WORKING FOR THE MAN .... OR, THE WOMAN

...and so I was talking with my manager today and telling her in no uncertain terms that I am not planning to be in the fold come January. Basically, I need my time for me. I can't establish myself as a writer and publish the way I want to be published if I don't here and now claim myself as a writer. I think the first step toward any measure of success is to free oneself from the chains that bind. And so without telling her *all* of the reasons I'm leaving I gave her the major reason: I cannot live this way any longer. Splitting myself between two kids' schools, Spouse, my writing (which she knows nothing about) and the myriad responsibilities that go into being a homeowner and taxpayer. My kids are 6 and 2 and as far as I'm concerned I shouldn' t be working at all. But that's another topic. But my manager just doesn't get it. And ya know, I don't expect her too. One thing I've heard Oprah say on many occasions is that people only have the ability to be who *they* are. What this means is you can't expect a woman with no children to understand what a woman with children goes through on the day to day. I remember a co-worker of mine making a comment about her two cats and the responsibilities she has as a pet owner. And I remember the conversation taking place in the midst of a winter storm and her making the claim that her "kids" at home were just as important as the kids we mothers had at home. I remember thinking how asinine it is for anyone to even think that an animal's life could be compared to a child's life. But now, as I look back, using this conversation today as a springboard, I realize that that co-worker then and this manager now do not have the ABILITY to understand. It's not that they don't want to understand, I believe, I think it's just they don't even have the ability. How can you understand what it's like to be a parent without being one? How can you understand what it's like to be an artist when you aren't one? How can you understand what it's like to thirst for your art, be willing to sacrifice sleep for your art if you aren't an artist?
So in any event, I understand how W. Somerset Maugham came to write the following:

"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passge. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriosly feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest. ----- from The Moon and Sixpence. by W. Somerset Maugham, 1919