Aaron Crowe

About the only good part of being unemployed is making your schedule your own. You’re a freelancer, in a sense, and you don’t have to be at work at 8 a.m. and out the door at 5 p.m. Your time is yours. There’s also the constant fear that time is running out because money is running out, and you have to find a job soon, so you spend every waking minute looking, networking and doing some work on the side to pay the bills.

My schedule is becoming a little clearer lately this week, in relation to my daughter, age 4. We’re signing her up for kindergarten, and I’m a little melancholy about it because while it won’t be until August when she starts school, from now until then I’m looking forward to and partly dreading seeing the hourglass drain and for her schooling to start. She’s now in her second year of preschool, which is a great thing by itself, and adding two more mornings of classtime can only help everyone in the family.

Part of me doesn’t want to see that time come so quickly. She’s not going off to college, to be sure, but she’s starting school and it’s one of life’s firsts that won’t be the same for either of us. From then until she’s graduated from college, probably for the next 18 years, she’ll have homework. And then after that she’ll have a job and won’t be able to take a break until she gets a vacation.  In other words, kindergarten is just the start of a life of continuous work — homework and work, until she retires. It’s all a lot of fun, but the chance to do nothing but play and be a kid, simply a kid without a care in the world, is slipping away.

And while I’m keeping busy looking for fulltime work, and networking, and Twittering, and writing for little pay at many part-time jobs, I see this on the horizon for us. She has free time, and so do I. The two are merging for awhile, even with the job hunt in overdrive.