It's like I started out at one hill, looking across a valley at another hill and thinking, "That's where we're going." And then, as we started the journey, a different path leading to a different destination opened up. This other path looked good, so we took it, only to discover there were several detours along this new path, and we wound through different valleys and forests and maybe a meadow or plain or two, and now suddenly the semester is over and we're on top of another hill, looking back at our original location and the journey, and also looking across at the other hill, our original destination, and thinking how foreign it now seems, and how exciting it is to be on a completely different hill.
Here's what happened:
My husband quit his job back in August. It was a scary decision, but for us it was necessary. He was working more than sixty hours every week at a position that exhausted him, and I felt like we had no family life anymore. We prayed about what to do, and as we prayed, I got the opportunity to teach five classes between the university and the community college. Teaching five classes would make up for the lost income, though not completely. We would have to live on a much tighter budget, and Ian would probably have to pick up a part-time job eventually to make ends meet.
As we prayed about it, we felt like it was worth it. I've always loved teaching; Ian would get to see the girls more than an hour at the end of every day; I wouldn't feel so isolated and lonely being at home with two little kids. So... we took the plunge.
This was not a long-term plan; as a part-time instructor, it's rare to get more than two or three courses, so teaching a full-time college load was a short-term fix. In my mind, Ian would find a different job, go back to working full-time after a few months, and I would go back to teaching college part-time for the new few years until our girls were old enough to go to school. For now, we were making ends meet, week by week, but still unsure of what our future would hold.
And then we were re-routed.
I have long thought that I would go back to school and take classes to become a certified teacher. I can teach college-level courses part-time with an M.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures, but I can't teach middle or high school. But it didn't make sense to go back to school while my girls were little, I thought. The biggest obstacle, in my mind, was student teaching. Student teaching is basically where you pay the university for several credits and you work with an established teacher, slowly taking over their classroom under their guidance and later on giving it back to them. Basically, it's an expensive, unpaid, full-time internship.
Hence my plan to do this once my girls were older.
But, a day or two after I wrote about life's unpredictability, I got a message from a friend who teaches at a high school here in town. They had a half-time position open, and would I be interested? Initially I said no, as I had no teaching license and the time of the position conflicted with my university class.
But it stuck in my mind. I couldn't shake the idea; I wanted to take the job. I kept thinking that this was what I wanted to be doing eventually anyway, and perhaps if I took this job, I would have a foot in the door and an ability to keep the half-time position. Then, when I was ready to do my student teaching, I could complete it as a long-term substitute and actually get paid for it. So I started praying for guidance, keeping in mind my ultimate lack of control and God's good control over everything in my life. I also asked some friends to pray for our family. I hadn't planned to go back to school yet, and working so many hours on a long-term basis was scary to me. What if I missed my daughters too much? How would this mesh with any job Ian might get?
To shorten up a very long story, here's what happened next:
I talked to my supervisor at the university, who supported my desire to switch to the school district. I talked to my friend and found out that they were dissatisfied with their current long-term substitute, so I took the necessary steps to renew my teaching license. If I was going to use this job for a paid internship, I would need to complete go back to school to do all the classes required before the internship. Thus, I applied to a licensure program through the College of Education.
It seems so simple when I summarize it. But there were lots of steps, lots of tasks and paperwork to do while my kids were napping and after they went to bed. It took a lot of prayer; some of the decisions had to be made very quickly, and figuring out which one was right wasn't always easy. Our circumstance of simply needing the income helped me make many of the decisions. The entire process took about two and a half months total, during which I kept working at the university and community college as I prepared to transition to teaching at the high school level and taking classes myself.
In the meantime, after I had applied to the College of Ed and committed to teaching high school once my license came through, Ian and I had been praying about his future job. He knew he needed to work more, but didn't feel like God wanted him to look for work elsewhere. Two months of being home with the girls had strengthened their relationship with him. They no longer constantly preferred me for everything or relied only on me for their needs. Kaitlyn has always been a mommy's girl, and for the first time ever she would ask for Daddy as well as (and sometimes instead of!) Mommy. So we prayed that he would be able to work forty hours a week with his company instead of the sixty plus. After praying for a couple weeks, his boss asked him to draw up a forty-hour-per-week job proposal and schedule, which he did, and which the company accepted.
So... next year is looking really different from what I anticipated. Ian will be working full-time and I'll be working about twenty-five or thirty hours a week at the high school and community college and going to school as well. This isn't what I thought my life as a wife and mom was going to look like. I didn't know if my girls could thrive in this life situation. And the thing is, we are thriving as a family. (I am hoping the thriving-family feeling will continue once I'm in the middle of education classes.) God knows exactly what we need and has been providing for us, adjusting circumstances to lead us to places we wouldn't have dared go otherwise.
It's exciting to see how we ended up in a place completely different from what we had expected. God has surprised both of us with where He has led us in life. It's not where I thought we would end up, but I am very content that we are here.
