Stealing Our Joy

Lately, life has been stealing our joy.  This should be happy time filled with excitement and anticipation, but instead we are both depressed and stressed.  Not about the baby, but about work and family.  Neither of our jobs is fulfilling us right now.

My wife's job has had some setbacks with a boss that procrastinates her progression.  He always seems to have something else to do or someone else to help.  When he finally gets around to her, it's always rushed and last-minute.  Recently, she was trying to apply for a grant, and he waited nine months before he made it a priority.  In that time, she missed two deadlines and had to try to submit on the last possible deadline of the year.  And as life would have it, there was a clerical mistake in the grant's office, and they "forgot" to submit her grant by the due date.  That was a huge blow to my wife's psyche, and it all could have been avoided had her professor made her a priority at any time during the year.

Add to that a general lack of interest in her career progression, because he seems more content to just use her as a work horse to provide data for his grants.  He has repeatedly shot down my wife's requests for a tech to help her, so that she can be free to read papers and generate ideas.  The generic excuse is that he doesn't want to spend money on a tech, but it also feels like he wants to keep her at the bench.  Because if she breaks out of her cage, then he'll have to find someone else who can single-handedly do the work of ten people and fund all of the work for everyone else in the lab.

My job hasn't turned out the way I thought it would be.  You would think a progression up the ladder would be welcome, challenging yet rewarding.  Instead, it's just a lot of stress and drama that I could frankly do without.  I love my team, but the constant expectation that I have to personally fix every problem is grating on me.  On the other side, my boss is pushing me to think at a higher level to formulate long-term plans and goals.  I feel stretched to try to do both the granular and non-granular simultaneously.  I'm tired, and I just don't care. 

Add to that that I had a one-on-one with my boss last week, and he told me that I could no longer take extended vacations of more than a week at a time.  Why?  Because the team can't function without me and something might come up while I'm out.  Something that apparently NOBODY else can handle and that can't wait until my return.  As my wife would say, "we're not curing cancer here."  Everyone equates life or death descriptions to what we do, but honestly it's not that important.  And what am I supposed to do when the baby arrives?  Just keep working and let my wife deal with it on her own, because I can't take time off?  It's unreasonable.  I find myself contemplating looking for something else, possibly in a completely different field.  I'm not happy at all.  I enjoy precisely zero of my day.

And all of these stresses on both us are bleeding into our home life.  We can't be excited for the baby because all of our time and energy is consumed by work.  The nursery has laid in the exact same state as we left it a month ago, because I have no motivation to work on it.  I'm too depressed.  I have no idea what God's plan is, but right now, I'm not feeling it.  Something has got to change.