And suddenly my life changed…

 

My life has changed…I always felt that I didn’t want to be one of these parents who were defined by their children; you know the type; who reply to every query with a little anecdote about little Jonny…so a casual ‘how are you?’ is answered with a discourse on little Jonnys sleeping patterns…And such a funny story about the time little Jonny ate broccoli…

 

However my life has changed; its changed because my son has changed. He’s met people who are more fun than me! (I know imagine how fun must they be!). But there are now people who he’d rather be with than me. And I’ve started inviting them round to our house; or meeting up with their mums….Its like I can breathe again.

 

These other people (lets call them friends) actually want to play Thomas or gnomes or made up superheros for as many hours as he does; which lets be frank- I don’t!

 

And I’m not pregnant….so I don’t have to start again and can get back to planning my trip to China!

Previous attempts to change…

I’ve rejected alcoholism as the most obvious way of dealing with the boredom that invades my life…So I’m looking for something else….I’ll start by reviewing things I’ve tried so far:

1) Change my job. I tried this 2 years ago; I quit my teaching job and went to a big firm to do public sector audit. There was a challenging career path, competition, excitement, more money. I lasted 2 weeks! So what went wrong…I really really hated it- the challenges weren’t challenges I cared about; the people were dicks and I had to drive miles and miles each day. I came home every day for 2 weeks in tears. I missed my teaching; I like the organization and the people I work with. I care about what I do. I phoned my boss and asked for my job back. Within a week I was back at my desk planning courses. Changing jobs seems like a good idea but I can’t think of a job that has advantages over the one I have. Mainly other jobs look like more work for less money; I need more than that to make it seem worthwhile.

2) Having more people around. One of the problems with raising children is that once you come home your kind of stuck in the house….me, husband, housework… So a year ago I got a lodger; the theory was that having somebody else around would help us to create grown up time as they wouldn’t be exhausted from the evening rush and we wouldn’t all ready know everything that had ever happened to them. This worked really well for a bit…then our schedules changed and we always seemed to be on top of each other.  We gave him his notice and he refused to move out; when he eventually did go it was a great relief!

 

3) Studying. this is the most obvious- I’d like something more to think about. I started an open university course about 9 months ago. I picked an MA in online and distance learning. I mainly chose this because my employer agreed to pay for it. The first unit was called The E-learning Professional. God was it dull….it dealt with things such as ‘what is a professional’. It was also quite easy- in my opinion not really post graduate standard as I found I could knock of an assignment (around 2,000 words) in a day with no prior reading and still get 65%. It wasn’t really challenging. I just had this guilt that I should be doing it…I finished the unit and was SO GLAD. So if its going to be studying it needs to be interesting!

 

The next step is to make a list of things that inspire me!