Working away from home offers overdue relief

I made quite a leap this week.

After years of working at home, years of weaving precious work time into children’s after-school activities, years spent trying to write while dealing with pets, ringing phones, doorbells and housework, years of working late into the night nodding over my computer, I left the house and moved into an office downtown.

The first day on my new job I felt conspicuous and out of place. I perched on the edge of my chair, poised for flight, expecting someone in a suit and tie to walk up to my desk, clear his throat and say, “I’m sorry Ms. Millsap, but there’s been some confusion. When we said we had a position for you we were talking about a paper route.”

But when I looked around the quiet room full of people busily writing, people with the faces of laughing babies captured as the screen saver on their computers and framed photographs of husbands, wives, friends and family on their desks, I relaxed. And I let out a breath I’ve been holding a long time.

The truth is I’d grown weary of working at home. I’d lost any sense of being “off.” The place I wrote was the same place I washed the dishes, folded laundry and worried about my children. Even getting up to walk around the room and clear my head meant bumping into all of the chores, large and small, of my other life.

We paint the concept of the home office with an air of romance. In the movies or on television, even in the comics, working at home means the luxury of taking frequent naps, sitting in chic little coffee shops or muddling through zany sitcom chaos; crying babies, barking dogs and a parade of comedic crises.

At times it is all of that. Other times it is isolating and lonely. Work, no matter how much we love it, is still work, and there’s nothing romantic about that.

For most of us, each day – wherever we are – is fractured. At work, we never completely escape the ordinary issues of day-to-day existence.

At home, we can’t keep thoughts of the big project at the office from stealing into our consciousness.

We are all busy people with quiet and secret thoughts about life, love and work no matter where we are.

After so many years at home, raising my children but always stubbornly, even doggedly, carving time to write out of hectic days, I was afraid that I wouldn’t fit into what I expected to be the sterile newsroom of a busy newspaper.

But toward the end of that first day, as I plowed through a story with an impending deadline, I learned a lesson.

At one point, stymied, searching for the perfect word, or string of words, to fit what I wanted to say, I pushed away from my desk, lost in thought.

It was only when I looked back at my computer screen that I realized that instead of a blank wall, I had been staring into the dreamy, slightly out of focus gaze of a woman, another reporter, across the room. Like me, she had been oblivious to her surroundings as she searched for her own perfect words. Or perhaps she was thinking about her child, or what the family would eat for dinner that night.

It was a pivotal moment. It made me feel at home.

Who knows, the day may come when I’ll wish I had taken a paper route. Or, the man in the suit really will appear at my desk and ask me to leave. For now I’ll do what I have always done.

I’ll take it one word at a time.