Weighing options for the future

At some point in our lives, you're going to be asked to make a choice. Now I'm not talking about the "tall, grande or venti" choice... I mean a real choice, the tough choice. If you're lucky, it works out. If you're even luckier it doesn't, and you learn something from it, and you can live to see another day.

Here's the thing, it doesn't always present itself like we're told in literature or by popular media. It will and may appear as a mundane/throwaway decision. Sometimes it's does feel ground shaking, and sometimes not. What I've learned is that you'll never know until after the choice was made whether or not it was that choice. The one that will shape you forever after.

So then when you're faced with something that feels big... like I am now... I've learned to not put too much pressure on it. Just let it be a choice. Not a big choice, just a choice. Now whether or not I follow my own advice is another thing altogether. But I have to try and be Zen about it. Its a choice, its not the "butterfly wing-flap" that will send be careening off a cliff, its only going to be a decision. a small one at that...

Being Zen is more difficult than it sounds. Too much pressure to be without pressure.

Returning to work, with baby in daycare.

Its an odd thing to think in this modern day that I am asked to make a choice. Be a "Stay-at-home-mom", or be a "working-mom." Truthfully to me, both seem like ironies. I am a mom. No matter where I am or what I do, I am someone's mother. But I am being asked to align myself with a choice.

I feel the guilt. I know it deep in my bones about leaving my child with a virtual stranger in the hopes that they will care for my young love in the same way that I would. I hurt when she cries in the mornings when I leave her, and I am near breakdown in the evenings if I am minutes late to see her. I cherish the few precious moments that we have before she sleeps at night and I find myself near tears if I don't get to kiss her goodnight. Does that stop me from leaving each day, not yet. The nightmares are there (and I do have them) about what happens when I can't care for my child, but they aren't yet pungent enough to stop me from wanting to be an adult and live in an adult world.

Besides its too early to say if this will even hold. Its only been day 5 of my new job, post baby. I need to let this marinate more before I get too deep in the psychological aspects of being a 'working-mom.'