Dear Sol:

It is okay to quit your job in the middle of a pandemic when that’s what it takes to survive the pandemic! Within your family unit, you, your husband and your son need to survive the pandemic with minimal mental health damage. Minimizing everyone’s stress is what it takes to minimizing mental health damage.

When you wrote: “The job is hard.. I get easily stressed and then shout and become angry at my family wo are also immensely stressed.. Maybe I can be the happy loving Mum they remember and can save the marriage/ son from the verbal abuse that started mid lockdown and has caused a massive change in his behaviour”- I didn’t need to read further to know for sure that you should quit the job ASAP.

It is never a good thing to keep a job that involves verbally abusing your son and your husband!!!

I didn’t need to read the rest of your post for the purpose of answering your question, but I did. Reads to me that this is what stresses you most about the job: “much ambiguity.. I don’t like the ambiguity of what the job entails, the greyness, I like to know what I am meant to be doing”- having a clear job description, a certainty and predictability, is like standing on solid ground; an ambiguous job description is like standing on shaky ground: you are scared of taking the next step and falling. Different people have different tolerance levels to ambiguity, but most people, if not all, are anxious when in an ambiguous situation.

“I think when I run my own business it won’t be as grey”- true, because you are very motivated to have that solid ground, so you will see to it that it will be as solid as possible.

“yesterday I all but handed my notice in and I felt so light. Then I encountered lots of posts on Facebook.. it felt like signs to give it my best shot at work before leaving”- there is no such thing as signs sent by a god through Facebook! That’s magical thinking, not realistic thinking.

I highly recommend that you give your notice as soon as possible, today or tomorrow, depending on your time zone. Not because this post is .. a sign that you should, but because of the simple logic and truth that it is never, never okay to verbally abuse your son, or your husband, and therefore, you need to take every measure possible to stop that behavior!

anita