Work

Ah, yes...work.  Earlier in my journal I was talking about how much I DIDN'T want to go back to work.  And yet I did.  Why?  There's so much history to this, it'll hardly fit into one of these little journal entries.

I started working full-time in the restaurant business thirty years ago, when I was eighteen.  I always felt bad about what I did for a living, thought it was somehow beneath me.  I SHOULD have gone to college, should have had A Career.  But, when I was seventeen, graduating high school with NO idea what I wanted to be when I grew up, my family didn't have the money to send me off to college to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.  And I didn't WANT anything badly enough to put myself through college.

So I got a job at a local pizza parlor,  and the rest is history.  It seems like menial work, but the ride was rarely easy.  I was an intelligent female in a world dominated by men.  Probably, I took my lumps like any working woman of my generation.  I had some successes.  But, all in all, I was miserable working for other people who had less vision, less intelligence, but more money than I had.  And I had the added misfortune of  working for several small business owners or managers who were really certifiable.  I dreamed of having my own business some day.

Thanks to my father-in-law's estate, I HAVE my own business now.  But it's harder than I thought it would be to transition from working woman to business owner.  My concession trailer is a seasonal thing...I basically have the winter off.  That's a good thing, right?  Well, I was just about going crazy after the first month of being a woman of leisure.  It's HARD not to work after you've worked for thirty years.  It seems I need the structure of a job to make the rest of my life fall into place.  So, much as I wanted NOT to, I went back to the old part-time job at the Assisted Living Community.  I cook meals for old people twice a week.  It keeps me sane.