I get to go into work late today because they don’t have my desk set up yet. That gives me a cushion here on my first official day as a fake office worker. Brett is envious. He has cubicle envy! No seriously. He found work much less stressful than being home with two kids and being responsible for laundry, cooking, cleaning, homeschooling, playdating etc. He decided to get a part-time job both to better secure our base-pay and to get the heck out of the house once in awhile.

We are very different people. Personally I like not having a reason to put on undereye concealer every morning. Maybe if he had to put on undereye concealer he’d feel differently about this whole thing but I doubt it.

This past year of full-time freelancing has been a terrific — if difficult — learning experience. I can see a lot of the mistakes we made but also see how far we’ve come. I’m not where I wanted to be by now but I’m where I hoped to be. (Except for the missing checks.) I have about a billion times the confidence I had when I started out and so even though I’m more aware of the pitfalls I also have more faith in my ability to get ahead of them.

The things that I wanted out of this — control over my own time, the chance to be a part of my family’s everyday life — are so worth the hard parts. But the hard parts are really really hard. (Namely the way that some clients see your invoice duedate as a suggestion they can toss aside for months.) I wouldn’t suggest taking this on without more of a safety net than we had to start. We burned through our available savings pretty fast, thus the disaster this month when we’re staring at checks that are weeks overdue. But the nice thing about taking responsibility (even as we shake our fists at the check-writing gods) is that it means that next time we’ll do better.

I come to the table with money issues in spades and this past month has brought them up all dark and scary with dripping fangs. It’s been terrifying. But it’s also been the chance to know that I refuse to live like this; I won’t let it get this bad again. I can work harder than I thought I could and I can work even when I’m so tear-swollen that I can’t see the computer screen. Added bonus: Once we got past the fear-induced finger pointing Brett and I got back on the same team and are now able to crack doomsday jokes. Feeling like we’re in this together (and isn’t the big reason we wanted a family business is to be a family?) has helped get through the worst of it.

Still, I’d like that check to come.

We told Noah that he’ll know its arrived when he wakes up and Daddy’s bought donuts. Krispy Kreme to be exact. Today it was oatmeal (Madison calls it porridge) but we’ve got donuts in our future. Hopefully not too far off. But for today it’s porridge and cubicles and Daddy working the phone trees at our creditors to stave off the wolf at the door.

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