Working away from family

Does anyone else do this???

I have been offered a job that is not in Palmy, I have 2 weeks to decide and confirm what I am going to do. It is an army job in the Wellington region.

Anyone done working away from the family and how did they cope? I will be the big money earner in the family as well so that is something that might swing us to me taking the job.

I know someone here in Auckland through our bookclub, they have three boys, andd her husband works four days in Wellington, he comes home Friday and goes back Sundays or Mondays

Not yet, but we might be. We are having to make some major decisions at the moment as DP was made redundant last week and there are no jobs, especially nowhere near what he was making. Our options all suck, but one of them includes him going back to the UK to work for 6 months and me and the 2 boys staying here. I hate the idea on a number of levels...not least of which worrying about how I will cope without any family support but it means that our life in NZ is not over and we don't all have to go back to the UK which is not what we want to do anyway.

The 'logic' of him going back there is that he can live with his parents and thus minimise outgoings there so he can support the 3 of us here. BUT it's 6 months of their lives he is missing (DS1 is 6.5, DS2 is 2.5)and even if we can pull it off, there is still the risk that if there still aren't any jobs next year we are going to have to all go back to the UK anyway.

This has really thrown us, and all our options suck and mean us having to potentially leave the support system we have here if we are fortunate enough to be able to do a move within NZ. But if we go back we have family support and DP can earn heaps of money but we lose everything that we came out here for in the first place. It sucks big time.

I did it last year for half the year, I was only away from DH.

Depends on how well you cope with stress and pressures from work, as I found when things got a bit tough I struggled without having DH to bounce things off, and it did affect our relationship in that DH got used to being by himself.

Will you commute every day, or only on the weekends?

I can see myself doing it again once I'm qualified as there isn't the work up here for me that I want to do, and there isn't work for DH in Wellington.

There are plenty of people that do it, I know of one couple that live in Waikanae, where the wife works in Lower Hutt and the husband at Ohakea its what ever works for you.

You could always accept the position and see how it goes.

How much job hunting have you done in Palmy?

How would Andrew react to it? I say Andrew rather than Josh because of the whole I hate you thing hes going through. How will he react to just having his daddy 5 days a week, miss you and have you ont he weekend?