A Month of Thanksgiving - Day 4 (Wednesday)
Today I am grateful for freedoms to choose my reaction to my circumstances and not surrender to them. And for education - in all forms.
A new marriage and family support system
I met and dated my husband Gary at the end of 1995 and we got married in 1996. He took on my three children from the previous marriage and I was no longer struggling to survive as a single mom anymore. He was in college himself, and finances were very tight for a few more years but things slowly started to improve for us. We started to become more financially stable and we got more organized and structured at home. Things were finally no longer a constant crisis mode for us.
New Career moves and step-by-step quality of life improves
After several temp-assignments I worked on one at Boeing that lead to a full-time position and I had tremendous opportunities to learn new skills while I was there. Over nearly three years I learned new software skills, took on more responsibilities and even after a layoff from Boeing, these led to better jobs and bigger career moves into the Software development and IT industry. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was going somewhere in a real career. Things were looking up. I was getting more involved at church, taking on more leadership and teaching roles - and additional responsibilities at work too. Life was very full and hectic, and difficult sometimes. I reached out to others at church for support, and had mentors in my career that helped shape my personal growth, and I looked for support with the kids from my community groups.
My husband was working in his career by then as a computer technician, and we were starting to get more stable financially. Thanks to his excellent money management and planning, in 2001 we were ready to buy a home of our own. The kids were in junior high and grade school by then, and were no longer needing full-time childcare, which freed up a good sized chunk of funds to put towards a mortgage. I struggled to maintain my own mental health too as I was stressed out and burned out from my demanding job! I got involved in support groups for special needs children - which was a huge help and became part of my church leadership groups as I wanted to give something back to my community.
More education - community college
I was in my early thirties when I went back to college to start working on a degree. My children were not so young anymore, but still pretty demanding and my work-life balance was getting a little out of hand. After about a year into it I dropped the program for the time being, until my kids were a little older. I still took on individual training classes to learn new skills as I needed them for my job. I was promoted to management and began taking on a lot more responsibility at work. A lot of my training came from self-directed tutorials and mentoring I found from my peers or managers, and some from church. I read a lot of personal growth and leadership development books and learned a lot from my "automobile university" -books on tape or CD while I was commuting. I did not return to college until my children were grown and had moved out on their own, but have always been a proponent of self-directed learning. You find the resources you need. They are everywhere. I read books like "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" and "21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership", and so on. They taught me many skills that have helped me succeed in life and my career.
(to be continued)
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