I'm very depressed at the moment.
February has been a huge month for me both personally and professionally in that this month my workplace has received word that we'll continue to operate for another two years at least, which is far better news than those poor workers at Qantas received last week, I found out a former work colleague passed away late last year and I didn't even know about it and I've passed on the career opportunity of a lifetime for various reasons.
My work situation pretty much speaks for itself in that our organisation in general is only assured of another two years of operation, after which deep cuts may take place with myself being included. That's what makes my third reason so hard to swallow.
I was basically offered an on-going position working in a rural area for what would be a hefty salary increase, would be a secure position for life and would give me the opportunity to move up greatly in my career. The two catches are that it would mean my wife wouldn't be able to continue to work in her current job (five hour commute) and we'd have to move away from our respective families (about five hours drive away).
The point about her job is a bit of a sticking point for me because, due to the lower cost of living in this town, if we were to move we'd be able to easily live on my salary alone, would even be able to put money away and I've just got this feeling that once my wife's got our baby in her arms she's not going to want to go back to the stress of working, not even part time. In our current location we could afford for her to take some time off when the baby is born, but with all of our current financial commitments (mortgage, gas, electricity, etc) we'd slowly be going backwards.
Like anything financial, once you start going backwards the momentum builds and continues to snowball until big decisions are forced to be made ie downsize house or move to a cheaper area.
I'm feeling depressed because on the one hand I want to provide for my family and give them the kind of life that they deserve and give my wife the option to be a stay at home mother, but on the other hand the easiest way for me to do all that would be to commit her to being a stay at home mother and, worse, take us away from our family support network at the same time. This being my mother-in-law's first grandchild, I don't think I'd ever get forgiven.
The job itself is also a very interesting one with big budgets, lots of growth opportunities and, most of all, lots of autonomy and the opportunity for me to actually be the one making the decisions for a change. In short, I'd be able to become one of only two senior people in my field in a small region. My cousin who has a very big entrepreneurial spirit lives in a small town and thrives because, as he puts it, "I'd rather be a big fish in a small pond than a little fish in a big pond".
I put it to my wife that we could always treat this as a seven year plan (as the bulk of the interesting work would probably be coming to an end by then) and we could move back to Melbourne so she could go back to her full time job just before her seven years leave could run out. The simple answer was that she didn't want to live in that small town, regardless of what freedoms it could provide her from having to work, even if it meant we could have several more children without having to balance when to have them with when would fit in with work.
This opportunity is a one time thing, so if she changes her mind in six months then the ship will have already sailed. My biggest dread is that in six months time she does just that, then get annoyed that I didn't try hard enough to convince her to go in the first place.
I'm not sure if this is a common thing with wives, but my wife has a habit of running around doing things, then if it happens to cause her problems it's my fault.
An example of this is that our house has locks on every window. She was worried that we'd get robbed by someone breaking the window and unlocking it so she locked all the windows, gathered up all the keys and put them in one place when I wasn't home. I didn't notice she'd done this until I wanted to open a window and she grumpily went and got a key for me. Fast forward several months and she's now forgotten where the bulk of the keys are and the only keys we have to open the windows are the few that she'd fetched shortly after hiding them.
Today, my wife wanted to open a window and promptly yelled at me with "why are all the windows locked?!?" That was my cue to go and fetch one of the few located keys. She believes that the obsession to lock things comes from my side because I have a compulsion to lock doors (mainly front doors) because to leave them unlocked is to ask for uninvited guests in. She grew up in a small town (different one) and her family doesn't really worry too much about it unless they're going out or at night.
I guess I'll have to just accept that my situation in that I'll have to stay in my not-so-secure job to allow us to stay in the location my wife wants to live and hope that I'll still have a job in two years time if she changes her mind and decides she wants to stay at home longer than she's currently planning to.
I just hope that I'm not going to look back on this passed opportunity as a mistake on my part. Only time will tell...
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