I smile when my classmates ask me how my weekend was. It was great, I say and smile politely. How was yours?
Truth is, I haven't had a weekend (by choice) in two years. When I revamped my life two years ago and took a position as a Client Care Coordinator at a veterinary hospital, I volunteered to work every Saturday in exchange for having Sundays and Mondays off. My reason was triple-fold: my husband works Saturdays, after 11 years in a cubicle in a variety of office jobs, I was tired of the Monday-Friday, 9-5 grind, and Saturdays at a dog and cat hospital are a really fun/interesting/insane/sometimes relaxing/mostly crazy kind of madness. We see many harried parents with kids in tow who are decked out in soccer uniforms bringing their pets in for annual exams, nail trims, grooming or vaccines. There are husbands that come in with a long laundry list of errands and read me verbatim what their spouse has written: "Well, the wife sent me out the door this morning and she said after I went to the hardware store - you know the one down there on, on, well you know the one down there (while jerking a thumb in some indeterminable direction), then I needed to get our cat Mitsy some food. And you know she eats that really expensive one. You know the one that doesn't make her puke. 'Cuz you know when she pukes it's always when she's sitting in my lap while I'm trying to do the crossword. Anyhow, I got here on my list that we need three cans of the hypoallergenic food. You know, the one that costs an arm and a leg. That darn cat. I tell you; she eats better than I do!" I talk to clients like this all day long and it's usually a lot of fun. We also see dogs with fish hooks in their mouths (after getting a little too excited after a day of fishing), dogs with sometimes very serious bite wounds from an encounter at the dog park that got a little out of hand, and the list goes on.
For the last couple of months, I have still worked Saturdays but now Sunday is devoted to studying all day and since I can no longer work on Wednesdays and Thursdays, I instead work Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. This leaves little room for a "weekend." And so I laugh when my very young classmates who haven't had to yet work for a living and are full-time students, kindly ask me about my weekend. But I smile and think to myself, yes, maybe I didn't have a weekend, but I'm getting closer to the weak part of myself ending. The part of me that rudely whispers you can't do this. You're not smart enough. Good luck getting it all done. You're going to need it. These negative voices are only a whisper now. They used to be loud enough to paralyze me and make excuses for staying at jobs that just pay the bills in industries that I don't want to work in. They used to be loud enough to make me doubt myself. To wonder if I would ever make it out of the hole it felt like I was in for too long.
I guess sometimes it takes choosing to give up something that everybody puts a high value on (Saturdays and Sundays)for a little while to get yourself to a different place. And I guess sometimes it does take losing a "weekend" to lose the weak end of who you thought you were to become who you are really meant to be.
