Now that it's all over, and I can look back on that unbroken stretch of not working, what did it teach me? What do I march back into the workforce understanding that I didn't before? Well, it's really something that I was conscious of at the time, while it was happening, but I couldn't really acknowledge at the time. While unemployment has the veneer of an extended vacation, you can’t enjoy it the same way, because there's always a gnawing at your insides, knowing that there's this big blank of a future out in front of you. It’s a fog that you might come to the end of tomorrow, or maybe not for years. No matter how much you do to find a new job over the course of a given day, you go to sleep every night with the dead certainty that you didn't do enough, or didn't do the right things. There was a website you didn't visit, a person who you didn't talk to, a connection you didn't make. And you know it's true, because you still don't have a job.
If you can put that out of your mind (like I could at times), the experience can really be pleasant. Once you get over the thought that you should have something to do, somewhere in particular to go, you just sort of drift through the days. It’s a luxury that most of had as kids, and it’s nice to visit it again for a little while. And because I have a three-year-old daughter, even “empty” days were always full... I had to give up the dream that I was going to have these huge tracts of time where I would finally get back into the groove of writing every day, or time to read all the books, or catch up on all the movies and TV shows that are on my ongoing list. After a while, I decided that I was just going to use the time, as long or short as it might be, to enjoy being with my family all day, every day.
And like I said, now that it's over, I can look back at it with fondness. But like I’ve also said, when you have no job, every day is tinged with the thought that you should be doing something else. They really were good times, too. I was able to take my daughter to preschool for most of her first year, to wake her up in the morning and dance with her, which is always the first thing she wants to do, even if she's still sleepy enough that her extent of effort was slumping against my shoulder. And there were "date afternoons", where my wife and I would drop Lily off at my parents and have a few hours to relax at home, or times we would stay up late watching TV and talking. There were no limits other than what we put on them.
Now that I'm back to a daily schedule, I'm feeling the tug of wishing I were still there. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for the opportunity and the money (by the way, I give endless credit to my wife for making it easy sometimes to forget that I was only pulling in less than half my Borders salary in unemployment). But now that I know how it all turned out, that I found something else and everything is going to be fine, I miss being with them. Knowing that I'm going to get home most evenings and have only a few hours when we can all be together is hard.
But there's always the weekends, and I have to keep telling myself that while I worked at Borders, I was fine with that arrangement. The adjustment period will end, and we'll all get used to the new normal, just as we did back in October when I suddenly had nowhere to go every weekday. The next chapter has begun, and it's up to me to make the best I can of it. But I think I will, and sooner than I would otherwise, because in those six months I've relearned what it is that I'm really working for.
