my stuff
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the story so far...
I really shouldn’t be updating just now because I’m at work, and what with the current climate, I should really be looking like I’m knocking my pan in to get as much work done as possible, but you know me! I like to keep my priorities straight and D-Land is the most important thing here!
Okay. Thanks again for taking time to give me your advice. RDC – I have totally lost the link to your page….can you email it to me? I miss reading you. And Kimistry – I do get paid maternity leave, but I have to be working for an employer for a certain period of time. My worry was that if my boss let me go (and I hadn’t told her I was pregnant) it might not be easy to get a new job due to being pregnant….
Anyway – in the end, I decided I could no longer take the pressure and went in and spoke to my boss. I told her the first available opportunity after finding out about the redundancies and I felt better after speaking to her. I explained that I was pregnant and that I hadn’t had my scan yet and that I wasn’t overly comfortable telling her about things because I wanted to make sure everything was okay with my pregnancy before speaking to her. I made her realise that the reason I was telling her was because she’d specifically asked us to talk to her if our situations were going to be changing in any way as our new situations could mean there is extra money in the pot and people might be able to keep their jobs.
So, in the end she was surprised but really pleased for us. She asked me what I thought I’d be doing in terms of my maternity leave (when I’d be taking it, how long I’d be taking it for and what I’d want to do when I came back) and I told her that I didn’t have any secured plans yet because it was such early days – that my ideal would be to take my maternity leave mid April for 9 months and then come back on a 3 day week. She said she was really grateful that I told her and that she appreciated me telling her when I didn’t have to.
So now, it’s just a waiting game…
Apparently we’re going to find out what’s happening on Thursday. The atmosphere at work is awful. Everybody is really down and stressed. We’re all expected to carry on as if nothing’s happened at all. Each of us finishes our sentences with ‘well, that’s if I’m still here obviously’ at least twice a day when we’re talking about projects and proposals. Some people are being totally transparent and sucking up to the boss, others (like me) are just trying to get on with it without losing the plot.
If I do go, I don’t know what I’m going to do but I know that it will all work out in the end. I was speaking to another work mate on Friday night (I have told a couple of people that I’m pregnant because I trust them and because I need them on my side – I thought it would be useful to have a couple of people in the office know, just in case I get fired and need to speak to them further down the line) and she had confided in me that her husband wants to start trying for a baby but she’s nervous because things always go wrong and you never know where you are in life.
I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I just said ‘the thing is, if Bandito and I had known in July that my job would be on the line in September, we’d have used contraception – no doubt about it, but we didn’t and now we’ve found out that work is a bit rocky and even though we both know that, the most important thing to us is this growing baby and the fact that we’re going to be parents. At the end of the day, work has gone from being the most important thing ever, to something that is pretty insignificant’.
So that’s that for just now. Thanks for your advice – I really did appreciate it and I am so glad I’ve started writing in here again, I’ve really, really missed it.
10:51 am - 24 September 2007
