Life as a Housewife

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I recently left my job. I did so for various reasons but the main one was the amount of stress it was causing me. I’ve been off work for five weeks so far and have very much been enjoying my life as a housewife.

On the day I finished work I got home to find an envelope waiting for me on the doormat. It turned out to be a lovely little doodle from a very thoughtful Elinor, wishing me encouragement with the ‘post job’ chapter of my life.

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I’m not actually sure which mouse this is. Elinor can you enlighten me?

The first few weeks of my new found freedom turned out to be a little strange. My body clearly decided it needed a rest and didn’t want to do much. However, the last few weeks have been very productive and I now find that I wake up each day excited about whatever it is I have planned. It’s been great! I shan’t bore you with all of the details but here are a few things I’ve done over the past five weeks.

Alex and I celebrated our Second Wedding Anniversary at the end of February. Alex is in a new job and is very much enjoying it, and it seemed quite fitting to enter our third year of marriage with both of us in new situations. Wahoo, I love being married!

Gwen and I went to visit Elinor in Lincoln a few weeks ago. It was a lovely few days and much fun was had eating out, watching Sense and Sensibility and generally wondering around the lovely city.

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Gwen and I are taking advantage of my current lack of a job to organise a Craft Fair! We’re having good fun with it and are getting rather excited, but more on that to follow another time. Yay!

Hmm, what else have I done… Well, I’ve re-organised and deep cleaned the kitchen, spent a couple of days mending a torn first communion dress, I’m loosing weight at last (put on a lot of it by stress eating..), I’ve started a few new embroidery projects, mended some clothes that have been needing my attention for a long time… the list goes on (and on and on). Suffice it to say I’m enjoying my time off and I’m using it well.

Anyway, I’m boring you, so methinks I’ll sign off and write some letters!

Anxiety

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I promised myself that my next post after returning to the blogosphere would be a cheerful one about all the lovely things I’ve been doing or the craft fair that I am organising with my sister-in-law. However, I am struggling with a rather bad bout of anxiety at the moment and I need to have a bit of a ramble. Cup of tea in hand, so here goes…

I’ve always been a worrier. I wish I wasn’t but it’s just who I am. However, now I’m having to deal with something new – Anxiety. Over the last few months I’ve been battling with what I would probably describe as social anxiety ( I am no expert, I have no idea). It came on very gradually and I feel I am slowly overcoming it (very slowly…)

There are times when I suddenly feel extremely anxious and very sad for no obvious reason. It doesn’t seem to matter what I’m doing, all of a sudden the anxiety pops up.

It had gotten to the point where I would have to spend quite a while in the morning convincing myself to leave the house. I was lucky that it didn’t affect me on work mornings; I seemed to go onto autopilot and leave the house as usual. But the weekends were a very different story.

I found myself trying to avoid making plans to go out at the weekends and I often felt an emotional resistance if people suggested we do something. In general I’d feel extremely anxious if I knew I needed to leave the house; however, strangely, it didn’t seem to affect me if people came over to us instead. Also, once I was actually out I managed to relax and usually enjoy myself.

I feel that on the whole I am managing to overcome this. I don’t struggle to leave the house too much anymore and the times when I suddenly feel sad are becoming less frequent, however there’s one major part of my life that is still being affected.

My husband and I are altar servers at our local church and we usually go to mass at 9am every Sunday morning. I love going to church and I love altar serving, however, when the anxiety first started, I began to feel a kind of nervous resistance when I woke up on a Sunday morning, and then couldn’t convince myself to go. Mass being at 9am didn’t give me enough time to overcome my anxiety and walk out the front door.

Unfortunately, this part of my anxiety seems to have stuck. I now start to feel apprehensive on a Saturday evening and usually wake up already feeling anxious on a Sunday morning. I think that because going to church is something that has been affected every week during the anxiety, I started to associate Sunday mornings with anxiety and now I associate church with anxiety. But I love going to church! I feel that this association is making it harder to conquer and I really don’t know what to do next. I’m stuck in a pattern and I can’t seem to break out of it.

All of yesterday evening I was determined that I would go to church today and I went to bed with that same determination. However, I woke up at half past seven this morning feeling absolutely terrified and I couldn’t shake it. I didn’t get to mass.

What on earth do I do next?

Oops… It’s been three months!

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Ahoy, there readers!

Apologies for the long hiatus (again), but my last few months of work proved to be a race against my own emotional sanity and a tough battle against my anxiety.

As it is, I finished work three weeks ago and have very much been enjoying my freedom. I’ve been attacking the housework and my hobbies with renewed vigour, and my sister in law and I are organising a craft fair at our local church. I’m also steadily losing the weight I put on through stress eating and getting fit. It feels good.

So much to do and now I have time to do it!

Hurrah! I’m blogging again!

