Working nights

The house was dark and quiet when I got home from work around 11:30 Monday night. Some nights my mom and/or my sister are awake when I get home and I stay up and talk with them just before they go to sleep. Not tonight. Disappointed, I went to the kitchen to get something to eat and when I turned on the light I noticed something: the house was clean. Not just sort of clean, but really clean, clean the way a hotel room might be when you check in. The house had been slightly messy before I left around 4 that afternoon, but now the kitchen was spotless, a new tablecloth had been put on the table, the rugs looked like they had been vacuumed, and all the stuff that had accumulated on the couch had been put away. It was like some magical cleaning fairy had come by while I was gone, but of course I knew that magical cleaning fairy was my mother. Somewhere in the nearly eight hours I had been gone she had managed to clean the whole house. This happens when you work opposite schedules. You miss things. Events happen that you are entirely oblivious to. I had no idea why my mom picked a weekday night to clean, and I wasn't exactly going to wake her up to ask her. I made myself a quesadilla on the spotless stove then sat alone on the clean couch to watch late-night TV.

And it reminded me of another, sadder, memory of the last job I had where I worked at night. It was my first real job, as a cashier at a big-box store that shall remain nameless. It was during the holiday season. I remember getting home from what had been a horrendous night. It had been so busy my boss wasn't able to give me a break during my six-hour shift. I was tired and hungry. I remember standing in the dark at the door of the house with my key, exhausted and so happy to finally be home. When I opened the door and went inside to the entryway it was quiet and dark the same way it was Monday night. All were asleep. And then I saw the glow of Christmas lights, the Nativity scene on the front table, and the decorated tree. You see, every year a few weeks before Christmas it was our family tradition to spend an evening together hanging ornaments on the tree and stockings over the fireplace, settting up the Nativity scene, and decorating the house with wreaths and garland. And this year while I was at work cashiering like a madwoman, they had done it all without me. At that point I burst into tears.

Some things you never get used to. I've had sixteen months of working nights at my current job and I'm used to the schedule for the most part. I've tricked my body into thinking it should be wide awake at midnight, but it's still difficult to accept the ugliest part of working at night: the lost time, time that could have been spent with loved ones instead spent in service to a corporation. All work requires sacrifices, but more often than working a "regular" schedule, working nights you have these large and small moments of pain in realizing what you missed that make you wonder if the sacrifices are worth it.