A sigh of relief and a little celebration

This summer, while I was struggling with being a stay at home mom, I wrote about the frustration of having a boyfriend-then-husband who has had several different careers. As we approach our fifth wedding anniversary (and 7.5 years of being together), he has had exactly three different careers. Recently my article, entitled I Think I’ve Had Three Husbands: Navigating Spousal Career Change, was featured over on Offbeat Home. And while I was in a really raw place at the time I wrote it, I look back and see how in just a few months everything can just feel so different.

I’m writing this before the next busy season, so I can remind myself of the little partnering sweet spot we’re in. Because, with the Mariner job over, football officiating over, we are currently parenting together many more nights a week. And today we got the great news that Boof passed the fourth, and final, part of the CPA exam. I couldn’t be more proud. While it wasn’t necessary to keep his job, for me it feels like he’s passed another really major hurdle. First he got into the program, after a traumatic exit from the world of teaching, and went to his old fallback plan of the world of business or accounting. He was accepted to a ten week certificate program with a great reputation and spent the summer going to classes. Our son was six months old. I was crisis counseling. And then, miraculously, after courting a bunch of big accounting firms that all fell through, he landed a great busy season internship that panned out to his job now. But there’s something so victorious about passing all of his exams on the first try. It feels like I can breathe a sigh of relief, that this career is going to last, for awhile at least, and we can get into a yearly rhythm rather than just a daily survival dog-paddle. 

So tonight I took Boof out to happy hour to celebrate. We toted Potamus along, to our favorite local brewery, and had a beer and some yummy food to celebrate his success. It doesn’t mean everything will be smooth sailing from now on, but it feels like we are in a really good place and I’m breathing a smallish sigh of relief. 

A Little Celebration!

Boof bought me flowers, to say Thank You for getting through the busy season with him. I said that he was the one who did all the work (who knew accounting could be so HARD with a kid), but he said that I did the work, being home late every night with Potamus and trying to juggle everything without him. Flowers to celebrate that the busy season is over and real-life can resume.

But I look at those flowers as a celebration, because, as of Monday, Boof is now employed as a full-time tax accountant! He proved himself a worthy seasonal accountant, so they’re keeping him on full-time! YAY! This means we can stop borrowing money from our in-laws, and can afford to take a breathe without the haunting past coming for us! It’s been a long year, but I am so thankful that we have gotten through it, together, and have proved to be stronger, closer, and a little bit  more thankful!

Now What? Moving on After Rejection.

I’m trying to remind myself that we are all made of sparkle dust, souls merely existing earth-bound for a period of time, and that, in cliche terms, this too shall pass, but hot damn I haven’t cried so much in months.

Yesterday Boof found out that the job he wanted, the firm we felt SO good about, the one he had built relationships with people who seemed to really get him and be excited to offer him a job…isn’t going to happen. The official rejection letter came on Saturday. We were crushed. Not just crushed because, at this moment, he has no other options lined up, and that firms are so far into their interviewing/hiring process that he has virtually no shot, but because we had felt so good about it. So good. That gut feeling that I always get when something is going to work out…yeah…that meter is clearly off now.

Square one.

In the practical reality of things, nothing has changed, save the hope that things would be different come the first of the year. Boof is still studying for his CPA exams, watching Potamus in conjunction with his own mom, and we are still scrimping and relying on our in-laws to float us indefinitely. I am still the not-quite-enough-breadwinner, the one who gets up in the dark and leaves my sleeping boys to trudge through rainy traffic to the ‘office.’

Nothing has really changed.
And we aren’t even at risk for feet of flooding like my East Coast friends.

Sparkle on.