Every time I write a post like my last one, where I make vague references to our future plans, I start getting emails from friends who are (understandably) confused. "Are you settling down?" "Has Brandon taken a permanent job?" "Where are you moving?" "Do you guys have definite plans yet?"
I'm sorry for the confusion-- I'm really not trying to confuse people or contradict what we've already told you! It's just that we have a game plan in our minds, but time lines keep changing. For one thing, the adoption comes first. . . and as those timelines keep getting pushed back, so do all the others. Second, we're "holding out" for something that we don't really have any control over.
Here's the scoop:
Brandon has a potential future job lined up. This is THE job, the one he really wants. The problem is that they definitely want him, but the position isn't available yet. We're hoping that it comes open this fall/winter, but realistically, it's not going to open until 2012. There's even a chance it won't open at all. That's really all I'm able to say about it.
Our tentative plan, for the time being, is to keep taking travel assignments that are close to home so that we can be here and prepare for our kids. We definitely don't want to travel for real while adjusting to parenting and helping our kids adjust to life with us. But as of right now, we aren't interested in taking permanent jobs in our hometown. That's what I mean by being glad we aren't settling here, even though we are "settled" here for the time being. We just don't want to tie ourselves down here, knowing that Brandon has the opportunity to move into his dream job in the next year-year and a half. Sure, it would be easier to take jobs here in town so that Brandon doesn't have to drive back and forth from the nearby cities. But there are psychological and practical benefits to continuing to "travel" even if we're actually home. For one thing, it saves me from having to redo all the employment/financial information on our adoption paperwork. ;) For another, it keeps us flexible, which is great when considering that we're going to need two good chunks of time off of work to travel to Africa. It's the best of both worlds-- all the flexibility and benefits of traveling, with the stability of home and community.
So, yes, we're settled here at home, but no, we're not settled here. And yes, we're still traveling, but no, we're not actually traveling. And yes, Brandon has a future job lined up, but no, it's not really lined up. Until he has an official contract in hand, we can only consider it a probability.
Make sense? Haha. Now you understand why I seem to contradict myself!
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Can you go home again?
The first month of Brandon's St. Louis assignment has already come and gone, and it's been very interesting. In some ways, we are reliving our first St. Louis experience. With the exception of a few days, I have lived at home and Brandon has traveled back and forth. Actually, that's stretching things a bit. He's only had the opportunity to come home once. The hospital has been very cooperative with block scheduling, but the weather has not been cooperative with snow-- I'm talking the kind of massive snow/ice storms that have shut down the interstates separating us. By the time everything opened up, Brandon had to return to work. The one time the weather was beautiful, Brandon's car had to be put in the shop-- probably from driving over 11 inches of unplowed snow to get to the hospital. Such is life.
So the end result is that I've been living at home, by myself. It's a very strange thing.
We started traveling in the spring of 2008. At that time, our plan was to travel for two years, then return here to our hometown for a few years. We knew we didn't want to live here forever, but we had no idea where we wanted to go. For some reason, we didn't feel like we had deep roots here, despite both having grown up here. We hoped that through travel nursing, we would find that place that felt like "home."
And we did. We discovered that for us, "home" isn't so much a place, but a feeling. It's curling up on the couch together to watch StormChasers and share a pizza. It's a great hiking trail, where we can spend a few hours connecting with each other. It's having our morning coffee together, in our favorite mugs. It's talking late into the night. It's corny, cheesy, and flies in the face of my independent nature; but the truth is, my "home" is Brandon.
So without Brandon, "home" does not feel like home. At all.
More than anything, it's a reminder of why we left in the first place.
Our lives looked so different when we lived here. We were both working full time, different shifts. I left for work before Brandon even woke. He would usually stop by to see me for 2 or 3 minutes on his way to work, but that was all we had time for. I was usually in bed asleep before he got home. I tried sleeping in half shifts so that I could have evenings with him-- e.g., sleeping from 8-midnight, waking to spend a couple of hours with him, then sleeping from 3-6. That didn't work very well. Weekends were great except that we were still on different sleeping/eating schedules, and Brandon had to work every other weekend, so time was still limited. I think that's one of the reasons we didn't put down "roots" here-- our time together was so limited and precious that we didn't want to get involved in any other obligations.
We were also falling into the patterns that surrounded us. I'm not talking about negative patterns-- just the normal patterns of life. Things like how long you should wait to have children after marriage, what kind of jobs you should work, what kind of house you should have, how you should spend your money, how you should spend your free time, the impact extended family should have on your own family, privacy (or the lack thereof), what church should look like, etc. But it didn't feel right. We both had this feeling we couldn't shake that maybe what was right for our friends and family wasn't right for us. . . that there was some unknown and completely unfamiliar adventure waiting for us just over the horizon, but that as long as we played it safe and stuck to what we knew and saw around us, we would miss out on something truly remarkable.
That's why I've said so many times that travel nursing was the best decision we've ever made. It forced us to figure out who we were, both individually and as a couple. It forced us to evaluate ourselves outside of the constructs in which we had grown. It forced us to learn to play by our own rules. It forced us to grow up.
One week, we were working familiar, safe jobs in a familiar, safe town. Both his and my parents were living less than a mile from us. We knew the town like the back of our hands. Anytime something went wrong, there was someone we could call to help us. It sounds awesome-- and in some ways, it was-- but we never grew.
Then we packed up and hit the road, and all the sudden, we were living somewhere radically different than what we had known. We didn't know a soul. There was nobody we could call for help. For the first time, we were really, truly on our own. It was harder than we could ever have predicted. If you've been following us for long, you know that we wanted to quit after the first assignment. But we stuck it out, and it was so worth it.
