A recent conversation has literally kept me awake at night.  Well, really a recent series of conversations has kept me from actually sleeping at all. 

Motherhood has slowed the progress of my making money by limiting the hours to my day.  Nothing I am good at really pays in a way that makes it easy to have daycare or a nanny.  So I squeeze it in where I can.  I play the monthly gig, write the annnual (roughly) piece or two for MUV, I am certified as a yoga instructor, but the only way to build these kinds of things is from the ground up, so once again, not enough cash there to pay a babysitter.  As the brain cells pop, it's harder and harder to pull the ambitions together to form a remunerative model. 

So I was recently discussing the possibilities of my ife when I was told that I have a reason for being, but not a career, which has kind of shocked me.  I mean, does it have to be profitable to be a career?  I have work that is widely praised, even widely known.  Does this body of work constitute "not a career"?  

I went to Wikipedia.  A "career", it states, is "an individual's "course or progress through life (or a distinct portion of life)". It is usually considered to pertain to remunerative work (and sometimes also formal education)."  On Dictionary.com, it is "an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person's life and with opportunities for progress."

Progress.  That's the key isn't it?  What defines progress? "[F]orward or onward movement toward a destination", says dictionary.com.  "To what end?" I say.

This has plagued me for a number of years, see, because I have done the artist thing of taking a lot of crappy jobs to support the larger picture and now that I don't have a crappy job, now that I'm mothering for more hours of the day than I'm doing anything else, now suddenly, does the "career" I've been building on, that I continue to build on, does that disappear?  Does it mean that I have less responsibility that I can't focus on profit first?  Does the fact that I make and sell music, albeit for less profit, in addition to parenting mean the career has stopped and the "reason for being" has begun?  Are they not the same thing?  And if the career has stopped, despite the face that it is obviously still happening, are we not buying into the dismissal of the importance of art in this country?  Is it not part of a larger problem?

I have been playing music for other people in hopes of profit for about 18 years, hopeful to progress toward a sound that moves people. This smacks of both online definitions of career to me.  How do I get other people to see it that way?  How do I get respect for it?  How do I respect myself for it?

Tags: career, money, music, parenting
Current Location: United States, New York, Port Jefferson Station
I feel: aggravated
I'm listening to: kitchen hum