I've had it with this upside-down work schedule. I simply cannot work the overnight shift or eventually it will kill me.

So I don't know how to phrase this, but we and the kids just got over a stomach flu which circulated from one kid to the next, then to me, then to another kid, and now to my wife.  This happened on our one-year anniversary from making Aliyah celebration, where we went to a hotel which cost us roughly $350USD even though it was off season.  Can you believe hotels are so expensive here?!?

Anyway, in my wife's illness from the stomach flu, she started sharing with me how home sick she was.  She talked about how easy it was in Denver (even when we were living in California), how easy life was.  We had one school where all the kids went to, the school was great, the kids had friends, and ...we had AMAZON PRIME!  Oh Amazon Prime how I miss you from Betar Israel!

While she was merely sharing her feelings of being homesick these past few months, as soon as she did, I myself felt an outpouring of homesickness of the way life used to be in the US.  I woke up in the morning, had breakfast and a coffee, prepared the kids' lunches, saw them off to school, then I went to work in my giant office space where I would work like a normal human being during normal business hours.  I would sometimes call my wife and we would go out to lunch together, or I would stop at home and pick something up, and then go back to work.

At 7pm, I would come home, I would put the kids to bed, say shema, sit down and exchange a few words with my wife over tea, and then we would either watch a show together, or I would play video games into the night.  Whatever the recreation, it was also a way to "de-fuzz" from the tough day at work.  This allowed me to go to sleep at midnight (or sometimes at 1am), and I would wake up refreshed and ready to start my day all over again.

Here in Israel, my schedule is ass backwards.  I wake up at 11am after having been awake until 4am, and I wake up feeling like a zombie.  I stumble out from my office couch (because I rarely sleep in my own bed because the noise in the morning wakes me up), and I greet my wife who is already five hours into her day.  She has already woken up with the kids, gotten them fed, dressed, made lunch, sent them off to school, and then by the time I am waking up, she is either cleaning up the house or relaxing on Facebook.  I fight the inclination to feel like a lazy loser for waking up so late, so I drag myself as if hung over to the kitchen to make myself some coffee.

I come downstairs and I try to have a conversation with my wife (which is where the daily mini-fight comes from, because she is simply not interested in talking and I am intruding on what she calls her "private time").  This is the conversation which often ends up with a "no, you're wrong, it is not like that, it is like this," leading to some huffy puffy hurt feelings, followed by a quiet walk of shame back up to my office to waste away the next few hours.

In Israel, I don't start work until 4pm which is 6am CST when most of my US clients for the law firm wake up.  During these next few hours, while I try to make good use of my time, more often than not, I end up reading about the terrible politicians in the US and what big "O" has done this time, I watch a televised presidential debate on YouTube, or if I am productive, I will listen to a few classes online.  Either way, I burn myself out because there is nothing to do except fry my brain (an activity that should be happening AFTER my work day, not before it).  Then the kids come home, I play with them some until I get overwhelmed, and then 4pm comes along and I need to get to my meetings.  I take a few calls, sit in on a few meetings, and I work my client's cases.  Around 6pm, I get called down for dinner (or sometimes to cook dinner), and I am downstairs until 7pm when it is bedtime.

Then at 7pm after saying shema with the kids and fighting with them to get to bed, I get back to work.  Well, sometimes it is that I only then get to work.  The problem is that by this time, I am WIPED OUT and I really don't want to start my work day, because I am already exhausted from the day I just finished, especially if my wife had me running errands during the day (while I myself agree to do so because otherwise I will be clawing at the walls from cabin fever), or if we went out for a late breakfast together in some cute kosher restaurant on some kibbutz or in Jerusalem.

So I force a few cups of coffee down my throat to get caffeinated, I get on the phone, I force myself to work, and because I'm so tired, I am not so productive.  Not to mention the fact that because I am in an "office" at home (I am working as of this week on getting an office outside the home), I cannot make noise or argue loudly with the opponent attorneys which messes with my ability to work effectively.  Then around 4am, I finish off my day, and crash in bed from a really really unbearably long day.  Oh, and sometimes my 4am's end up being at 6am, after my wife's cell phone alarm wakes her up.

So I've pretty much had it with this "upside-down time" lifestyle, and I want out.  I want to go back to the US when I woke up with society, and when I slept with society.  Here, I feel that my work hours will be the death of me within the next ten years, tops.  I give myself five more years of this before I'm dead of a heart attack or just the unhealthy lifestyle of being awake all night every night (and then having to jetlag myself every shabbos so that I can be awake for shul).

But then I go back and forth about the merits of Israel versus the desire to go back.

NOTE: Image taken from Pixbay, CC0 Public Domain, Free for commercial use, No attribution required.  Link.