What's Next? (Is "planning for the unknown" an oxymoron?)

Realizing that I’m not even halfway through pregnancy is strange, because I feel like I’ve been pregnant for AGES, but nearing the halfway mark next week is still a reality check that THERE IS SO MUCH WE NEED TO DO. We still have an English-immersion student living in what will be the nursery (she’s been with us since September) and we haven’t even measured the room for furniture. We do have a plan for where she will go when we need to start setting up the nursery, but it feels strange that our designated room isn’t even really accessible yet for planning or fantasizing.

We are frantically saving up the $2500 needed for second-parent adoption (still necessary for travel to states and countries where our marriage is not recognized), $1200 for our doula who we will be interviewing next weekend, $1600 for wills etc. with our attorney, and approximately $3200 for two months’ worth (4 vials) of donor sperm if we want to guarantee having the same donor available for a possible second child. (What if we end up needing more than that? But we can’t afford it! This is all I can allow myself to budget for in the mad race to save.)

We also have yet to figure out our day care plan. Every time someone asks, “So what will you do for child care? You know you need to be planning that YESTERDAY because day care centers have waiting lists, right?” I panic and have an internal meltdown. The problem is we don’t really even know what we need yet. Will we be able to afford for me to go to work part-time somewhere? And will I even find something local that accommodates me in that way? If so, will the child care provider be able to do just a few hours a day, or will that take away from a possible full-time client they would prefer to have? What would those hours look like? I don’t know if I’m asking a provider to just have our child three full days a week, or four or five mid-afternoons (if I work from 3-7 somewhere), or something else. If I get an afternoon gig in Long Island that I have to drive to, how will my wife pick up the baby from daycare when she gets home at 5:30 with no car? We can’t afford a second car on part-time income! If I need to go back full-time, will I find something close to home, cutting down on my current three hour total commute? Will I be able to work 8-4 somewhere? Will I NOT find something before my maternity leave is up and end up having to go back to work in the Bronx for a few months before taking a whole different work schedule when I do find something? Will the child care provider be able to be flexible and agreeable to all eight thousand possible scenarios we are facing???

I love my job but am also ready and okay with moving on at this point. I’m glad I stayed here when I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else a few years ago (the critical point to leave if I was going to leave and accrue new benefits elsewhere before having a child). It’s comfortable, I have a flexible and supportive environment that has allowed me to go through the crazy and unpredictable schedule of fertility treatments, and I get unusually great benefits for a social service agency. I have five weeks’ vacation, five sick weeks a year plus up to five additional weeks I can save in a sick bank, three personal days, and all the major Jewish holidays off. I have a pension plan and a life insurance policy paid by my employer. I can take five months off with my baby and have my position guaranteed when I return. I have my own office (very rare in this field) and a comfortable environment. I have so many friends here.

But I also have to travel an hour and a half each way every day. I have to pay $242 per month on my railroad pass, in addition to subway fare. I have to be on call every few months, getting phone calls throughout the night for five days. I have to work until 7:00 one night a week every other month. I’m not guaranteed to leave at 5:00 any other day because crises pop up unpredictably in foster care. My heart hurts worse and worse with the emotional burden of this work as I bring my own child into the world. I am realizing that being a supervisor is something I love in many capacities (when I feel empowered to make real changes and impact on my staff and with the cases) but hate in others (I’m weak with staff confrontation, get really anxious and procrastinate on disciplinary action, fall behind other supervisors on ensuring workers’ mandates are being met even though I am ahead of most others in ensuring my own are met).

I want to get back into direct practice, and I want to learn something other than foster care. I’m passionate about it, but I’m passionate about it because this is the job I happened to land right out of school and I went into it with everything I have. I have the ability to be passionate about other areas of social work also, and a big part of the appeal of an MSW to me was how versatile it is, how very many different things you can do with it: gerontology, mental health, schools, hospitals, prisons and juvenile justice, immigration, domestic violence, homelessness, HIV/AIDS, LGBT, children and families, individual and group therapy, policy work, research, advocacy. I have always been attracted to the doors open to me as a social worker, but I felt safe and comfortable and passionate in my first job and have stayed here. I don’t regret that because I have been able to serve my clients better and better with each year of experience I get. I don’t want to spend my life dabbling, I WANT to have a focused passion and area of expertise. But it’s okay for that to change once in a while, and now might be a good opportunity. I also know that I work for the cream of the crop in child welfare, and moving to a more local agency still doing foster care is likely to leave me feeling dissatisfied, frustrated, and overwhelmed in comparison to what I left.

I’m glad I stayed here. I’m glad I got all this experience under my belt in an organization where I felt safe and cared for. My resume is very well-padded with the various positions I’ve held here. I’ve also accrued maximum vacation and sick time from all my years here, so I knew I either needed to leave years ago (when I was NOT ready) or stay until I had a baby. But now I’m in a position of planning for the birth of my child while also having to plan a major career change, and that is more than a little overwhelming. When I first got pregnant, I told myself I could just come back to this job after my maternity leave and then start looking, so that I wouldn’t have the pressure of that while on leave and the anxiety of it while pregnant. But the looming reality is that I do not want to spend even one day leaving the house at 7:00 and getting home at 6:30 earliest. I do not want to spend even one week on-call, handling crises at two in the morning with a cranky baby at my breast. I do not want to return after five months away and feel disconnected and checked out because I’m so antsy to move on. I do not want to catch up on my cases just to leave them a couple months later. I want to go into a fresh start.

And this means I have no choice but to be thinking about it now. I’m trying very hard not to obsess over it, because I can’t interview now so it’s not something I can control at the moment. I have to trust that things will fall into place, and do my part in making that happen when the time comes. But the child care dilemma makes this difficult to do.

My strong preference is to go with someone who watches two or three children from their home, like my mother and my wife’s mother did when we were young. I have two possibilities, recommendations from our neighbor and from my mother-in-law’s secretary, so I need to start with calling them and running over all the possible day care needs we will have, and see how flexible they can be. I have to start there, because maybe one will say, “Part-time, in any arrangement, will be fine and I will charge accordingly. I’m also open to doing full-time if that’s what you need. Just let me know when you know!” Wow, just imagining hearing that takes a weight off my shoulder. I can only hope!