I choose my marriage

M's birthday happened recently, and to my relief, he finally entered my decade (good-bye, cradle robbing jokes! Until I hit forty...). To celebrate, we spent the weekend in San Clemente, where he got to surf Trestles and Cottons, and many of our friends joined us to either surf or help me watch car keys on the beach. We then walked around San Clemente (the whole main street of it) with frozen drinks, before settling in for our reservations at Hapa J's, a restaurant with amazing Hawaiian food. Seriously. Amazing. I ordered poke, spam masubi, AND short ribs, and if you think that was shared with a group of others, you would be mistaken. M ordered some appropriate portion of food, which I only vaguely remember through the haze of my food coma.  We spent the night in San Clemente, had breakfast at Honey's on our way back, and continued the celebration on his actual birthday at Brett's Barbecue.

M and the boys watching Trestles and sharing a Folgers moment.
(Photo credit: Allison Rudd and her iPhone)

Some might think the weekend staycation of food and surf was my birthday gift. My real gift, however, was quitting my job this past Monday; my last day at the office was yesterday. Since we've moved to Encinitas, my commute to work has been forty minutes to an hour each way. I leave before M gets out of bed. We eat dinner after 8. The house remains largely unpacked and disorganized, because neither of us has energy to do what needs to be done. We spend less quality time together, not only due to physical time contraints but because the time I spend with M is often spent in complaining about my new commute, typical workplace pressures and aggravations that get compounded by annoyance with the commute, and then the commute again.

I love recruiting, most days. It is not only fun for me to talk to smart people who make cool things, it is extremely satisfying to put deserving people in good jobs, where they're still happy a year later when I check in on them. I've made great friends at Outsource, and I'm grateful that my boss took a chance on me and let me leverage the sales training I learned in sports over to recruiting. I've had the opportunity to learn a lot about staffing from my co-workers, to train with the incomparably knowledgeable Stacy Zapar (the Most Connected Woman on LinkedIn) on social media recruiting, and to attend cool networking events.

But...our marriage has been suffering. I miss my husband. He misses the more enjoyable, less-complaining version of me, assuming there ever was one. So my birthday gift to him was to choose him over my current job, and to have my next job allow me to work from home, to have flexibility in organizing our household, to learn how to cook for real instead of looking into EZ Bake Ovens, and, above all, to be both available to and happy with my husband (because what good is one without the other?).

His gift to me has been to be loving and supportive unconditionally, to shoulder the mortgage and bills, and to allow me to pursue something with complete freedom and flexibility. Many people never receive a gift of this magnitude, and it's not even my birthday.

I'm consciously choosing a next adventure that I'm excited about, and that allows me to continue in the skills and knowledge I've garnered as a technical recruiter. I have an idea of where this next adventure is coming from, and there are wheels in motion, but nothing is on paper yet. Until then, I'm excited to simply see M while there's still daylight and everything.