a woman only find time for the things she would really like to be doing when there is no man in the house? Perhaps it will be better when I get a house with two living areas because the house we are in at the moment has the lounge-room in the middle of it and if the tele is on (which it always is when my husband is home) it consumes the whole house. There is nowhere you can go to get away from it. Maybe I should take the somewhat drastic step of making it a tele free home at night - at least for an hour? Or maybe I should lock myself in the study regardless of the tele and just get on with something more interesting with the tv. Or maybe I should just give myself a break and not expect so much of myself all the time. Not sure what the answer is here but I will keep pondering.
