I QUIT my job.
Friends, this is such a big deal to our little family and before you think, wow girl, must be nice, let me tell you how heart-wrenching, painstaking, fear evoking hard this was. Not just was, still is. We are a working class family. Blessed but we both have to work kind of family. When I first had the idea to stay home it wasn’t, “yeah we can cut out some extras and make it work”, it was more like “well we won’t have groceries but…
The other painstaking part is I loved my job. Like really, really loved it.
I was a livestock inspector– I got paid to drive around and do disease investigations on farms.
But as much as I loved it, something changed on March 16th, 2016. Tommy was born. Work did not become optional, I carried our insurance, my paycheck paid our mortgage. I had to go back after 12 weeks but after Tommy was born, work became impossible. In a way I can’t explain, working motherhood became my deepest struggle.
In my circle of friends no one seemed to struggle with not being home the way I did. Something felt really, really wrong and I didn’t know what to do. So I complained about it a lot. And I thought of all the ways I could make money working from home.
Talking about leaving my job and ALL of my business ideas turned into a major pain point in our marriage. Tom supported me but for sure thought I was going crazy. (Because I was). I became very torn, very money focused and very into the idea of ‘what I wanted to do next’. Something big, something important. Start a business, build my blog, make $5000/month. And yet, nothing happened.
I’ve been building websites since college but I couldn’t seem to make any for profit. Everything was impossible. And I was losing my babies.
Ten months ago, I was sitting in a hospital room, mourning the fact that I wouldn’t have three kids at home when I ran the math of what we would have been paying in daycare. That’s my salary I thought. Then I thought it again, that is my salary.
It was exactly my take home pay.
I immediately told Tom– I could do in home daycare and quit my job and stay home with Tommy! He didn’t just say no, he said NO WAY. He said I was trying to replace our babies. He said our house would never be clean, he said I would go crazy. He said, you almost just died and you carry our insurance. I felt defeated. I asked my two closest friends (both who do daycare) to pray for him to change his mind.
Seven months later, out of the blue, Tom called me at work, “Hey”, he said, “you know that daycare thing? Why don’t you do that? Do you still want to do that”?
Now, I know God can do bigger miracles than changing Tom’s heart but at that moment, there was nothing more surprising to me.
What I want you to know about quitting my job is that it wasn’t easy. No one told me I should. No one told me how I could. No one told me it was a good idea. It was more than a little bit crazy.
But there is one reason I quit my job. His name is Tommy and he is three.
No Comments