Developments and a lack thereof.

Maybe I should be more encouraged than I am, but instead I feel there's a pall over my professional life right now - one that I don't know when will be lifted. My company is going through a merger process right now, and it's not ugly, exactly, but it's not pretty, either.

Yesterday, all the vice presidents of the new company were announced. My boss, who is fabulous and who I think I have a great relationship with, was promoted to be the head of my group. Arguably, this bodes well for my keeping my job, but at the same time the proportion of Newco VPs to my company’s VPs showed clearly that there is likely to be something of a bloodbath in our legal department. There are a lot of good lawyers who need jobs, so maybe I’ll keep mine, and maybe I won’t.

Usually, this doesn’t scare me too much because I have a decent severance package, and we won’t starve for awhile. But, this is ME we’re talking about, so there are certainly times I allow my mind to wander down dark and scary paths, or even just a path where my career becomes yet more mundane. My biggest fear is not that I won’t find another job, but that to stay in Denver, I will have to take a job with some company that nobody ever heard of, doing tedious and irrelevant work. Not that my job is particularly glamorous right now, and it sure as hell isn’t relevant to most people’s lives, but it’s good enough that with some work I could swing it out of its Mommy Track Death Spiral ™ and back towards something at least a little more international in nature. I haven’t found that Denver has a lot of these jobs, and whatever there is will soon become raw meat for the 50 attorneys who will be out on the street.

At any rate, my life just feels like a whole lot of limbo right now, waiting to find out how it’s all going to end up. We can’t move forward with the remodel until I know I have a job, so we’re still crammed into our tiny house that is rapidly becoming a casualty of entropy. If I do keep my job, it will likely be at an offer of reduced pay and bonus, and who knows about promotion opportunities? I would probably ride it out until my kids are just a little older and I will hopefully feel like I can commit more time to my own life.

Sag – it’s all so boring.

Not boring: trip to sister-in-law’s wedding on a week and a half with NO KIDS. Sleep, glorious sleep!

Choo choo

Giirrrrrrl,

Shit's been busy around here (see, e.g., the above photo of my child (r.) on his first day of school this week). Is it not weep-worthy? A veritable milestone, yea, and one that did indeed reduce the child's mother to quivering jelly. My big boy!

And then there was Challenge Day yesterday. Look it up. It's an 8-hour extravaganza of serious emotion and dancing assholery that consists of about 25 adults spending the day in an airless gym with 100 public school kids (in my case, 7th graders) trying to "get real." There is a show about it on MTV called "If You Really Knew Me," and I can tell you that it was one of the most rewarding experiences I have had in some time. It is quite emotionally draining, and amazing how quickly so many of these kids want to talk about things going wrong in their lives. It was a very heartening experience, and I have nothing but the highest admiration for the people who do this for a living. It's awesome work. When I get laid off, maybe I'll look into it.

Hamish (as opposed to our oldest, Angus - our silly sometimes nicknames for the boys and ones I think I will use going forward just for funsies) made his first two-word sentence this morning. He pointed to the lamp that was not on and said "no light." the boy is a genius!