I think my job is eating my brain

I need a new job. Or something. Because I think this one is slowly killing me. Or maybe it's the schedule. Or the 45 minutes each way commute.

There are days where my job is perfect - where I am very comfortably me, in my element, doing my thing. Creative, organized, insightful, and inquisitive, solving problems, figuring things out.

There are days when my job is soul sucking and painful, where I can't imagine enduring another day of it.

And there are days it manages to be both at the same time.

Don't get me wrong - my job is important to our family.

I have health insurance, which Big Oak only sorta-kinda has access to at his job (his boss likes to change the coverage from month to month to lower costs). At this point, Acorn wouldn't have insurance if we were dependent on Big Oak's employer for it. And it's turned out that having really amazing insurance (one of those "Cadillac" plans you hear about on the news) makes getting the waivers Acorn needs a lot easier - they know they aren't going to have to pay out more than the copays on most things, and paying for 40 therapy visits a year after the 60 our insurance allows is far far less expensive than paying for 100 visits.

And I make half again as much money as my spouse. We're still paying for some things we did early in our marriage that, in the grand scheme of things, were not the wisest choices. I used to say we were paying off "young and stupid" but it's more accurate to say that we were chasing a dream of a life that didn't require these crazy day jobs, and just didn't quite get there. Having a day job that pays more money than your parents ever made combined makes the risk analysis on business opportunities look a little different.

And Big Oak's job isn't all that stable. Yeah, he's worked there longer than we've been married, and yeah, he hasn't missed a paycheck yet....but there was that time that the electricity at the office got turned off because paychecks went out. And the boss is talking about cutting everyone to 30 hrs a week if sales don't pick up this summer. Which isn't such a bad deal (other than the 10% of our family income lost, though we can do that without giving up anything other than massive debt reduction), if Big Oak gets to choose which hours he works (which he probably will), since it'll mean he can take Acorn to appointments and I can save my last 6 vacation days for Acorn's hypospadius surgery this fall, and anything else that comes up.

But - and of course there's a but - I wish I had more time at home with Acorn. I wish I had more time to write and create. I wish I had more time to just enjoy life, rather than running from thing to thing all the time. I wish I wasn't spending so much time on the road.

It makes me contemplate taking the option my employer offers to work 75% or 80% of my hours for a similar cut in pay. But I wonder if one day a week would get eaten up in household chores and scheduling Acorn's doctors and therapies.

Or if it'd be just the thinking space I need...

...or if it would just be a better mirror to show just how badly I need to do something else with my life.