A few days before I returned to work after having my second child, my husband put up a schedule on the kitchen wall. It had the days, times, name of each child and red and green lines for which of us would be ferrying them to or from nursery. Red was him. Green was me. There were more green lines than red.
Our daughter, the baby, would be turning one at the end of March and making her way out to nursery on April 1. Around that time, it had also become increasingly hard to convince our three-year-old son to do anything at all. Leaving the house, walking to the nursery, entering the nursery, getting to his classroom. All these things required wells of patience I often didn’t know how to access.
We hadn’t been able to get a space at my son’s nursery school for the baby, so they were going to be in two different places. Still, I told myself, it’s doable. I only need to actually go to work three days a week anyway. I had returned to work when my first child was ten months old, and it had been an adjustment, but I managed just fine. This time would be no different. I would manage.
Four months later, about a month ago, I resigned from my job teaching English at a university. I couldn’t, it turned out, manage.
But the whole truth of why I quit my job after just one semester back from leave, and with a young family at home requires context. In the end, I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice, but I still ended up battling fear, guilt and sadness.
Why I didn’t have a choice
Let’s start at the beginning, that is, April 4. Only a few days into the new business year in Japan. My first official day back on the job after a year’s childcare leave would be the next day, April 5.
When I went to pick up my son, I saw his teacher, sticking slips of brightly coloured paper in the wall pockets they use to send notices to parents. Oh, I’m so sorry, she started to say. What’s going on? my face said. What was going on was corona. The class would be closed for a week.
The next day, my first day back at work, I teach four new groups of students online. My son watches too much YouTube. We get through the day. I hate teaching online, but he likes watching YouTube. Win-win?
By the end of that week, my family had all tested positive. After being at home for almost two weeks, everybody had gotten better, and I felt finally able to start my semester. But it was nearing the end of April.
This feeling of not having quite started, but needing to feel and show that I was making progress would shadow me the entire semester. As anyone who has ever taught knows, teaching is rarely an in and out operation. Prep and marking take more time than the time spent in the classroom. Time was something I could never find. At home and at work, I felt like I was just doing enough to keep things from crashing. In other words, I was not on top of things, things were on top of me, pressing me down.
In June, my son turned 4. At his nursery school, parents were invited to a party for those born that month. In another year or semester, I would have taken the day off, but I had already missed all those classes due to corona. I had make-up classes scheduled on Saturdays for weeks. I couldn’t add any more.
On the day of the party, I sat at my desk and watched a video of him in his neon green t-shirt and green and white trousers, ebullient, doing his birthday interview. His favorite fruits he told his teacher were apples, pears, plums, strawberries and oranges (just like The Very Hungry Caterpillar). I cried. Later, in narrating what happened at the party, he told me of all the parents who were there, and, he told me, as a matter of fact, you weren’t there.
What is Anxiety?
I started to really consider what anxiety might be after I started feeling quite tense before my fuller days at work. In the dark, after my younger child had fallen asleep beside me, I googled things like how to deal with work anxiety or signs of anxiety. One thing I took from that ‘research’ was that preparation can help with anxiety, which I agreed with.
Commuting time became marking time, on my days off or whenever the children had gone to bed, I would prepare. Prepare, prepare, prepare. What that meant, of course, was that for every minute spent preparing, there was something else I was not doing.
I felt prepared for my classes for a few weeks, and that reduced the anxiety a bit. But what I wasn’t doing was cooking or sleeping or anything entirely selfish like reading. Which led to uneasiness. And weariness. And tension took up a permanent space inside and outside of me. I could never relax.
The end of the semester snuck up on me. After weeks spent in what felt like the trails of Superman’s whizzes, it was summer break, and I could think. Then, while eating his dinner one evening, my son clutched his throat and yelped as tears, sudden and real, rolled down his cheeks. Omicron BA.5.
Deciding to Quit
The thought of quitting my job and not looking immediately for full-time employment was slow in coming to me. I am Jamaican. I live in Japan. Overseas. When you go overseas as a Jamaican, you work. Two, three, four jobs if you can. We work.
I enjoyed the security of a full-time job (though I was on a contract), and I enjoyed the opportunities for interacting with various personalities that teaching provided. Did I really know what I was thinking? Could these things not outweigh the heaviness that I had come to associate with work? Maybe it was just my schedule. Yes, that had to be it. I had been working in this same job for six years, and my schedule was, objectively speaking, quite hectic this year.
I entered into communication with my superiors, and I agreed to a lighter schedule. Resolved. Except the heaviness returned. Why? Because I realized that when I had considered the idea of just leaving it all behind, in addition to the fear and sadness, I had also felt free. I’ve left jobs before, so I was familiar with that feeling. Having experienced it, even for just a moment shrouded in indecision, led to a yearning.
What I’m searching for
Recently, tennis star Serena Williams announced her retirement from tennis to focus on growing her family. Many professional women, famous or not, make the decision to focus on family every day, and more discussion is taking place about whether women can have it all–family and career–at the same time. The pandemic has also set the Great Resignation in motion with more people searching for careers that suit their lifestyles.
I can’t say that I wasn’t influenced by each of these phenomena, but there are two specific things I am in search of.
Whenever our children got sick, my husband and I took turns missing work. Or we decided based on whether one of us had a stronger need to be at work that day. But I still felt guilty or bothered about it. I would like a work situation where missing work for a valid reason leaves me at ease. At the same time, I would like for the children to be able to recover from their ailments slowly.
Even if they just have a little cold, we take them to the doctor anyway, just to confirm that they can go to nursery. Why? To be able to tell the nursery that the doctor said it’s OK, so we can go to work.
The more important thing I want to be able to do is give my children time to be. Children move at their own pace. Hurrying them along takes more time and energy than just letting them be. Yes, sometimes we have to cut off the playing at some point, and, yes, sometimes we have to leave the house right now. But I don’t want to be thinking all the time about that train that I have to catch, which I’m surely going to miss if this child doesn’t come now.
I realize that there are parents who achieve these two things while holding down full time jobs, and maybe I will return to a regular job soon or someday, I don’t know. But right now, I have to try to make life easier for all four of us in my family. The first step toward that was leaving full-time employment.