Echoes.

This evening I’m feeling a bit off.
It seems as though nothing is working out quite as I had planned – that’s not the odd part.
The odd part is the fact that I’m basically left without a future for myself.
I’m all wrapped up – not mentally, but physically, in being the future Mrs. Labello.
The mom of little Labellos and apparently nothing for myself.

One of the hard points of Nick’s and my relationship has been his ability to remind me again and again that I have no skills, no trades, no degrees.
No amount of common sense about how the world ACTUALLY works, about being a parent, about stock markets and music or anything  count – as they aren’t actual TRADE skills.
I think part of being a graduate with multiple degrees is gaining this incredible lack of insight to the fact that to 90% of the population, those degrees don’t matter and it’s about who you ARE on the inside.

And he’s a good man.  And I love him.
But he’s clueless about this.
And I ask myself again tonight what that means on a day to day basis.
Am I going to hear about the money being HIS because he’s the primary breadwinner?
Am I going to hear about how I need to take off of work because my job isn’t as important as his?

I don’t actually think he’s that meatheaded to SAY those things, but the points that have lead me to this quandary multiply with imagination and imagery and I’m left with sort of a Donna Reed vs. Father Knows Best mixture.
And I worry.

He sent me an email a few months ago from the Le Cordon Bleu school in Minneapolis.  He has been saying that he thinks it would be great if I do something like that for school because my job is ‘dead end’.
I’ve defended my position, but the truth is that I have had about all I can take of the rigidity of the world in which I work.
And so I finally looked into it.  I’ve always wanted to go – just never thought that it was all that practical as a single mom.
And I got excited – enough to where I asked for more information.

But tonight he’s dismayed.  Thinks that finding a job similar to what I have is the way to go because you can’t keep changing  jobs every few years.
I am who I am who I am.
And never have I been a person that’s content with sticking with a job for more than 5 years or so.
I simply get bored.
And the things I love – the things that I can do forever are the creative things.  I want to try working for a printing press, I want to cook, I want to make cupcakes for a living, I want to create music the way I always dreamed, I want to be a family therapist, I want to be a photographer.

I don’t see why I have to decide.
He chose chemistry in high school.
I chose motherhood.
That’s my full time, life long job.
Everything else is simply a paycheck and so when he says that he wants me to find something to do that makes me happy, I cringe.  Because then comes the elaboration, that it needs to be a trade, a skill, a degree.
And yet none of the skills I have thus far are good enough to count – what would be?
So I aim for my happiness, but that email that he sent is no longer valid.
No longer a good trade, a good skill.
Because we’d have to pay for it.
8 to 5.  18 months.
Just like a regular job.  Only one that I’d pay an enormous amount for.

I’ve not been unemployed since I was 16 years old.
Not a day.
And I’m facing a period of unemployment that is indefinite.  And an impatient but good man with impossible expectations.
And I wonder when to separate respect for him as a man with good long term planning skills and when to truly hang him by his toes for being so clueless about the fact that being miserable with a paycheck for a job HE can be proud of does not a happy wife and mother make.