It's been a long, long time since I lost myself.
Put my pride down on the table, put my fear on the shelf.
So I bought myself a throne to reside and let myself go.
But I've traveled much too far, where I've gone, I'll never know.
What a long, long time...
Long, long time.
It's been a little old while since I felt so fine.
Wanderin' in the rain...
Losing my mind.
What a long, long time.
What a long, long time.
-- O.A.R. "King of the Thing", 34th And 8th
Heard a live version of this song being played on the Groove Show last weekend. I fell in love with the refrain, and it speaks to how I've been feeling lately.
Last Sunday, a post appeared on I Am Doing the Best I Can that struck a chord in me. I'll pull the relevant paragraphs and quote them here:
When you drop off the entire Bloggy planet and don't read any of your friends, even though you Love them...but participating in the bloggy world become just too much to bear because that means, well INTERACTING and shit...
When you decide after two years, which, lets face - is antediluvian in the time epochs of the internets - to wander back and try to find all of your peeps, your homies, your original Phi Delta Badass...
They ain't all there.
In recent weeks, my life seems to be filtering down to something. Wheels turning. Pulp falling to bottom of glass. I twist and squirm in my skin, trying to figure out what it is that I seem to be morphing into, but it still has no recognizable shape or form. I can only tell you is that it is Different.
I feel like I walked back into a playground that was waiting for me to arrive...but there is no one left on the swings. No one on the slides. No one over there by the fence telling ghostly tales and urban myths to each other.
...
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry I withdrew so deeply into myself that I locked the door to the yard and refused to go out. I'm sorry I missed babies being born, babies being lost and the million other joys and sorrows that happened in your lives. Marriages. Divorces. The terrible. The frightening, the sublime. I didn't mean to abandon you."
And I wait here in the edge of the yard...just on the edge of the dark peering out waiting for a noise. A whisper. Anything. I pick up a small stone and throw it up into the air and watch the bats dive and turn towards it.
I can wait.
It's bad enough that the third anniversary of this blog came and went without so much of a post on my behalf. Adding insult to the injury is the fact that I have been equally as bad about keeping pace with the many blogs I read on a regular basis and left comments regularly over the course of 2006 - 07.
Looking back, I see a similar pattern that happened over time with real-life friends. My dissatisfaction with my marriage and job some four or so years ago resulted in me pulling away from them. Not keeping in touch. Not answering e-mails. I just didn't think I could share this struggle with them. I built a cocoon, with the blogosphere as a lifeline to the outside.
With the change of jobs, I found myself swept up deeply in my work, which was good in to an extent because it helped me jump start a stagnating professional life, and it took my mind off of having to live under the same roof with an estranged spouse.
When STBX moved out, I had hopes of starting up a new circle of friends. I put up profiles on a couple of sites and I started to have some conversations, one of which led to an adventurous beneficial friendship with someone else who was in a similar situation. She has since moved on, but we keep in touch every now and then.
The e-mail nastygram from STBX in early December throttled my socializing. The addition of STBX to the ranks of the unemployed didn't help much either.
It was at that time that I really lost momentum for filing the divorce proceedings. For one thing, it seemed downright cold to have STBX served with a summons after having lost a job. Second, I wasn't sure how the courts would look upon the child support figures that STBX and I had agreed on back when she moved out, since they were based on her weekly gross earnings at the time. Third, the costly van repair at the beginning of the year made be fearful of my own finances, and the cost of paying the fees associated with the divorce seemed like a luxury.
The past eight months have gone by quickly. Up to and beyond the firing of the underperforming co-worker, I have increasingly allowed my life to be consumed by two things... work and my kids. Although I have put in some crazy hours at the office (and from my home), I have never backed out of a commitment to spend time with my kids. I spend time with them doing things when they are in my custody, and I show up for their performances.
Over this time, I regrettably started to neglect this blog and the relationships with those whom through this blog I had become acquainted. The cocoon was sealing, leaving room for only a few friends I had made over the past few months plus intermittent IM pings and e-mails with a few long time readers. In retrospect, this has not been a Good Thing.
Over the past month, several big changes have come down the line that are threatening to shake up the status quo.
Let's look at the home front. First of all, STBX's desire to get the divorce done has increased. A couple weeks ago, she said she'd like to get it filed sooner rather than later so that it isn't hanging over everyone's head during the holidays. Second, she is verging on running out of unemployment benefits, with no job in sight. She actually had an interview for an instructional aide position with our daughter's school system, but she didn't get the job.
