Planning the Great Escape

I have a lot of decisions to make in the next 5 weeks.  I’ve been needing to make them for a year, and now the deadline is quickly approaching.  I haven’t been procrastinating.  I’ve just been carefully plotting and planning the changes that need to be made so other changes can be made.  It’s a fragile house of cards over here.  Or it’s maybe more like Jenga.  One peg needs to be moved in order to make another area more stable, but if I move the wrong peg, the whole damn thing could come tumbling down.

For both my own catharsis, and for the benefit of those who don't totally understand our situation, here’s where we’re at:

I work full time + I go to school full time + I run an increasingly-busy side business.  I also have two kids, and my lower-cost childcare is about to run out soon.  For the past 9 months, my MIL has been watching the kids for a lesser amount than daycare would charge, but it was a temporary favor to help us out, and we need to find a more permanent childcare solution – fast.  Our deadline is August 1st. 

The problem is my full-time day job.  This job means that soon I’ll be footing $2000 per month in daycare costs. This job is also preventing me from finishing school at a faster pace, and is preventing me from investing more time into my cake business.  Nevermind the 10 hours a day it keeps me away from my children, and the stress it causes because they Re-Org the company once a month and I never know what my job will be when I come in on Monday morning.  I promise, that is not an exaggeration.

I don’t want to pay most of my paycheck to a daycare.  I also don’t want to work full-time AND go to school full-time anymore, and school is NOT going to be the thing I sacrifice.  I MUST finish school.  They won’t let you be an attorney unless you finish school, so my career and income (and livelihood) are completely stunted  until I get these degrees finished.  I also get paid to go to school through a bevy of hard-earned scholarships, and my family needs that money.

Ever since I was on maternity leave last summer, my plan was to ramp up my cake business so I could use that to support the family while I was finishing school and taking care of my kids.  I’ve done a good job of building up the biz in my little “spare” time – the time I’m not at work, at class, or wiping the butts of my babies – often staying up until 2 a.m. to finish cake orders.  Every night that I’m sleepily piping little details onto a cake through blurry contact lenses, I think “I’m one cake closer to quitting the job I have to wake up for in a few hours.”

The caveat in this is that running any sort of (legal) food-service business requires a commercial kitchen that can pass health inspection.  Now, my business is doing well enough to create a nice little extra cushion for us, but it is NOT doing well enough to pay for the $30,000-$50,000 it would cost to open a bakery.  The catch 22 here is that if I ramp up business, I can afford to be legal.  But in order to ramp up business, I need to spend a bunch of money we don’t have to get the business up to code.  We don’t have any sort of savings to float on, and no collateral for a business loan. The idea of taking out a business loan in this economy scares the living crap out of me anyway because we could end up losing everything.  I’m trying to get us in a BETTER position – not WORSE.

So, we have a new plan that we’re implementing immediately, and just the notion of having a PLAN is putting me in better spirits: 

Step 1: Find a commercial rental kitchen in the area that will rent by the hour (apparently this is a big thing, part-time caterers use them all the time) – rent one or two days a week so I can get my business license and pass health inspection
Step 2: Start doing the real advertising that I haven’t been able to do thus far because I wasn’t legal and didn’t want to get fined by the county
Step 3: Make enough money to pay for overhead and replace the income I’ll lose by quitting the day job
Step 4: Quit day job, thereby allowing me to raise my kids, take more classes, and keep making wedding cakes on my own schedule.

Now – of course not all this will be accomplished in the next 5 weeks, but I hope to have the process fully underway so we can ask the MIL to give us “X” amount more time before she stops watching the kids.  I would really like to be off the corporate teet by the time I have to register for classes so I know whether or not I can increase my course-load.  If we can find a way to make this work, then I’ll be done with school at least 1.5 years faster.  The obvious bi-product is that I will be happier and mentally healthier than I have been over the last stressful year.  The financial benefit is that I'll be making an attorney's salary a whole lot faster.

If we cannot make this work, I will stay at this job indefinitely, keep taking classes, keep paying mostly my entire paycheck for someone else to be with my kids, and slowly watch my health go down the toilet.  Life will be exactly as busy and insane as it has been lately, only for the next 6 or so years it will take me until I have my law degree. 

This will put me at 37.  That is the exact age my aunt was when she graduated from pharmacy school after working full-time and taking care of her children all at the same time.  The summer she graduated, just a week before she started her awesome new dream job, she dropped dead from an aneurysm.  Her body had had enough.  She got out of the shower one morning, wrapped a towel around her head, and passed away before she could get dressed.

I don’t want to be 37 when I’m done with all this.  I don’t want to be my aunt.  So I am planning my escape. 

I just hope I don’t move the wrong peg.