A Tough Few Weeks

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I’ve been unhappy in my job for a very long time. I work in a very busy office and there’s a horrendous amount of work that needs to be completed on a daily basis. I come home every day tired, stressed and dreading the next day. The weekends pass by in a haze of tiredness and catching up on housework; then before you know it it’s Monday again! In a job such as this you end up wishing away whole chunks of your life waiting for your leave. It’s been having quite a bad effect on my health.

I had a very bad week a few weeks ago and Alex and I decided that it was time for me to resign. It hasn’t been possible before now, because, since we married, Alex has either being working part time or not at all. My salary has been essential for us and I’m reasonably well paid in my job. I find it incredibly hard to make these decisions even when I know I’m definitely doing the right thing and, after all this time being the main bread winner for us, I found it difficult to decide to turn my back on that income.

However, for the last few months Alex has been working in a new job with full time hours and good pay. After talking about the possibility of me resigning, I had a good look at our finances and realised that we could cope for a few months on just Alex’s income. I built up the courage over that weekend and handed in my resignation on the Monday; it was an enormous relief. I was very happy that evening, I went over to see my sister-in-law and have a cup of tea with her, and then I received a text from Alex, to say that he’d lost his job! Perfect timing! The cut the end of the long story short, I’ve extended my notice by a few months, so I’ll work until the end of February. I’ll then take a few months off to have a rest; spend some time with family and pursue my hobbies.

I know I’ll need to get back into work pretty sharpish, and I’m prepared for that. Some may say it’s reckless to abandon my job at all, but I’ve worked solidly since I was at school. I’ve had no break or period of a relaxed lifestyle to speak of; I never went to University and I didn’t take a gap year. I went straight from full time education into full time work, and it’s taken its toll. I know I’m doing the right thing, I’m just terrified that I’ve ruined us in the process.

BOO! I’m back.

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Ok, what on earth have I been doing for the last month! Well… for three weeks I spent every evening washing our clothes by hand, whilst we waited for our new washing machine to be delivered and, in the process, discovered how not to wash new black jeans by hand. Although, that’s a story for another time I think. Three weeks of coming home from work at 6pm, washing up, making dinner and then washing our clothes. So very tiring! My husband has a new job and for the same three weeks wasn’t getting home until 10pm every night, just as I’d finish washing the clothes, then we’d eat and go straight to bed. Needless to say I’ve had no time for blogging or anything else!

I went to the Sewing and Hobbycrafts Show at the NEC last weekend, always worth a visit if you’re a crafter of any kind! There are two a year; one in March and one in November which is more Christmas themed. I prefer the one in February/March as it’s mainly sewing and craft stalls with a great selection of haberdashery. I stock up on supplies and it usually lasts me until the next exhibition! I also found a brilliant jewellery stall and gained a few rings to add to my already silver laden fingers. I think my next project will be to make some pouffe shaped bean bags out of some of the green floral fabric left over from the wedding, as well as making a lot of Christmas cards from my Zentangle tiles.

Anyone ready for Christmas? No? I’m getting there. I only have two stockings to buy for, but a lot of other presents to get as well. My Husband is never impressed this time of year, as we have Christmas, followed by my birthday in January, and then our wedding anniversary in February! Too many presents to buy.

I feel a stocking filler and gift wrapping post coming on! Bit excited this year…

If I was a full time house wife I’d probably be quite enjoying this…

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Normally, I love pretending that I live at the turn of the 20th century. I will quite happily spend an evening sitting at my writing desk with a pot of loose leaf tea, writing letters to friends and relatives dwelling in far off places, mending clothes, drying lavender and generally doing anything romantically old-fashioned. However, this particular trip into the past has proven to be less than idealistic.

I arrived home at 6 o’clock, washed up, tidied the kitchen, and I now find myself (not at this exact moment of course), standing over our bath tub screaming, ‘OH MY GOODNESS HOW CAN THIS LITTLE PIECE OF KNITTED WOOL POSSIBLY HOLD ANY MORE FLIPPING WATER!’

The cause of this excitement? Our washing machine broke down at the weekend. I am the sort of person who can cope very well with any of kind failure of modern technology. If I was a full time house wife I wouldn’t mind washing our clothes by hand, at times I’d probably quite enjoy it (yes, I really do mean that.) However, I’m not a full time house wife, I have a job. A full-time, physically and emotionally demanding, stressful job. And what was it that was left to wash when the washing machine decided that it didn’t want its drum to be attached to it anymore? Oh yes it was the FLIPPING JUMPERS! Could it not have been the delicate load or the tea towels or even the bedding? No it had to be the FLIPPING JUMPERS AND HOW ON EARTH DO THEY HOLD ALL THIS WATER! SOMEONE GET ME A FLIPPING MANGLE TO GET THE FLIPPING WATER OUT OF THESE FLIPPING JUMPERS!

Take a deep breath, keep wringing… Take a deep breath, keep wringing… Take a deep breath, keep wringing…