What Do You Do?

1. What is your cur­rent occu­pa­tion? Is this what you choose to be doing at this point in your life? Why or why not?

I’m a Mom­my. I do vol­un­teer work main­tain­ing web­sites and help­ing to run an online safe­ty orga­ni­za­tion, but main­ly I’m a Mom­my. Obvi­ous­ly, this is what I’ve cho­sen, or I’d be doing some­thing else.

2. If time/talent/money were no object, what would your dream occu­pa­tion be?

This is pret­ty much it. There are oth­er things I enjoy, like writ­ing, and I hope to return to tech­ni­cal writ­ing when I return to work. But I write now, too.

3. What did/do your par­ents do for a liv­ing? Has this had any influ­ence on your career choices?

My father is in the HVAC indus­try and has been for most of my life. He was (is) a Marine but left the ser­vice short­ly before I was born. He’s taught HVAC in vocational/technical schools and run ser­vice depart­ments and now he works for one of the big ven­dors in the industry.

My moth­er stayed home with us until I was in high school and my lit­tle broth­er was in ele­men­tary school, when she start­ed work­ing part-time at var­i­ous jobs. She’s a records clerk at a local high school now. It’s clear­ly a job rather than a career, just so she isn’t too bored.

I think the biggest effect Dad­dy’s work had on me was that I knew I did­n’t want to do any­thing blue-col­lar, but also that I knew I could do any­thing I real­ly decid­ed I want­ed to do (he dropped out of high school and has lit­tle for­mal edu­ca­tion, but has been a pret­ty suc­cess­ful exec­u­tive). Mom’s good about being hap­py wher­ev­er she is and doing what­ev­er she needs to do with­out complaint.

4. Have you ever had to choose between hav­ing a career and hav­ing a family?

Well, I know that tak­ing sev­er­al years off is going to hurt me when I return to work. I may have to work back up to doing what I actu­al­ly enjoy the most (tech­ni­cal writ­ing) because it was dif­fi­cult to get into it in the first place with­out a degree. But between Katie los­ing her father, blend­ing two very dif­fer­ent fam­i­lies, and health con­cerns (mine and Katie’s) it was real­ly more impor­tant for me to be home full-time than to be out work­ing. And it’s worth it, hon­est­ly. Katie and I are real­ly enjoy­ing homeschooling.

Yes, I want to go back to work, because I miss the chal­lenge and the inter­ac­tions. But I’d pre­fer to do it either part-time or as a telecom­muter, and I’m unlike­ly to find an employ­er inter­est­ed in me on those terms quite yet. So it may take time. And as the kids grow old­er, they are bet­ter able to take care of themselves—daycare just isn’t a pos­i­tive thing as far as we’re concerned.

5. In your opin­ion, what is the eas­i­est job in the world? What is the hard­est? Why?

Eas­i­est is any­thing that actu­al­ly engages my inter­est for long peri­ods of time. Hard­est is any­thing that requires deal­ing with a dis­or­ga­nized, high-stress/cri­sis envi­ron­ment or lots of pol­i­tics. Like being a step-par­ent. Espe­cial­ly with two ADD kids and an extreme­ly hos­tile bio­par­ent who refus­es to be civ­il or cooperative.