As expected two summer months came and went in the blink of an eye, but there was a lot crammed into them. Below I've tried to summarize the highlights (things like weeding, doing jigsaw puzzles, and drinking too much wine not included.) I also decided for the sake of my attention span as well as the reader's, to break the post into two parts: The first about the stuff I did (below). The second about the application onto my future career ambitions (yet to be written).
Here goes ...
First off. You might have the question: What is Sabbatical?
Answer: After ten years of service (or rather hard work) at my company, you get to take a two month paid break from doing your job. Yes, you read that right.
Next question that I get a lot: What do you have to do during sabbatical?
Answer: Whatever you want. However (and this is subject to interpretation) I believe sabbatical is supposed to give you time to do the things you've put aside for a decade because you've been too busy working.
Final question (and I will be fielding this for the next week): So what did you do?
Answer: Read the following
Going in, I was given many suggestions: vacation itineraries, book lists, ways to disconnect, warnings that I will never want to come back. I applied some advice, left the rest and improvised along the way.
I Moved:
On the first day of my Sabbatical, we sold our old house, bought a new one, moved out of the old house and into the new. It was a magical day - so magical that I never changed out of the stretchy pants and t-shirt that I wore to bed the night before and believed that I didn't make a splash looking like a slob at the title company while signing my life away.
Over the next two months, I made the house our home. I unpacked boxes. I bought furniture. I coaxed my husband and then my dad to hang pictures for me. We did everything from acquiring the fundamentals (a working air conditioning unit) to the superfluous (an upright piano.) Basically with a lot of time off and digital marketing stalking me across the Internet after a mere glimpse at a Pottery Barn bookshelf, I ended up spending too much money decorating, but hey, the house is looking good.
I Went On Vacation:
While coworkers of mine had done European tours, African safaris, and experiments in agrotourism, I knew with children aged 6, 4 and 2, that sabbatical travel would be a little more domestic. While I was hoping to do more, we ended up doing a weekend in Quincy, Illinois - a Mississippi River hot spot with a lot of family history; and a week in Martha's Vineyard, providing the kind of respite our family needed at a particularly tough time.
I Hung Out with Friends:
If you've ever engaged in small talk with me, I very likely ended our conversation with a suggestion that we continue the dialogue over lunch, or a game of tennis, a run perhaps, better yet, let's grab a drink some time. I have made so many suggestions to friends over the past ten years, and so few of them have actually played out.
On sabbatical, I kept promises and hung out with friends. I hosted my Bridget for a night. I played tennis with my sister-in-law, Claire. I ran with my friend Erin. I organized play dates: at our house, to the zoo, to the pool. I had drinks and hearty laughs with Mom friends. We took couples on the boat for a dinner party and river cruise. I lingered at pick up for just another couple minutes of socialization and I gloried in all of it.
Now friends, unfortunately you won't see me again for another decade.
I Exercised:
For the past ten years, I've watched the community of moms around me go from buff to buffer as the number of exercise studios proliferated. Within a mile radius of my house alone, there is The Dailey Method, Orange Theory, Shred 415, Core Power Yoga, Yoga by Degrees, Treadfit, and Get Fit for Women (worst name ever.) And for the past ten years, I've avoided the fitness class craze completely. But inspired by or rather envious of the Mom Militia on parade, I signed up for some Yoga Classes.
I chose the studio, Yoga by Degrees for its mere proximity to the grocery store, figuring I could check something else off my list after class was over. I walked in for the first time with a Yoga Mat and nothing more. A spunky woman named Alex greeted me and told me she would be my instructor. She looked me up and down and said, do you have a towel?
Uh no ... I'll just use my t-shirt to wipe off the sweat.
Um, you need a towel; here you go. You need water too.
She handed me a bottle as I brushed off the unnecessary concern, Oh thanks - I should be good though. I played lacrosse in college.
Uh huh.
I walked into the hot studio thinking, seriously, how hard could this be?
I took a seat on my mat as Alex walked in and took off her sweatshirt, revealing (surprise!) she was literally the strongest woman in the world. There were perhaps eight other people in the 95 degree studio with me. We started our practice with an intention of some sort and then began a warm up that is best described as not a warm up at all. I struggled through it, wondering how on Earth it could get harder from here. For an hour we did a combination of weight lifting, squats, jazzercize, push ups (and I can't even do a push up), abs, and sets of pulsing the same position over and over again until my will to move was broken. I had so much sweat dripping off my body that my feet and arms kept sliding off the mat, making me tumble to the ground. I wasn't the only one that found it hard - the only male in the class gave up after 20 minutes and just laid on his mat the rest of the time.
Miraculously, I survived. And more miraculously, Alex was very enthusiastic about my performance. So I stuck with it. I've been going once a week, towel and water bottle in hand. Now I can not only do a couple sets of push ups, I'm also developing a two pack. I call that a success.
I Took The Helm:
For more than a decade, Peter has been trying to teach me how to boat. During those ten years, all I've learned to do was balance as I was pouring champagne. So my in-laws, likely sensing how worthless I was on their boat, sent me to a Women at the Helm course in Chicago. It was designed to get more ladies off their butts and into the drivers seat to combat the vast inequality of male to female boat ownership. Instructed by 100 Ton Master Captain Pam (she's the one in the back of the picture), I absorbed the day long curriculum like a sponge, reciting everything back to Peter when I got home that night. In short, I loved it. And since the class, we have spent many days on the boat putting my lessons to practice.
I Was A Mom
Of all the things I did, this was probably my favorite. For the first time outside of maternity leaves, which are a blur due to sleeplessness, I got to focus, singularly, on being a mom. I took the kids to the Zoo and to parks. I colored and built Lego creations. I packed picnic lunches to eat at the pool and swam with the kids till we pruned. We rode bikes, went for walks, and ran around the new yard. I was there for bed time and there to get them up in the morning. I got to attentively transition them to their new school routines and help with homework. I was present physically and mentally and I loved that.
As I went back to work on Thursday, I could see that Mary was getting a little upset going into school. She told me that evening that she had cried because she was sad that I was back at work. She wanted me to be at home, and that was hard for me to hear.
Quickly, and then I will express the rest of my thoughts in Part 2 of this post, I would love to be a stay at home mom. There were moments when Margaret sat on my lap on the patio and we would just talk about the bunny rabbits hopping through the yard. There were days when I would escape with Mary to do some shopping or get our nails done during nap time. There were evenings when Bobby and I would do soccer drills and laugh and laugh in the backyard. And then there were those hugs after school. How I loved those happy faces, lighting up cause I was there. These were hours typically filled in by work over the past ten years.
Counter to past thinking, as a stay at home mom, I was very busy; there was always something to do and if there wasn't, there were clear ways to get more involved in the school, church and community at large. I spent time thinking about what it would be like if I could continue in this role or if I could find an alternate career with more flexibility. But in the end, the economics never worked. At least, set in our current lifestyle.
If there is one thing that I learned on sabbatical, it's that being a stay at home mom is both an amazing gift and a satisfying career. And I am so thankful to my company for giving me that time with my family. I won't forget it and I will work hard toward my next one.
Lo.
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