I am doing the thing adults don’t do. At least, the thing working-age, bill-paying adults don’t do in American society. I’m taking a month off. A sabbatical, if you will. 

I keep waiting for someone to scream, “Spoiled! Slacker! Must be nice!” at me. So far, no one has, at least not where I can hear it. 

I have literally never done something like this before. Closest I’ve come:

Job hunting. Similar to a sabbatical, kind of, in that you’re not working and no one is paying you. Radically dissimilar to a sabbatical because you need someone to pay you, and therefore, your unpaid job is looking for a job. 

Maternity leave. Wonderful, precious, incomparable. All of the above. Also, incredibly effing hard, involving lots of new stress and little to no sleep. Not a sabbatical (anyone who wants to argue, take a few weeks on your own with a fussy newborn, then come back and see me). 

Part time work. I really, really did love this! Especially since my little was little and awww….the memories. It was like a step back from the full time working lifestyle. Like, instead of sprinting around the whole track, I was sprinting, then walking, then sprinting, then sprinting more, then sitting down to catch my breath.

As you may have noticed, none of these is actually a break. 

I’ve been training for not taking a break my whole life. Our culture is unfortunately super good at that. Our word in college for this was ‘productive’. As in, “I was very productive this weekend. I finished a paper and spent Sunday in the lab,” or, “I was surprisingly productive last night,” PRODUCTIVE. A strangely large number of us used this word…..As if we were all little factories managed by Henry Ford instead of very young adults cutting our teeth on life at our fancy-pants college. 

It’s not lost on me that I am able to take this break because I worked (productively!) for a few years at the little tech company that tossed me out like rotting leftovers when Covid hit. A few months of scrambling later, I was back to work (again productively) at a state agency. And a few weeks from now, I’ll start my new job. I’m able to do this thing, live my life for a month without pulling in a paycheck, partly because I worked hard but mostly because I got lucky. Lucky that we were able to squirrel away some funds during my past two jobs, lucky that both my previous and upcoming jobs were agreeable to the timing I wanted (or maybe, needed). Don’t get me wrong, hard work is important. It can be great and fulfilling. But so is down time. And a lot of people live their lives under a permanent deficit of down time. 

What I thought I would do on my month of down time – organize my house and work on my book. 

What I have actually done on my month of down time, so far….traveled to New Hampshire, slept in every morning and drunk coffee on the deck, forgotten to wear sunscreen, swum, waterskied, sat around the deck table chatting with my extended family, watched my daughter play with her cousins and celebrated my grandma’s 100th birthday. In other words, I had a week vacation….and it was heavenly. 

Back home, I’ve taken my daughter to 3rd grade orientation. Talked to both teachers, arranged after school care, provided kid taxi service to and from school. Taken my daughter to year round swim team and to therapy. Wrote and answered emails and figured out scheduling re: all of the above. Did laundry, shopped for groceries, spent actual quality time with my husband. Paid bills, sent a baby gift, helped out with activities at church, fed a rooster that appeared and then disappeared from a parking lot near our house. Skated, because I love it, and lifted weights, because I should. 

Somewhere in there, realized the hammer on head obvious truth – this month is a break from employment, not a break from life. I knew that! I knew that. And yet, still I imagined that I’d have hoards and oodles and gallons of time. 

Gallons, no. Quarts. Delicious amazing wonderful quarts of free time. In which I will blog. And maybe figure out Facebook ads. And maybe, hopefully, yes I will do it, get back to my memoir draft. 

And now I’m off to organize my kitchen.