Ranting

I've been feeling a little down in the dumps lately. Last night Steve and I stayed up and as always, he was able to put his finger on why I was feeling so frustrated. I swear he'd make a great clinical psychologist, but considering how we both feel about that field and the fact that I am already a very demanding patient of his, it's best he sticks to the cognitive side of things. Anyways, if you know me well, you know that unless I vocalize my feelings, they tend to build up and then things get messy. So please indulge me in the following rant, but don't feel like you need to read it.

After this semester it will be Steve's last year of school. Grad school is kind of a grand equalizer. Everyone is poor and we tend to live in similar housing with similar qualities of life. It's been interesting to watch my friends as they move on and how their standard of living changes vastly. Several of my friends are buying houses this year and enjoying significant changes in their lifestyle. I am not jealous- in all honesty I am truly happy for them. But for those of us in academia, there's a long ladder to climb before you start to enjoy those perks. I've started to realize this as we looked at some job postings, although Steven says I shouldn't start reacting to situations that haven't even been presented yet. My largest concern is that we will downgrade from our current lifestyle because the majority of openings are on the east coast and we all know that life is not cheap there. But, again I am getting ahead of myself.

When we first moved to Illinois, it was a literal leap of faith. Steve still had not received funding and we didn't know anyone out here. We hadn't even seen the apartment we had leased except though a couple of digital pictures. Things didn't turn out the way we had hoped. Steve didn't receive funding and we ended up working for a year to avoid student loans. Steve's adviser at the time was not particularly helpful and it was really frightening to be in a place where we had no support. After we had come to terms with the fact that funding was no where to be found, Steve started to look for a job. Even after applying at Walmart, there was still two weeks where we just sat in our basement apartment in the middle of Illinois wondering what we had gotten ourselves into. Steve eventually got a job working front desk at the Marriott and after filling out disgusting amounts of paperwork to get a work visa, I found work as a nanny. Not the greatest start to our adventures in Illinois, but at least we were able to support ourselves. When I compare our life then to our life now, the difference is night and day. We have a beautiful home, Steven is making decent money, his educational pursuits are going great, he has a fantastic adviser, we have two beautiful children which I have the privilege of staying home with- life is good, but it didn't start out that way. It took a long time to get here, as Steve so graciously pointed out to me last night, and the next chapter in our lives may take some adjusting to too.

Admittedly it was a little sad to see that there's a chance that life will not be as easy as I had hoped after what will end up being 7 years of school. But what really hurts are the comments made from people in my life who don't really understand what we are doing. Yes, it's true that Steve could of gone into a more profitable field, but he would not have been happy and as a result, neither would our family. If he had gone into law or worked in the oil industry back up in Alberta, perhaps we would have a lot more money than we do now. But not everything is about money- our main priority as a family is stability. Yes, we've been in school for a long time, but I find it hard to understand how someone can judge our situation when we have no debt and plenty of savings.

Another thing that has been getting me down lately is that I feel like I'm going through a bit of an identity crisis. I was telling Steve the other day that I don't really know what my strength is as a mom. Some people are great at cooking or crafts and others at clipping coupons. Steve asked me what I tend to do if I have a spare moment and I told him "clean." But my house is not spotless and I am currently writing this with dishes and laundry that need to be done. Clearly I can't claim this as my strength because it's not my number one priority. Just because I notice the need doesn't mean it always gets fulfilled. I'm not sure that I am particularly strong in one area and I suppose I need to learn to be okay with that.

However, this isn't entirely what has been bothering me. Once again, others' opinions have been getting under my skin only this time it has been about things like how I parent or how I spend my money. Obviously I have some work to do with not letting other people's words affect how I feel about my life, but it does. Some people believe that you must save money by any means possible. I too believe in saving money, but my philosophy is more to buy the best my money can afford. If I have to go secondhand to get a better quality product, I will happily do so. If I can't stand generic root beer, I will buy A&W because a few extra dollars to buy something that I enjoy is not going to ruin our finances. I buy the best I can with what I have because that is what works for us. Do I expect that it will work for you? No. Because I want the best that I can afford, does that make me materialistic? To a certain degree I can understand how one can think that, but if I truly was that way wouldn't I have convinced Steve to go a different way in his education? In my life I have found that when I scrimp on quality, like buying cheap Walmart bookcases at a garage sale, they tend to sag and lean and later on I kick myself for not spending the extra $30 for the wood ones I saw at an earlier sale.

I realize that I am just as guilty for judging people. Sometimes I think "why doesn't such and such do this- it would make their lives so much easier/better..." But I'm coming to a realization that there's a lot of room for variability even within living the standards of the church. To assume that I can live someone else's life better than they can is a horrible folly because I am coming from a different background with different life experiences. Maybe if I had lived that person's life from A-Z I would find myself in the same predicament that they are in. So unless I am soliciting for advice, please don't assume that your way is the best way. You are probably only doing more damage than good by thinking that you can tell me how to live my life.

End Tangent.