Comments

[Jill]

First, I'm so sorry to hear about your aunt.

I think you have a great plan. I look at life as a giant leap of faith, and I think this is a good leap you're taking.

[Jenny]

I hope your plan works out - I've been reading for a few weeks now and I cannot even begin to fathom how on earth you do all you do.

Best of Luck!

[Naomi Dwyer]

I'm sure you could get some TV channel to pay for the benifit of filming you on your cake store opening. I mean you are pretty interesting and seem like you would make good TV! Here is to happy peg pulling! (quit that job already!!!)

[Amber]

That sounds like a great plan. Even if your health doesn't suffer 6 years is a long time to live with the craziness for your whole family. You sound very determined and logical, I think you can pull this off.

Best wishes!

[Emily Jones]

I told you, you are a very smart and creative woman! I have every confidence you will find a way to achieve the balance you are looking for. :)

[Crystal]

Looks like you're on a mission to accomplish your goals and I applaud you for that! However, I should caution you about the Legal Profession since you are making so many sacrifices in order to be a Lawyer. Are you 100% sure that you'll like being a Lawyer, and have you talked to Lawyers to get different perspectives on the profession?

It's actually very difficult to make a living as a Lawyer these days, and to do so requires long work days with typically 50-60hrs/wk. Here in Washington D.C. area, most firms have had massive layoffs, and Chicago has been especially hard hit as more Chicago firms are moving document review etc. work to India that used to be performed by Paralegals & Junior Associates. The pay for attorneys is much more modest than most people imagine (often only $45-55/yr) especially if self-employed or working for a smaller firm.

My midwife assistant (doula) was a former lawyer in Washington D.C., but like many she left to start a new career, and there's also a former-lawyer who started "CakeLove" (www.cakelove.com), a bakery with home-made cakes very similar in concept to yours! :-) Anyway, what you find is that there are a LOT of "former-Lawyers" out there and there are a million Unhappy-Lawyer blogs out there! I had previously considered being a Lawyer as well, but after a few years of research and talking to Lawyers, I ruled against it because I wanted to have a large family and realized that Law is often unkind to working mothers.

[TheFeministBreeder]

My plans for my law degree extend far beyond the practice of law
specifically.  I'm getting my LLM in Health Law Policy, with a
focus on public policy change and advocacy.  So yes, I'm 100% sure
that's what I want to do.  I also intend on keeping my GPA right where
it is, which will get me into a Tier 1 law school and expand my
opportunities for employment and pay.  I'd prefer to take a job working
as a state's attorney right out of school, which pays less than I make
right now, but it would be far more rewarding.  I'd rather make 50K a
year doing something I love than 50K a year hating life every moment of
my 8 hr work day, not making a bit of difference in the world.

[Natural Mom Loves Prada]

WOW - you are really busy!! As a compliment, you are a machine!!!
Sounds like you definitely know what you need to do and have some great options, so I hope that they all work out - there's no reason you can't be a Jenga winner!!!

[Crystal]

Definitely it's a noble goal to aim for the more rewarding career, but personally I've always felt that the purpose of WORK was to earn MONEY. I couldn't see myself sacrificing 6yrs of extra time away from my children only to come up with a lower salary at the end of the pipeline.

Hopefully your schedule will lighten up a bit at the end of this process, so that you'll have more time to make happy memories with your children before their childhoods have passed.

[TheFeministBreeder]

6 years is nothing compared to the 30-40 years I could spend working a
job that I hate/makes me miserable/keeps me away from family anyway. 
That's the point of education.  It takes a few years, but overall it's
worth it.  I feel better about myself when I'm completing my degree -
which means something to both me and my family.

I'm making plenty of happy memories with my children right now,
thankyouverymuch.

[michele]

Sounds like a great plan IMO. I hope everything works out. Wait, strike that--you are a very intelligent, driven woman and you WILL get everything to work out. You are Houdini Mom.

I also hope you don't end up like your aunt (I am so sorry BTW...how awful!).

[Annie]

New reader - got here via link to your ingenious cloth wipe folding tutorial!

Just a thought about your cake business - many communities have "community kitchens" where small entrepreneurs like you can rent or borrow space in a kitchen that has passed "commercial kitchen" muster, but is run as a non-profit. Many times these are located in a church or school. The price you'd pay is often much less than you would have to for renting a business's kitchen. You could google your community's name and "community kitchen", or oftentimes folks selling prepared food at the farmers' market use these sort of spaces and might be able to point you toward them.

(I'm a sociologist studying local food systems, not a cook or baker, so my knowledge of the specifics of these arrangements is limited.)

Good luck!

[TheFeministBreeder]

Thanks so much for the information!  And I'm glad the wipe info helped
you.