Testing 1… 2… 3…  test… 1… 2… 3… 

Is this still on? 

It feels like it has been forever. When you think about it, I haven’t talked to you all since well… last year! Really it’s been only 3 months. 

But when I look back at these past 3 months, I think about all that has happened: we pulled our kindergartner from school, we have closed my father’s estate, and I have changed jobs. 

While it may not seem like three major events like this happening in the span of 3 months is a lot, when you think about how weighing they are on me, you will understand just how freeing these three changes are for me. 

Joseph, our kindergartner, started the school year off with high hopes. We knew that he would be a challenge but we didn’t quite understand how much of a challenge he would be. It all started with one out-of-school suspension because he was not being safe with his friends and hurting them and it quickly snowballed into happening almost every day. There were times that he wouldn’t even make it in the classroom before we would get a call from the principal. 

We worked with the school over the course of the semester trying to figure something out that would encourage him to stay in his classroom but nothing worked. We ended up pulling him when he started to try and hurt fellow teachers. Teachers have to deal with enough, they shouldn’t have to deal with a child who is acting the way that ours was. At the time, I was temporarily working from home so we could continue his schooling from home in the hopes that he would be prepared to go back to the classroom for 1st grade. 

While this is all happening, we are approaching 1 year after the passing of my father. This also means that we are working hard to get his estate closed so that there is less tax work later on. Personally, I had been waiting for this milestone. It was one I felt would be the point that I would start to move on. Trying to grasp what happened and why people would act the way they did in the days following his death all weighed very heavily on me. 

Once we got his estate closed shortly after Christmas, it was like that weight was lifted from my shoulders. I didn’t have to worry about any more bills to pay, paperwork. or phone calls to make. Yes, we still had some of his “stuff” to go through but it was all stuff that we intended to keep to help decorate and “memorialize” him once our basement remodel was complete. 

Oh, yes that was another thing, we redid our basement (my man cave/bar/guest room/and now office). When my father would visit us, he would stay in our basement. He was the one who would visit the most out of all our friends and family. So when I say “memorialize,” I don’t mean putting a picture of him on a stand with a candle next to it. I mean displaying so much of the sports memorabilia that he collected throughout the years. I’m looking around at it now and telling myself again that he would walk down here and say, “Now this is cool!” That’s what I mean by memorializing him in decorating our basement. 

The day that we finished our basement, I got a phone call that changed my family’s life. I accepted a work-from-home position as a video producer. It has been a long time coming to be frank… but please don’t call me Frank. Not that I hated my previous position or the people I worked with. But this was a change that I needed to do so that I could reset myself. When I think about everything that has happened over the last couple of years, I really needed this. I suffered from depression and lost my dad in the span of two years. That coupled with not having much job satisfaction was exactly what I needed to move on to something new. 

I’ve only been in the new gig for a week, and I reserve the right to change my mind (I can hear my wife rolling her eyes because I’ve said this almost at nauseam this past week) but I feel like I’m at home. The people I work with are great, the working environment is not only so welcoming but they look at the whole person and really care about the person’s life outside of the job. This gives me the opportunity to be able to sit down with Joseph, do his schoolwork, give him the skills to be successful in school, and take him to his daily IEP services at the local elementary school. 

We are big on saying, “everything happens for a reason.” All of those job rejections that I had received over the last several months were leading up to this. This one single moment of accepting a new job that gave me the smile that I needed to change my outlook on life.

I say all of this not as a way to catch you all up on what has been going on in my life, but as encouragement. Encouragement to keep pushing through whatever hard times you are going through. Keep waking up every day trying to be the best parent that you can be, keep applying for jobs and thinking that with every rejection you are getting one step closer to accepting the job that you are meant to have. Never give up on living a life that will give you happiness and satisfaction.