Home is where the heart is...

Tomorrow I head back to work full time. I find myself strangely apprehensive about whether I can pull it off, put my heart back into it and about whether I’ll enjoy this time spent away from the kids and A. It’s not a good time for me to be ambivalent because I have to have a job given A’s new gig as entrepreneur.

I’m incredibly glad for him and grateful to God who in one way or another paved the way for this to happen, because if it hadn’t been for a Deus ex Machina, A might have carried on working at a corporate job but with his heart and soul completely not into it. There are some people who’re good at that and who pull it off incredibly well but for A and I, we have to operate from our cores, otherwise we get dissatisfied and that spills over onto everything else. I’ve been lucky in that so far, whenever I felt that’s sense of dissociation , I had the freedom to quit and start looking for something I wanted to do, because I was either unmarried or A was working, and I’m glad that my being at work full time is giving me a chance to repay A by giving him that freedom.

But the last four months have really been rather idyllic. First I was on maternity leave and about 5 days into it, while A was on paternity leave, he quit and he didn’t even have to go back for too long to serve out his notice period. So we spent a cool two months hanging out together all day, along with Chubbocks, Puddi and Bojjandi. Then, even when I went back to work in December, I was only working half days so I’d be home for lunch and we’d both greet Chubbocks when he came home from school. We took leisurely siestas together and hung out with the kiddos the rest of the day. We read, lazed in the sun and got our house put back together to some extent. We had time to chill, have a conversation and an after dinner walk and watch friends and laugh late into the night.

From tomorrow I’m back to being gone for 9 and a half hours a day, from 8:15 am to 5:45 pm. It’s going to be even harder knowing A is at home and that if I was we could be spending time together. I’ve gotten spoilt, used to spending my whole day bounded up with him and the kids and it feels a little like I’m being exiled from the Magic Kingdom. I’m going to miss the way Chubbocks bounds into the house after school, excitedly chattering about his day at the top of his voice. I’m going to miss seeing Puddi do all the wonderfully kooky things she does, from her request-a-minutes to have anything, from pomegranates to ‘chandra’ ( santra – oranges) to toffees to namkeens, climbing on the furniture, riding Chubbocks’ old cycle and watching the cat that haunts our place bask in the sun. I’m going to miss Bojjandi’s gurgles and coos, his calls for attention, the bicycling movement of arms and legs as he pumps them up and down when he’s particularly happy or excited, miss feeding him so many times a day.

Sometimes I wish I could reverse mortgage my time, that the workplace worked in reverse. That I could have worked until I had Chubbocks and then taken time off till all my kids turn 18 and then get back to work till the end of my days. I’m so glad today’s Sunday and family sleepover night. We have all three kids in our bedroom on Sundays and though it’s kind of cramped, my heart just feels full on Sunday nights.

I guess right now there’s no real cure for it, unless I quickly write that best-selling potboiler. So I’ll just have to store up heaps of time and attention for the weekends and just wrap those memories around me the rest of the week…