Too much choice!

In one of my earliest posts (she says as though she's been blogging for years; when in fact she means "about four weeks ago") I commented on how maybe having all the choices the modern woman has (to work, to look after the children, to do a bit of both in whatever fashion that works for you) isn't all it's cracked up to be.  And maybe it would be easier just to be told what to do and have done with it.

Well, having thought I had two, maybe three choices, I now discover they are (or feel as though they are) infinite.  The problem is I now have to decide what I want.

I had an awful day at work on Friday.  I ended up in tears of mixed rage and frustration on a colleague which is never the most professional of looks, and only narrowly avoided throwing my letter of resignation at anyone who'd catch it and marching out (probably to Scotland, but then that's another story), never to return.  I thought I'd calmed down, but I got wound up enough last night about having to go to work today that, in a manner reminiscent of my elder daughter, I refused to go to bed because then I'd have to get up in the morning and I picked a huge fight with an innocent bystander (aka husband) about (of all things) karaoke.

I woke up this morning thinking "this is it. I've got to do something before I drive my marriage into the ground and myself into the local psychiatric ward".

I've done very little work today because I've mostly been in meetings with much-maligned, but if today's experience is anything to go by, utterly sympathetic and wonderful HR people.  And it turns out that having felt unloved, unwanted and unsupported, I am anything but.  It transpires that I'm good at my Proper Job.  Good enough that they will do anything they can to keep me.  I can go one day a week, or two, or do a totally different job within the same organisation, or be a consultant and only work when I want to and they want me to, or stop altogether and work out as much or as little notice as I like.

I cried.  Again.  Still not very professional but they seemed to understand.

So now I have to decide what I want.  I can stay, or I can go.  And I feel very lucky and privileged that (unlike, I imagine, most women in my shoes) whatever I decide, the people for whom I have worked for the last nine years will support me.

Doesn't make the choice any easier though.