The Year of Waiting
This has been a year of waiting… and I am so over waiting. I work in a job that has a lot of focus on spending time working overseas. In December last year, we found out that we would be going overseas for three years with my work in January 2009 (yep, they believe in long lead-times). In November last year we found our known donors, and by January we had their sperm deposited at the clinic. We’ve had to wait out a six month quarantine before we are legally able to use it (only one month to go!). And we face a five month window in which we can ttc – complete with all the waiting that will involve.
So, we’ve spent this year in a strange holding pattern, on the cusp of being somewhere, but not yet there. Slowly disengaging from our life here. But it’s all so complicated.
If I have the baby while working overseas, I can take my 12 weeks maternity leave, but cannot take more than that otherwise we get sent back home and my position overseas gets cancelled. It’s also commonly held that it’s a ‘bad look’ to get pregnant while overseas. (Given that it’s a pretty conservative workplace, I can only imagine how much more of a ‘bad look’ a pregnant lesbian is.) But we’re pretty well informed of our rights, and I am of the view that maternity leave is the cost of doing business with women (in some parts of this country anyway) so have been working on the assumption that we would aim to get pregnant before we go and then I would take the 12 weeks while we are away and then Lo would stay home with the baby thereafter. There’s no other way we could have done it. We couldn’t get pregnant earlier, we can’t get pregnant while over there (at least not easily), and there’s no way I am letting four more years tick past on my biological clock before getting started.
The opportunities overseas are good work-wise and excellent money-wise. Personally, I have been ambivalent about going, as I like our life here and I do not love my job, but Lo has been pretty excited. We’re headed to a great city and I think Lo is looking forward to a bit of a break and the opportunities that being a SAHM open up. But I’ve been worried a lot about this model: three years is a long time, our first child will be 2 and a half before I would be able to consider spending time at home with the children, I can imagine regretting this. It will be difficult for Lo to conceive our second child overseas, and costly flights home for inseminations will be very difficult to manage. I worry about how Lo will go at home with the baby non-stop and how her career would be affected. She might get bored pretty quickly – particularly in a new city without the support networks. I imagine that I could work through the early stages of our child’s life if I had a job I loved, but the reality is, while my job is a good job, it is not one I love. I worry about the stress of managing it all with my employer – because even though I know my rights are pretty water-tight, the emotional politics of it could get messy. I worry about being expected to work long hours, and travel away from home, and finding that really tough. I worry about breastfeeding and bonding and how I will feel being in the breadwinner role, without an escape hatch. How I will go working all day after sleepless nights. So there’s a lot to worry about.
And while everyone knows we’re going away, there are very few people in our real lives who know that we’re planning to add a baby into that mix. And the baby is not negotiable. Lo and I both know that now is the time for us to start this journey and nothing should postpone it.
So this week I saw a job advertised that is pretty close to being my ‘dream job’ and is definitely on the career trajectory I have been working towards. It’s the kind of job I would have thought about applying after we returned from overseas. It’s in our town and with an employer who has a reputation for fostering work-life balance and supporting women, and includes options for work from home, part-time work etc. The work excites me, but the prospect of a more flexible future in which we could grow our family excites me more.
I told Lo about it in a careful way, sounding her out about a possible future for us that involved staying here, and she was wonderfully supportive. She said that I should definitely go after the job. She was so good about being able to let go of the certainty we had created about going overseas. Which is tough, particularly as she’s been having a really rough year in her work and was looking forward to escaping. But escaping is not always the best exit. We went out to a cafe and mapped out pros and cons of staying or going, and drew up life-maps about where our lives and our careers could be in three years. I am sold on staying put, and I think Lo is comfortable with either approach. We are both aware that we don’t yet have a decision to make as I have to be offered the job first – and there is a lot hinged on this one job. Personally, I see applying for this job as a first step towards loosening the expectations we have for next year. In three months, hopefully we’ll have a better indication of where our pregnancy attempts are up to and will be able to take a more informed decision about what we’re planning to do. We can have a few options on the table.
If we stay here, we can look at models where we both take a few months off when the baby is born, and then both work part-time or more flexibility. We both got quite excited about the idea of staying in our house. Which room would become the nursery, the changes we would make if we were to stay here for a few years (installing a dishwasher is top of the list). It would be difficult to extract ourselves from our plans and will require some careful management regarding telling both of our works. But no one is ever as bound up in these things as you are yourself, and they will deal with it.
So this past week has shunted us out from the comfort of at least knowing where we were going to be next year, back into the world of multiple uncertainties. I think you can tell where my heart is… so fingers crossed for this job or something like it and for our ttc journey.
