life’s not a paragraph

I've been going back and forth with this recruiter who seems to have been assigned to me, for over a week. First she wanted to know my availability for an interview last week. I responded within 10 minutes of her email. It took her 2 business days to get back to me and the times she proposed were all after 3pm--after I explicitly told her my availability was until 1pm. So I responded immediately and said "I am really looking forward to connecting, but unfortunately I will be at work with my current nanny family at 3pm. Is there another time that works for you?" (Which I had already stated to her in the previous email?? That I don't think she read??) Then she replies, OK what about Monday? I say "Monday is perfect. Have a wonderful weekend and I look forward to speaking with you!"

The interview is virtual. At 9am she sent me the Zoom link for our 12pm interview time. At 10:50am I get an email from her that asks if I can reschedule for tomorrow because her team just planned a meeting at noon. I find it a little difficult to believe they planned a company wide meeting with 1 hour of notice and I am not available tomorrow. I respond and say "Do you have time to chat at 11am or 11:30? I finished my earlier interview a few minutes ago and I'm free for a little bit before I pick up my nanny kids. Please let me know."

She responds that she has another call at 11:15. OK??? Why is it OK to cancel my call but not theirs??????

I'm thinking all of these things at the same time:

I'm not available tomorrow.

It's been 8 days of this. I don't want to deal with her anymore.

This agency has SEVEN jobs I'm interested in and this person who doesn't seem to have the ability to manage her time at all is my barrier to entry.

When our dog died in 2020, it was unexpected. She was the dog he adopted with his ex-wife when their child was a toddler, but he inherited her in their divorce, and she loved me and followed me everywhere. She was 12.

We’d been at our vet for her 6-month wellness visit with a full senior dog work up, 4 weeks before. One night she yelped on the stairs and refused to walk, we decided he would take her to the emergency vet because she was in pain and we did not know why. We did not expect the ER vet to tell us she was internally bleeding from a burst cancerous tumor in her stomach. There were no signs or symptoms that our dog had stomach cancer. She didn't lose her appetite, she wasn't vomiting, her stool was normal, she wasn't lethargic, and she had been given a clean bill of health 4 weeks before.

The vet explained to my husband, and to me over the phone, that they could try surgery to attempt to remove the cancerous tissue, however the tumors would grow back, because that was the nature of the kind of cancer they saw. The prognosis with surgery was another 1-3 months. It was gutting to hear. I asked what the recovery process was like. She would be in a large cast and she would not be able to jump or run or play.

The idea of watching her slowly die while unable to jump or run, to go on walks that she loved, to have treats, to move freely, was unfathomable to both of us. We made the decision to let her go. They wouldn’t release her to us to come back home, she was actively in crisis. The vet said we’d made the right decision and there was no guarantee she would live through the night to have surgery the next morning.

It was heartbreaking. She was such a sweet girl. And we loved her so much.

In the following days, my husband would break down about how losing our dog reminded him of my sister’s passing, and how he felt like he failed in supporting me.

He did.

In the months leading up to my sister passing from terminal cancer, I was the primary parent in our household for a child who was not mine. I was left to provide childcare for his child any hour I wasn’t at my 60 hour per week job, while his ex wife fucked off doing who knows what. On Sundays I paid for a babysitter, with my own money, so that I could take the LIRR 3 hours east and visit my sister in the Blood and Bone Marrow Transplant Unit at Stony Brook University Hospital.

It was a situation where there were no good alternatives. The 10yo wasn’t allowed in the hospital because no one under 14 was permitted to enter the unit. They also didn’t know my sister well and bringing them there likely would have been upsetting. The only solution would have been biomom using her custody time once in a while, but she didn’t want to. My husband wasn’t making a lot of money then ($50K a year to my $80K at the time) and he worked weekends and 3 weekdays each week. I asked him to consider finding a different job but that didn’t happen. He still works that job today (though he makes more money now). He’s in school for a career change to become a teacher.

I love him and he’s my best friend and my favorite person to be with, but I also feel sad that our “partnership” more often than not is me taking care of him. Whether it’s accurate or not, I feel like I’ve been taking care of him for most of our marriage. And I wish I had married someone who could take care of me sometimes, too.

And I mean that in big life ways. In day to day, he helps maintain our household, he unloads the dishwasher, he takes out the trash, he does the laundry. I don’t mean that he needs me to keep house for him, because that isn’t true. I mean considering me and my needs and my life just as much as he considers himself and his child.

I wanted to be out of Brooklyn by now. I wanted to be in a house in the Hudson Valley by now. I let go of the dream of having a child a long time ago because I saw the way he parented (or didn’t parent at all) and the world is so fucked up right now, I just have no interest in that any more. But there are other things I’d like to do and they necessitate living outside of the city and lowering our cost of living.

We have to be where we are because of his schooling. He finished undergrad in December 2024. He could be almost done with graduate school but said he felt unmotivated after the 2024 election and didn’t apply to graduate school programs until this year. He just started this summer in 2026. He’ll be done in the summer of 2028.