When my son was two and a half, I took a second job teaching in an alternative school at night. The first job was part-time, because I was a single Mom who wanted as much time with my son as possible. But there were bills to pay.
Originally, I interviewed with the school system to get a full-time school counselor job, so my time would be more structured, and there would be time in the summers to take my son to see his father.
This was in spite of my swearing never to set foot in a school building again, after teaching three years in an urban school as a wet-behind-the-ears, recent college graduate. I’d been miserable, and left education to fly unfettered in the heady world of fundraising, public relations, marketing and advertising for fifteen years. But now, with a Master’s degree in counseling, and a toddler to provide for, it seemed like the right time for stability.
There were no mid-term counselor openings, but there was an alternative school whose English teacher had quit. In the middle of the year. They needed somebody fast, and I needed the money. The school met from 2:30 in the afternoon to 9:30 at night. My day job was from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 across the street from the campus. Luckily, for me and my son, that was only three days a week. But it still kept me away from my child for way too long on those three days and nights.
I would pick up my son from the nighttime daycare at 9:45, and of course he was asleep. But on Friday nights I would wake him for a pizza and movie night. I sang him songs about the moon, and told him the north star was our own special star as we followed it home.
While I was busy with work, I was less busy than in the workaholic days of my twenties and thirties. Not so for one of my colleagues.
She taught elementary school during the day, then raced to her job at our alternative school. She and her husband had their son, who was three at the time, later in life, just as I had mine. I don’t remember how old she was, but I was forty-one when my son was born, and she was around my age. As I remember, her husband also worked, probably as a teacher, because on the nights she worked, he picked up their child from daycare and stayed home with him. Since our dinner break was only forty-five minutes, she couldn’t dash home to see him. Occasionally her husband would bring him by for dinner.
She began experiencing stomach issues and pain. I knew because we always ate dinner together. She was seeing a doctor, but hadn’t been diagnosed with anything. With her tight schedule, it was difficult to see specialists, so she suffered, with her doctor relieving her pain and discomfort as much as possible while waiting for second opinions.
I wondered why she kept working both jobs that semester. Her answer was that since she and her husband were older parents, they wanted to build up as much savings and pay off as many bills as they could while he was young, so they could spend more leisure time as a family later on. Like all good parents, they wanted financial security for their child.
I wasn’t as mature. I went kicking and screaming back into the school system because it did offer regular, if too small, paychecks, health insurance, and eight weeks off in the summers. And I had discovered it was too difficult to build a thriving private practice while being a single parent.
For the Fall semester, I was offered a job as a high school counselor. I could work days again, and get off at 4:30 to pick up my son from daycare. We could have our pizza and movie evenings earlier and not just on Friday. It still didn’t pay enough, and I left a year later to work in the elementary school my son would eventually attend, because the principal and lead counselor at the high school were workaholics, and expected the same from the other counselors. There was a very real reason I wasn’t willing to stay hours after school let out, as they did. My son was more important to me than a job.
During that year, I heard that my friend and colleague from the alternative school had died. She was finally diagnosed with gall bladder cancer, but not early enough to treat. Who knows, if she had time to see specialists when she needed if they would have caught it sooner and saved her life.
The saddest part of her struggle to me was that some of the time spent working two full-time teaching jobs could have been best spent spending time with her husband and son. It stood out for me as a huge lesson in priorities, and the truth that our time here on the planet is not guaranteed. She was a wonderful person and teacher, who loved her family to the point of sacrificing herself and time with them to pursue financial security.
Life is full of decisions to be made about how we live and love.
My son, now in his twenties, teases me sometimes about placing so much value on being there with and for him. Because he was my priority, we never had all the money we wanted to do all the things we wanted to do. Then I remind him that I was an expert at doing all the things rich people did, but with much less expense. Skiing, snowboarding, cruising, traveling and too many basketball camps to count, including five years at the Michael Jordan Basketball Camp. He laughs and agrees.
No matter where life takes us now, I will never regret the time I spent with him and the adventures we shared. Most of the time, he feels the same way.
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Previously published on psiloveyou
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Photo credit: by MPHO Mojapel on Unsplash
