No Mo' Mondays: When the Wrong Job Leads to the Right One

As I sit here noodling around with this post on a Sunday evening, a bit peaked hungover but excited about the new year - happy 2012! - something is missing.

There are no more Mondays in my world - or, more specifically, no more grey cloud of dread that used to loom over my weekends as I contemplated returning to a job I always enjoyed more in concept than in reality.

I've danced on the grave of my legal career many a time here; longtime readers will recall that, after seven years of practice, I was thrilled to hang up the Ann Taylor to be a stay-at-home Smug Mummy. Not only because was it the right decision parenting-wise for my family - (but not necessarily for yours because For the Love of Nordstrom there's no one universal right answer here and can't we all just be glad we women now have the right to decide what's best for our respective families?) (deep breaths) (parentheses) - but also because I was ready to move on to a vocation I felt passionate about. I don't at all regret having given the law a chance, but I'm also proud to have stepped away after having thoroughly proven that it wasn't my right answer.

It kinda came full circle for me tonight, as I sit here enjoying some blessed post-NYE quiet snarfing cookie dough while the AH is away, because it doesn't count if no one sees - much like those Life Goals I fretted about for so many years, I wonder if the long time spent in the wrong job threw this time in the right one into greater relief, in all senses of that phrase?

Feel free to leap on my #yuppiewhitegirlproblems perspective here - for starters, I'm admittedly in the fortunate position that I get to leap from a lucrative job to this unpaid one. I get that, and I'm immensely thankful for it, pinky swear. Plus, being grateful for having spent ten years, between law school & practice, in the wrong job could fairly be called revisionist history - couldn't I have ended up in the right career for me minus the headaches and the student loans?

Maybe - but that isn't how it worked for me, and my hope for any of you reading this & fretting about What You Should Do When You Grow Up is that any initial wrongs lead to eventual rights too. If the Plan A job ends up not being what you hoped, that doesn't mean you're doomed to it forever. In my twenties, I wasted a lot of time worrying that I had to figure out the One and Only Perfect Job for Me and felt plenty guilty when I started to suspect the Law wasn't it sometime around, oh, the first semester of law school. Let me spare you that guilt - it just ain't so.

Sometimes the wrong job is just the precursor to the good stuff. Mondays don't always have to be Mondays:

Okay, fine, these photos were technically taken on a Friday, but my point is - how awesome is this? This, this is what my working days look like now. I took the long road here, but - praise Neiman Marcus - I'm *here*. Finally.