It's been well over two years now (we will hit the 3 year anniversary very soon!), and I'm definitely looking forward to saying goodbye to travel nursing and starting the next phase of our lives. Brandon is very excited about his new/future job, and I'm excited about starting our family and "settling down". But I'm really happy that we aren't coming back to our hometown to settle. I know that's hard for a lot of our friends and family to understand. Often, they take it personally, thinking that we don't care about them. That's not the case at all! We just don't want to fall back into the patterns that didn't work for us. We don't want safe and familiar. I love that what we're doing next is going to be a challenge-- even more challenging than travel nursing was. I love that it's another adventure, that it's a little bit (okay, a lot) scary, and that it's going to force us to keep growing. I love that it's going to force me to get even more out of my comfort zone.
So perhaps the best thing about this assignment is that it's given me some closure. You really can't go home again. It was an awkward fit before, and it doesn't work at all now. We are different people than we were when we first hit the road 3 years ago. In some ways, that makes me sad. This is a great town, and most of the people dearest to our hearts live here. It's one thing to leave for 3 months at a time and still maintain our permanent home and level of connection here. It will be another thing completely to actually sell our house and let go of that physical connection. I won't lie, the thought really does make me sad. It will be strange to move on and know that life is still going on here, that I'm missing out on watching the children in the family grow up and missing the day to day lives of our friends. But I'm excited about the future, and convinced that we're doing exactly what we should be doing.
I'm ready for the next chapter. Just a few more months. . .
So the end result is that I've been living at home, by myself. It's a very strange thing.
We started traveling in the spring of 2008. At that time, our plan was to travel for two years, then return here to our hometown for a few years. We knew we didn't want to live here forever, but we had no idea where we wanted to go. For some reason, we didn't feel like we had deep roots here, despite both having grown up here. We hoped that through travel nursing, we would find that place that felt like "home."
And we did. We discovered that for us, "home" isn't so much a place, but a feeling. It's curling up on the couch together to watch StormChasers and share a pizza. It's a great hiking trail, where we can spend a few hours connecting with each other. It's having our morning coffee together, in our favorite mugs. It's talking late into the night. It's corny, cheesy, and flies in the face of my independent nature; but the truth is, my "home" is Brandon.
So without Brandon, "home" does not feel like home. At all.
More than anything, it's a reminder of why we left in the first place.
Our lives looked so different when we lived here. We were both working full time, different shifts. I left for work before Brandon even woke. He would usually stop by to see me for 2 or 3 minutes on his way to work, but that was all we had time for. I was usually in bed asleep before he got home. I tried sleeping in half shifts so that I could have evenings with him-- e.g., sleeping from 8-midnight, waking to spend a couple of hours with him, then sleeping from 3-6. That didn't work very well. Weekends were great except that we were still on different sleeping/eating schedules, and Brandon had to work every other weekend, so time was still limited. I think that's one of the reasons we didn't put down "roots" here-- our time together was so limited and precious that we didn't want to get involved in any other obligations.
We were also falling into the patterns that surrounded us. I'm not talking about negative patterns-- just the normal patterns of life. Things like how long you should wait to have children after marriage, what kind of jobs you should work, what kind of house you should have, how you should spend your money, how you should spend your free time, the impact extended family should have on your own family, privacy (or the lack thereof), what church should look like, etc. But it didn't feel right. We both had this feeling we couldn't shake that maybe what was right for our friends and family wasn't right for us. . . that there was some unknown and completely unfamiliar adventure waiting for us just over the horizon, but that as long as we played it safe and stuck to what we knew and saw around us, we would miss out on something truly remarkable.
That's why I've said so many times that travel nursing was the best decision we've ever made. It forced us to figure out who we were, both individually and as a couple. It forced us to evaluate ourselves outside of the constructs in which we had grown. It forced us to learn to play by our own rules. It forced us to grow up.
One week, we were working familiar, safe jobs in a familiar, safe town. Both his and my parents were living less than a mile from us. We knew the town like the back of our hands. Anytime something went wrong, there was someone we could call to help us. It sounds awesome-- and in some ways, it was-- but we never grew.
Then we packed up and hit the road, and all the sudden, we were living somewhere radically different than what we had known. We didn't know a soul. There was nobody we could call for help. For the first time, we were really, truly on our own. It was harder than we could ever have predicted. If you've been following us for long, you know that we wanted to quit after the first assignment. But we stuck it out, and it was so worth it.
It's been well over two years now (we will hit the 3 year anniversary very soon!), and I'm definitely looking forward to saying goodbye to travel nursing and starting the next phase of our lives. Brandon is very excited about his new/future job, and I'm excited about starting our family and "settling down". But I'm really happy that we aren't coming back to our hometown to settle. I know that's hard for a lot of our friends and family to understand. Often, they take it personally, thinking that we don't care about them. That's not the case at all! We just don't want to fall back into the patterns that didn't work for us. We don't want safe and familiar. I love that what we're doing next is going to be a challenge-- even more challenging than travel nursing was. I love that it's another adventure, that it's a little bit (okay, a lot) scary, and that it's going to force us to keep growing. I love that it's going to force me to get even more out of my comfort zone.
So perhaps the best thing about this assignment is that it's given me some closure. You really can't go home again. It was an awkward fit before, and it doesn't work at all now. We are different people than we were when we first hit the road 3 years ago. In some ways, that makes me sad. This is a great town, and most of the people dearest to our hearts live here. It's one thing to leave for 3 months at a time and still maintain our permanent home and level of connection here. It will be another thing completely to actually sell our house and let go of that physical connection. I won't lie, the thought really does make me sad. It will be strange to move on and know that life is still going on here, that I'm missing out on watching the children in the family grow up and missing the day to day lives of our friends. But I'm excited about the future, and convinced that we're doing exactly what we should be doing.
I'm ready for the next chapter. Just a few more months. . .
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