A billion rewards

We joined Walter at work for lunch yesterday. It's been two years since I left my paying job at the same office building where he works, so I looked forward to going back in for a visit. After the four of us ate our pizza without too much commotion, we walked through the space where I used to sit. It's been only two years, but in the ever changing corporate world, it might as well be an eternity.

A cleaning staff member must have grabbed everyone's name plate, mixed them all up in a bag, and returned them at random to offices and cube aisles. No one sits in the same spot and I recognized about one in five names. Where a row of windows once allowed light onto the floor, managers enjoyed their own private sunshiny real estate in their newly converted office space.

With so many physical changes on the floor, it would take me weeks to understand the workflow and assignment shifts that all of these moves represent. And I feel a twinge of sadness knowing that just two years later I would be lost if I reentered the department that I had once been such a part of.

As we walked through the doors of SC-4, Asher asked where we were going and why Mommy used to have a job and why Mommy doesn't still have a job so Bekah can watch him again.

I wonder those things too.

Don't misunderstand. I will never regret staying home with my kids.

This is absolutely what I want to be doing and I do not take it for granted that Walter's hard work allows me to do this. But some days I get nostalgic and think about the old days when I didn't get asked to play "Cowboy is coming" ten times before ten o'clock but finished ten research requests before ten o'clock.

Being a stay at home mom has a billion rewards but I don't know that we often acknowledge it has a hundred sacrifices. Clearly the billion outweighs the hundred, but every once in a while
I think the sacrifice needs to be noticed and understood.

Thanks for noticing and understanding.