First off, thank you all so much, you fabulous peoples, for all the gems of advice. Pure gold, it all was. What I really want to do, is to move you all in here, so that you're on hand for any future dilemmas I may have. You wouldn't all fit, what with us not having a spare room, let alone 15 of them. I'm thinking I might buy a big property down the road, and you could all go and live there. I'd call it "The Advice Shack", and I'd pop round every time I needed a decision on anything. I could hire out your services to cover costs: "
Top Notch Advice for All Life Situations". On the other hand, you probably would miss your families, and maybe this doesn't look to you like a job opportunity that you can't resist. OK. Stand easy. You can stay where you are, and I'll just tap into The Advice Shack in a cyber way. Probably simpler all round.
Well, peoples, I stayed. I did. I stayed. I rather surprised myself, and reading back that last blog post, it does sound as if I was pretty much on my way out already. However, I was glad to have 10 days or so before I had to make the decision, and I just hung loose. I kept deliberately putting the conscious decision to one side. Every time my rational self wanted to pick it up and get it sorted and tick it off the list, I would tell her to put it down and leave it alone. I'd done all the listing out of the pros and cons, so I tucked that information away in my head, and used it as a background to pottering on, doing the job, and trying to see which way the path would lead.
I can't explain why I stayed, because I'm not entirely sure. I think, when it all came down, I had a strong feeling that having something outside the school, something mine, something that might lead on to other somethings, was more important to me than I'd realised.
The meeting at which I had told my employers that I was applying for other jobs, and discussed options, was extremely annoying. I felt patronised, unappreciated, voiceless. (At one point, I said the following: "
I've been in this room for 15 minutes, and I haven't finished more than 2 sentences. PLEASE would you let me say what I want to say." for yes, I do work with people who can talk at me for 15 minutes without pausing, and then interrupt me when I open my mouth.) I came home furious, and it took me a couple of days to calm down. But I did calm down, and Husband said "
You've got a great offer on the table. I couldn't quite understand why you were so angry at being offered totally flexible holidays..." Having calmed down, I realised that I do like fundraising (bits of it, anyway), and that no job is perfect. I did think that I ran the risk of being a little bored and isolated in the Library Assistant job, and though, of course, jobs are always what you make them, my gut feeling was that in a year or two's time, I'd regret the choice. A shrinking of horizons.
A boarding school can be a rather intense bubble, and I tried to imagine what it would feel like, sitting at the library desk six mornings a week (yes, six... Saturday morning school included), when Husband or one of the children has got involved in some wrangle or other, and I imagined it could feel claustrophobic. My current job is two days a week, and then I can walk away. Arrangement of hours can be quite a significant factor, I think, and I don't underestimate the freedom I have at the moment to fit my job round my life, rather than the other way round.
Those elements were important, but I also had a deep-down sense that I just wanted to win this battle. Something gritty inside was telling me that I do have a bit of a pattern of leaving difficult work situations, instead of working through them, and, while I wouldn't have sacrificed family happiness or the chance for an easy life for that gritty something, nonetheless, I did listen to it, and the more I listened to it, the grittier it became. It felt like I'd turned some kind of corner. Perhaps it was that moment when I told someone to shut up and listen to me, or perhaps it was that over the following week, I found a way of working that was ballsily focused on making my own job a success, rather than worrying about other people's situations or the future of the organisation, or perhaps it was that I had in writing an acknowledgement of what I'd been saying for months about the fundraising target. (Yes, ballsily is a word.) Anyway, I felt the corner I'd turned was an important one. I'd done a lot of leg-work in a new job situation, creating order out of the chaos that I'd inherited (my predecessor lasted 7 weeks, and then there'd been a long gap), carving out my role, making sense of it all, developing a workable strategy - I didn't want to waste it all. I stayed, and I'm glad I did.
A rather odd thing has been happening. I've found that I've been treated with more respect than before. I've been listened to (just about...), appreciated, supported, and my judgement backed. In return, I've tried hard not to close down defensively quite as quickly (though who likes being talked at without pause?). This week I'm about to pull off (here's hoping) a large funding coup. If successful, it will make a big difference to the organisation, but more than that, I feel that in the process of working on it in its final stages, collaboratively with certain individuals, important things have shifted. A colleague said to me "
I think you've been an agent for change in the organisation", which was a nice thing to say, and yes, I think probably true.
That's all got a bit touchy-feely hasn't it? The other factor that's helped is that I've booked 6 weeks off, through July and August (not the entirety of the school holidays, but good enough, and to work the other 3 was my choice), and now I feel I can look forward to enjoying the summer, whereas before, I was looking on it as something to be got through.
So, till next time in The Advice Shack...
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With luck, they'll make it to Heathrow this evening, in time to get a flight to Edinburgh. But they may well have to spend the night at Heathrow and come up tomorrow instead. That will represent a delay of 48 hours. Yes, you read that right: 48 hours. Instead of spending 4 nights in a cottage in Girvan, it will be 2. Though luckily, this whole sorry saga won't have eaten into the time that we will be spending with them, which would have been much more tragic..JPG)
