Work

[talyen]

(Forgive any oddness about this post - I am playing with using a new client.)

A year ago, my emotional and mental housecleaning started, and I thought about the relationship I was in. Once that was fixed, I spent my thoughts on all the rest of my life: my lack of children, my discontent with my job, and how to minimize the pain from my pinched nerves.

I made some decisions then: I had surgery on my neck. I gave up on ever having a healthy relationship with another adult, and decided to become a single parent while I could still get pregnant. (Little did I know

I have some challenges to getting pregnant, since I am not making enough of the hormone which prepares the uterus to receive and keep the cells that attach and become a fetus. I did manage to get pregnant, accidentally, and was both saddened and relieved when the predictable miscarriage happened. Saddened, because it was a cheap way to get pregnant, and would have made making any sort of decision moot. Relieved because I do want it to be my decision, and I felt so unready at the time. Now if I want to get pregnant, not only do I have to go through a medical procedure to do it, but might also have to have daily shots for a the first trimester so I can keep the pregnancy.

And who knew I would feel so conflicted about getting pregnant? I've wanted kids since I was a teen-ager (although I avoided the trap of getting pregnant in high-school). I've put it off for 20 years because I've never been in a good enough relationship, or because the person I was with wasn't someone with whom I would be able to raise a child, and because I didn't want to be a single parent.

Now it's down to the wire - I'm 39, and have a fertility challenge, and I'm single with some awful family background. I'm dating the most wonderful woman in the world, and who knows where that will lead? Can I create a parent-child family, and feel confident that I won't mess up another person's entire life? Can I afford it financially and emotionally? Am I even capable of having patience? Yesterday I really disliked my dog, and it's not her fault that she is sometimes incontinent. It was simply the inconvenience of re-washing the couch covers at 11:00pm that broke my patience - how would I deal with a small person? I can't imagine subjecting a new baby to me.

Yep, I'm waffling. My next appointment with the Reproductive Endocrinologist is in a week and a half. He will want me to start on drugs right away, and start trying to get pregnant in October. I have to figure out what I want before then.
).

So and then I got back to work, and hated it. Hey, after 3.5 months of not having to go to that place and deal with the issues there, of course I hated it! And about two months after I got back, I had the opportunity to read a book about negotiating results between groups in contention. It was like a lightbulb went off in my head, and I finally knew what other people were born knowing about dealing with others. After that, work wasn't so awful. I read more books about negotiating. I talked to my boss about changing my role on the team so that I could do more inter-team work while still retaining my security focus. She had noticed the change, even pinpointed the exact date I'd read the book (three weeks before), proving to me that I was using my new skills. She's promised to re-evaluate me in October, since the only reason I haven't been promoted for three years is my people skills, and that would give me time to show that I've made a real change, not a temporary thing. I mostly like both my work and the environment in which I do it.

So now, things are better at work, but I still haven't been promoted. There's a position open on another team which would be at the higher level, but with a different kind of responsibility and not as much people interaction (which I would miss - I like working with all the teams that I do). I've pretty much decided to talk to my boss about the open position, in terms of letting her know I was thinking about it because of the higher number after the title, and let her know that I'm looking forward to the change in responsibilities on my team. Hopefully, she will follow through and let me do more of the stuff I'd like and let me learn to get good at it. I guess both futures are unknown, but the future on my team sounds better in terms of actual work than the future on the other team.

I'd still like to be promoted *soon*.