I had an incredibly busy weekend. I babysat my sister’s kids from Friday until Monday, so that meant I had eight kids in my house for three days. It didn’t go 100% smoothly but it wasn’t all horrible either. There was one major issue that kept me awake at night that involved my teenage niece and my 11 year old daughter, but I think that was handled as best as we could. Teenagers are so complex! I remind myself constantly what it was like for me as a teenager so I can identify with the issues the teens in our family face. It’s still not always easy.

Monday my youngest woke up with a fever. He’s had a lingering cough from a cold he had a few weeks ago and him waking up with a fever made me nervous and I thought he might have bronchitis or something. I took him to the doc’s and it turned out he had a sinus infection. The cough was from the drip. Poor little guy. Once we got him on antibiotics he perked right up and was back to his normal self. So we did not cancel the zoo trip I had planned for us yesterday (Tuesday). We wore ourselves out spending the entire day walking all over the zoo. I did rent a wagon for my youngest to ride in, in case he got tired, but he had more energy than all of us. My 9 year old rode in the wagon more than he did, heh.

Today I finally sent off an email I’ve been wanting to send to the owner of the company I worked with for the last 3.5 years. I am hoping this brings some closure for me. Even if he doesn’t reply, I have at least said what I needed to say. Severing this working relationship has been a lot like breaking up with a boyfriend…

I cared a whole lot about my job and the people I worked with. I poured my heart and soul into my work. My job would even become my escape when things got rough in my personal life. Due to the nature of the job, I could always work day or night. It was only a few mouse clicks away. And I did just that on many many occasions. I was always available, always visible. Due to my hard work and dedication, I was never given a negative review. In fact I was promoted four times in the 3.5 years I worked for this company. All the way up to Assistant Manager. I managed 40 people in the end, mostly on my own.

I was given a lot of responsibility, and at times I’m sure I made mistakes. But these are mistakes I always tried to learn from. I do not feel their decisions and actions regarding me in the end were the right decisions/actions. Nor do I feel the decision came from the right set of people. It came from people who did not even work in my department and had little clue as to what my job really entailed. There was always this huge communication problem between departments… and I would often try to identify where the problem was and offer solutions to fix it. At one point I was given the task of quality control. The reason I was given for that was because (in their words) my attention to detail and eye for seeing a potential problem ahead of time and fixing it before it became a problem. I was told they were impressed by my ability to do this and they wanted me to focus more time on doing just that; finding problems and issues and report them, offer solutions… and that’s exactly what I did. Unfortunately it involved pointing out some flaws with management in other departments. I was never accusatory and remained as neutral and politically correct as possible. But when I would point out some of these flaws, I was ignored. If the issue was minor, I let it go. When it wasn’t minor, I pushed the envelope. In the end, I don’t think the higher ups wanted any of *their* flaws pointed out, no matter how minor. And somehow I became the bad guy.

What they did in the end just hurt though and I know in my heart I did not deserve it. It’s been hard for me to let go because of it. And this is where it’s like a breakup. It was a relationship that became one-sided and lack of proper communication just made things worse.

So I wrote a letter to the owner. It’s a letter I’ve been working on off/on for a couple weeks. The owner of the company and I were friends before he gave me a job. I wrote to him as one friend to another… and explained my side of things as well as point out all the facts of the events that led to my leaving the company. I don’t know if we’re still friends because he’s not contacted me since this whole thing went down. And I have no idea if he’ll even reply. But at least this has brought me some sense of closure. I’ve said what I needed to and hope to only move on from here.

Here’s to looking ahead…