On the work front, a month ago, my boss announced to our team that he had turned in his resignation to upper management and would be leaving the company at the end of the month to go work for "So You Think You Can Search".
The announcement caught us all off guard because we thought he was in it for the long haul and that he wouldn't ever think of hiring on at the search startup because of its non-existent progress over the past three years and its notoriously dysfunctional managerial environment.
He cited two reasons for the decision:
- The work he had done to stabilize and solidify the source code and create a team to develop it was mostly accomplished, and he believed we could pick up from where he left off. He needed a more chaotic environment.
- The role he was in, VP of Product, was transitioning to more of a business development role, and that wasn't his forte.
He said that his departure shouldn't be construed as a vote of no-confidence against the company. In fact, he said, he was purchasing the options he had accumulated over the years so that he would have a stake in the company's future success.
After the big announcement, he called me into his office to discuss something in private. He said that they were going to try to find someone outside the company to fill the business development role, but he didn't see the company finding someone to do that in the time he had remaining with the company.
He also brought up our past conversations on how he saw in me the potential to take on more of a leadership role. Upper management also agreed that I would be a good candidate to take over leadership of the Product team under the role Director of Engineering.
He added that there was a chance that the Product Support team, which was merged into our group in October of last year, might be moved out of our department and placed under the control of the new VP of Client Success.
I was given an offer letter on the spot, with a 12 % increase in salary and lots more options. He said he knew I would need time to think about it, but they would really want me to make a decision by the company meeting, which would take place on the afternoon of the next day. The offer didn't surprise me given the circumstances, but the increase in pay was more than I had anticipated.
I weighed what I would be throwing myself into. I would be trading off relatively long days of coding solitude for lots more meeting commitments. I would be responsible for managing things outside the scope of my expertise, like the systems engineering and IT guys. I would more than likely have to be on call 24/7 for server outage alerts. It would be the first time that I would have people reporting to me on a regular basis. I also knew that I would be the only server-side developer left on the team.
On the other hand, here I was at the age of 40 and really in need of experience with leadership. I recalled Drunken Housewife's remark from April where she suggested that I needed to accumulate some management experience. The department would have a leadership vacuum in our boss' absence, and they needed someone to help maintain the positive progress we had made over the past year and a half.
In an act of self-validation, I turned in a signed acceptance of the offer the next day. When the news was announced to the team, there was a collective sigh of relief on my coworkers' faces, which was reassuring. I know that I am looked upon as a reliable resource of information, but being viewed as a leader is a totally different thing.
The remaining days in July were a whirlwind. My life became so full of meetings that I felt like I was working for a completely different company.
As my boss predicted, there was a restructuring that put the Product Support folks under Client Success, which was a bummer for the Product Support team, but it did reduce the amount of fires I had to fight.
Then a week into the job, we closed a very big deal with a client wherein it became clear to our team that they wanted to use the applications in ways that would push parts of our server and user interface code to its limits, if not breaking them. So the focus of our work the next couple of months will be on making it so our app will be able to handle these demands. It will keep us very busy.
With the promotion, I revisited the child support calculation that I did a year ago and updated the numbers with current wages and insurance, turning in the new form on Monday this week I priced STBX's numbers as 40 hours at minimum wage. She got a boost of about 40 or so dollars per week, and I adjusted my direct deposit numbers accordingly.
The next day, after she had interviewed for the instructional aide position, she IMed me at work saying this:
1:18:03 PM STBX: well i just called daycare/preschools for (younger daughter) in case i get the job. it will be anywhere from $600-$800/month for (younger daughter) to go all day. i will probably need your help with this if it happens
As we found out earlier in this post, she didn't get the job.
But nonetheless, that maxed out my stress level for the day. On Thursday night, one of the nights when I had the kids, I was giving them a bath at her place while she was at our older daughter's PTO meeting. I noticed that she left out a notebook where she had taken notes when calling child care places. The three she had listed indeed ranged in the values she said, but all of them were also high end places, which confirmed my suspicion.
If she continues to push this issue, this may transition from an uncontested divorce to a contested one. This week, I will be scoping out divorce attorneys to be ready.
Finally, it should be worth mentioning that I have made a new friend via one of my profiles. She was shy about approaching me, but I'm glad she made the move. We have some commonality of experiences, musical tastes, thought processes, and desires which leads us to enjoy each others' company very much. She has been a source of peace in the malestrom that has been my July and August. I have added her to my blogroll, for those who may be interested in her story.
