Compartmentalizing

Today, after... oh, only about 15 years of working in the world, I finally got my own office, complete with nameplate, a door, privacy, etc. And wouldn't you know that I moved into this enclave of workplace serenity a mere three weeks before I am scheduled to go out on maternity leave for at least three months. I'm flattered that my boss has enough faith in me to grant me an office right before my leave, but I can't help but feel sort of Alanis Morrisette about the whole thing (isn't it ironic?). I plan on returning to work at the end of the summer, out of necessity more than anything else, but I can't help but feel conflicted about the fact that I've finally landed a decent-paying job where I'm given lots of respect and leeway, only to to have it coincide with a time in my life when I'd be just as content to turn my attention entirely to staying home and raising my child. 

I've always been perfectly happy staying at home, fussing around the house. As a kid, I'd frequently feign illnesses so that I could take a break from school. It wasn't the schoolwork that wore me down, it was the incessant socializing that school requires. I've always felt the same way about jobs. The work itself has never stressed me out as much as the people one inevitably has to deal with on any job. Of course, that's just the way the world works--life, and especially business, doesn't happen in a vacuum. I think that's a lesson I didn't pick up on in school--that it wasn't just spelling words correctly or solving equations that mattered, but knowing how to interact with the other people working on those same problems that really counted. 

Virginia Woolf famously said--actually wrote a book about the idea--that a woman needs a room of one's own in order to successfully write fiction. I'd argue that a woman--at least this woman--needs a room of one's own to get just about anything done. When I was sitting in cube-land, I couldn't seem to gather my wits about me and focus on what I was doing. I don't know if it's just me, or if it's the distinctly feminine side of me, but when other people are in a room with me, I can't turn off the compulsion to be tuned in to what they're saying, their moods...and am easily affected by both. It could be some form of ADD, or some womanly habit of being tuned in to others' needs (whether I responded to them or not). But I often found that I got most of my work done only after the other women in cube-land had gone home, when I felt freed to pull in those hyper-sensitive external feelers and focus internally. 

So it strikes me as almost absurd that now that I'm finally hitting my stride, career-wise, and realizing just how essential it is for me to have privacy and solitude in the workplace, I'm also coming to the time in my life when I'll be having a child, a time when my old habits of tuning into others needs and moods are going to serve me better than at any other time of my life. I've certainly wasted years of my mothering instincts on a string of men who didn't deserve my patience and attention, and spent years in my career inadvertently allowing those same instincts to get in the way of reaching my goals. And now I find myself at a place in my life where I'll need to cultivate and nurture those instincts more than ever before, for the reasons that nature intended. So I've learned to muzzle--or at least delay--my biological impulses, yet I also have to learn to recall them at a moment's notice. Is modern life just a training ground for learning how to compartmentalize our natural instincts in such a way? Is this how evolutionary biology works?