"Always finish what you start." These are the words of wisdom that my father impressed upon me one day when I was in elementary school. I think I was working on a composition that I didn't feel like finishing and he really wanted to coach me to the end. Nevertheless, the phrase has stuck with me and it has made it unbearably difficult for me to leave things unfinished. I think that the spirit behind the phrase is very true and important to remember. I don't think that my father meant for me to be crippled by it at times.
Leaving my job, a fun, exciting and challenging job was not an easy decision. After seven years at the same school, I had risen to the top, to a place where I was trusted to make the right decisions and to guide my department to where I thought was best for the school. I had a powerful job, to maintain a growing staff of 500+ who would be expected to guide our students to greatness. I had a flexible job, many would call it a dream job, where I could work from home, have my kids at home with me and still work full time. Right. Little does anyone know that if you have any kind of work ethic, your work from home job will be extremely frustrating until you can find the balance of working, parenting and managing a household. In that order. My solution was to send my older child to preschool and to hire a nanny to watch the baby three days a week. It was nice for awhile, until the day that I realized that I had lost my way. I no longer had a handle on managing my house or raising my kids. I was a working mom, with a nice collection of spreadsheets and a strategic plan for the next twelve months of recruiting. What I didn't have was time with my kids or a plan for dinner. Although I rarely left the house, I came to realize that I really wasn't the stay at home mom that I had once envisioned myself to be. I reflected, I pondered, I feared and I worried. I agonized and tried to justify this and that and in the end I concluded that it was time to quit. Time to quit the lifestyle that I never expected i'd find myself to be in. Time to quit the role of working mother. Time to quit the chaos of doing it all. Time to quit what I started.