Reader, Forgive Me

"Father, forgive me for I have sinned" is the way I remember starting a Catholic confessional. 

Are you disappointed that I did not kick of the New Year with a resolution post?

I know you're not.  You are totally licking your lips in anticipation of morsels of guilt confessed.

Ok, so I had no big scandals involving adultery or gambling or plastic surgery or such.

This is more of taking a deep breath and admitting something out loud.

So I am a career woman now.  Real deal.  Swallowed the whole gig hook, line, and sinker. 

That's not the confession part.  The confession part is that I miss being at home.

I do.  I miss letting my kids be kids.  I miss having things organized. (Though we all know that is such a relative term, organized). I miss cooking real dinners most nights.  I miss having free time without having to borrow from my already shortened sleep.

I don't want to stop working.  I like it.  It's been good for me.  It's been good for my family.  I just don't want to work so much. Or maybe I just want to be better at balancing.

Whenever my family moves, I feel as if it takes 2 years to really feel at home there.  Maybe after 2 years of working full time I will feel at home in my career mom skin.  I'm the better part of a year shy.  I do want to find more balance.  In retrospect, the happiest period of recent times has been when I was working part time. Can I find balance in an unbalanced schedule?

I responded to a comment made the other day by a reader on an older post ("Everybody Needs a Housewife, Including Me") that I have recently been intrigued by the idea that "taking care of" is an art. It is something learned with care, just as people learn to be engineers or accountants.  What I mean to say is that I feel the need to recapture the honor of being able to take care of my home and my children and *gasp* my husband and even myself.

I have no idea how I will do this.  I am not even really asking for suggestions as I suspect this is something I have to feel my way through. 

This blog, at its heart, has always been about figuring out who we are best meant to be.  I am quite certain I am not meant to be who I was entirely last year.  In some ways, absolutely positively YES I was made for what I was doing.  But there was much left unattended to.

This blog became a little scattered and self-centered last year and the reason is because I was. 

Phew, I am done confessing now. C'est le vie. Let's see what happens this year.