PACKING UP

Today is my last day at work (and by work I mean both paid employment and postgrad studies), for a year potentially...

Packing up my desk, I feel surprisingly emotional. While physically I am craving the time off - the opportunity to nap during the day, to have my heat pack handy, to not have to change out of my pyjamas - it's a different story emotionally. I enjoy having a daily routine, somewhere to go to (even if I have been getting in shamefully late these days). More than having somewhere to go is having people to see - I like that on any given day at work, I will interact with people, share an office with my colleagues, have people to discuss publications, research, blogs and personal stories with. It sure beats spending the day alone at home, and it helps that I genuinely like my colleagues.

What I will also miss is feeling like I have a purpose, something that has become more important to me since entering (step)motherhood. At home sometimes, it's so easy to become bogged down in domestic routine almost to the point where it starts to feel vaguely oppressive - and not because I have a partner who doesn't contribute his fair share, because this isn't the case. It's simply that some element of your individuality, a sense of command or equal footing - of reaping immediate, tangible rewards of your hard work - is lost among the chores and tending to of children who (despite being appreciative at their core) do not thank you for your efforts. At work, I feel as though my thoughts, my intellectual input, is sought and valued. The work I do is acknowledged and appreciated, and there are tangible rewards to my efforts. I feel like I am truly in my element as myself and not someone merely fulfilling a required role.

By no means do I mean to to imply that parenting is not fulfilling and rewarding in its own way. Neither do I mean to deride or belittle those who don't work or those who are stay-at-home parents, or suggest that one even needs work to have meaning in their lives - far from it. But for me personally, there is a certain sense of self-actualisation that I get from my work that is truly meaningful to me, as corny as that may be. It's this, along with the friendly faces in my office and along the corridors, that makes me a little misty-eyed looking at my bare desk today.

I like to think of it though as not the end of an era, but the end of a chapter - one that heralds the start of another chapter, and does not preclude a reappearance of this current chapter's contents later down the track.