After a time out for child care, I'm glad to have a boss again

When I was closing in on the 10-year mark at my previous workplace, I found a lot of things were bothering me. I fretted over office politics and promotions, petty power plays, and seemingly unwarranted rewards. Everything about corporate life struck me as simultaneously momentous and trivial. The stakes were high, in the form of salaries and professional stature, for things that didn't ultimately seem to matter all that much: reaching a sales goal, designing a new customer incentive.

Moreover, I took everything personally. Criticism from a higher-up on a project I was managing seemed to call my basic competence into question; the discovery that a co-worker was representing our group at a conference that I would have liked to attend made me believe that no one liked me. Surely, I used to tell myself, there must be something I could do that would be more meaningful, more authentic. Something almost primal.

That was several years ago, and not long afterwards, I left the job for an entirely different role. If it was primal I wanted, it was primal I got. I spent the next four years as a stay-at-home mom, living in a close-knit community, keeping house and raising children. I potty-trained and hosted play groups, decorated Valentine cookies, and folded laundry. Whereas office life had felt synthetic and contrived, my daily reality as a stay-at-home mother became downright gritty as I immersed myself in the world of spilled juice and playground scrapes.

But now I'm back to professional life -- in a different company but one with the same corporate structure -- and I've discovered that something within me has changed. The overblown weightiness is gone, leaving a sense of perspective in its place. All those hours of being captain of the ship -- which meant not only cooking, cleaning, and transportation but also all the decision-making, budgeting, and arbitrating that it takes to run a household -- caused a transformation of sorts. Now, instead of being distracted by office politics, I'm just relieved to be someplace where I'm not in charge. I look at the higher-ups in my company and think with relief, "You are the boss of me, and it feels just great." Let someone else do the driving for a change.

These days, I arrive at work in the morning and savor the antiseptic reserve that makes my new existence so different from Life with Children. I pour a cup of coffee and enjoy the solitude that my desk job provides. The air is always 70 degrees, whether it's August or February; a crew arrives after dark to dust and mop. The most labor-intensive chore I do all day is microwaving my lunch.

I often joke that the best thing about corporate life compared with being at home is that no one at work ever whines to be carried anywhere. But it's more than just the obvious differences. I like the politeness with which co-workers treat each other, the ceaseless hallway greetings, the mundane conversations.

"How was your weekend? Did you watch the game?" I ask the financial analyst down the hall as I wander past his office door with a pile of photocopies in hand.

"Bad commute today?" he says if he sees me first.

He likes the Patriots; I have a half-hour drive from home. And that's all we feel the need to know about each other. After years of intense, emotional conversations with other parents about fevers, school systems, and discipline methods, I like the fact that at work, all I'm expected to worry about is reaching deadlines and avoiding revenue loss. It's not that no one takes corporate life as seriously as I take parenting; it's just that I myself don't have to. At home, I'm the one with all the tough decisions to make and all the responsibility to bear. At work, I have a midlevel position where I'm surrounded by other people who are paid to worry about the big things.

That's not to say I don't want to be part of the grittiness of a child-centered existence. I come home to kids who grab me in sticky hugs, fight over who gets which kitchen stool, and splash water all over the bathroom floor, and I still welcome that. It's part of being a parent.

But I also love walking into my office in a beige linen skirt, knowing that nothing I do in the next eight hours is going to be very messy. Hot coffee; ergonomic desk chair; warmly lit computer screen with politely worded requests e-mailed from co-workers. Organic and authentic? Absolutely not. But oh, so clean and soothing.

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