Equitable life

I know boredom. I was brought up in West Wales and I can tell you that once 'Sing something simple' started on the radio on Sunday evening at 7pm you might as well go to bed as there was nothing else left to do. It was no good asking your parents either as they would respond with 'How about you finish your homework about the sheep industry in North Wales, make plasticine sheep, colour in pictures of sheep or go and count the sheep.' Sheep figured largely in our young lives in Wales. And did you know that when sheep fart it sounds like a human one? Of course you didn't you are far too refined. So when it got dark all you could hear from your bedroom was the sound of ghostly farting from the fields and the distinct impression that some ghastly axe murderer was outside your bedroom window with dark intent but having eaten too many brussel sprouts for dinner. You longed for school on Monday.

The dynamics have changed. Wise up.

So when you have left your job (or, more accurately, your job has left you) and found that you no longer have a daily destination to go to boredom can set in quite quickly. For example I've just bought the 2009 'week on two pages' calender refill for my battered and beloved Filofax. So far I have birthdays and a dental appointment in there. For June. And that's it. If it had been available I would have bought a 'one-year on one page' refill but that might have been optimistic as it currently stands. In the old days, sigh of nostalgia here, I'd have been penciling provisional dates to beat up Marketing on their bonkers ideas to increase sales of badger warmers, dates for fighting with Finance who had the nerve to suggest that my entertainment budget might be er, 'a little constrained', dates to deal with the never ending list of disaffected employees who considered company property as a perfect eBay opportunity and the staff toilets as a useful centre for the distribution of marijuana, other illicit Class A, B, C drugs and stolen items and the bear pit fights aka as the Board Meetings that I chaired and were similar to Medieval street brawls at times; 'No please put the water cooler down we know that won't help the Sales Director explain the downturn in sales.'

Where did I put it?

Losing your job (doesn't that sound odd? 'I seem to have misplaced my job Mavis, have you seen it anywhere?' 'Well where did you last see it?'. Sort of like putting your spectacles down somewhere in the house and then spending the next two hours looking for them getting increasingly crosser and looking in more and more outlandish places.) There is a grieving process that you have to go through when you lose your job - can't be avoided it's gonna happen. When you start to come out of that you get bored and that's when you start following your partner around the house like a demented toddler seeking attention. Now we have to remember that your partner had had their own space and possibly job for many years. They've been running the house, managing the kids, living their own career without your intervention thank you very much, for a long time. So standing at their shoulder tugging at their clothes saying 'I'm bored' will become very wearing.
Very Quickly.
And you probably will not have pictures of sheep to colour in either.
The dynamics of the relationship have changed.


It's a hard thing but you have to find a new level of living and that means not having much of a structure to the day anymore - and finding that the day has many more hours in it than you remember. It does take a long time to come down from the demands that a job makes on you and the social benefits it also confers - where else are you paid to moan about the people who manage you with like minded soul mates, who now strangely do not return your phone calls and emails?

Do stuff. EoTP says it will help. Really

There are practical things you can do as you partner will not want to run the household whilst you are mooning about the house all day in your Winne-the-Pooh jim jams.

• The shopping (I know the layout of Tesco intimately now and get annoyed if they move the shelves around.)
• The cleaning - you should see my toilets, the pride of the street, twinkling with the intensity of the summer sun.
• The ironing - creases so sharp you could cut down mighty oak trees with them.
• Washing - there are 232 washing permutations on our washing machine though I only use 2. Still, I have now read the manual.
• Getting fit. You should see me out sprint the milk float to the tune of 'Chariots of Fire' at 0630.
• Cooking - no I'm not perfect I can't do this. I heat a darn good M&S Lasagna though.
• DIY - moving swiftly on...
• Communicate - look this is harder on men (comments on a postcard please) as we are genetically wired to hunt woolly mammoths and sabre toothed field mice and not clean the cave toilets. Women are, of course, far more adaptable than men and can catch and cook the mammoth whilst cleaning the cave without making a big fuss about it all and they don't need a stroky beard meeting beforehand to set objectives either. I don't mean that you should whinge every day about how bad it is not to have a job but talk about how you, the both of you, will collectively will get through it.

And so on.

Basically you have to find a new way to live your life with your partner in an equitable way and recognise that, temporarily at least, the relationship has to change and the roles have to change as well.

And if you don't recognise that or can't change then don't get too close to the water cooler.