As I look to the future I look back and think of moments of clarity and difficulty. One big moment of clarity that I can remember is when I felt in my soul that God told me to start a not profit working with pregnant outcast and even runaway teen girls. That clarity came to me a few months before college graduation. I was engaged and knew my then fiancé was going into politics is some manor and didn’t know how the two would work together. Honestly I still have only ideas of how I want to carry out this calling. At the end of college I thought that I would and planned to get a masters in pastoral counseling figuring that would help me the most as my calling would lead me to create and open a non profit and my role would be dual as director and a counselor to bring families back together.
But as graduation came and went myself and fiancé ( now husband of 7 years) got married and moved out to Oregon. Where I attempted my hand at running my own business with a great company thirty-one gifts while looking for something full time. At that time my husband had a great job for having just graduated college. Me on the other hand had a few interviews but no luck finding a job the whole time we were out there and never really got my business off the ground because it was proving to be extremely difficult to find interested ladies to host parties for a company they were not familiar with. After a year out in Oregon we moved back.
Through all this I had no drivers license and at the point when we moved back I found a few jobs that didn’t last very long. When we moved back it was for my husbands job he started his own consulting business and did political consulting for campaigns. Once I finally found a job that lasted more than a few months I once again started thinking about masters programs and began to focus in on the idea of marriage and family therapy because I was working in residential psychiatric facility and saw three types of families 1) the totally involved and supportive, 2) the mildly involved but supportive and 3) the uninvolved. So I began to see how I could use marriage and family therapy in my non profit and also outside the non profit. Around the two year mark at that job aside from feeling burnt out we had moved closer to family and further from the job. Prior to moving we had a child and decided that being closer to family was important.
After being settled for a while in the new rental we found I started applying to new jobs. I had two different interviews with the same company that I work at now the first was for a case manager/ house manager position but someone else got that job offer and the second was for residential coordinator/ direct support which I was offered at the end of the interview. Following the acceptance of that job I put in my notice had the previous job. Than we had some difficulty after I started I was there for a year we were home when a tornado hit and it knocked us out of the rental. Shortly before the tornado hit we had found out we were expecting and than because of stress we lost the baby. In a short few months we lost a house and a baby. A few months after having a procedure to remove the deceased baby we found out we were expecting again. Shortly after that we found another place to rent and I once again began to think about masters programs. This time thinking about an msw believing that would be a better avenue because I would be in just a narrow field of focus.
Jumping ahead to about a year ago the case manager and administer for my house that I work at both moved on. The two positions at that point were separate ( prior to the departures) then someone was hire to fill the combined vacancy. After a few months of that it was decided that the positions were to be split up at which point I applied and was once again not chosen. For a short time we had a new case manager but she found a better fit elsewhere within the company. Then the job was filled again this time I did not apply. Once again we have a new case manager but we also as a company said fair well to the executive director and hello to new director.
Now I am thinking about a masters in aba because I look at my experiences and see that I have worked in some capacity with populations of people that have behaviors of some sort. I also recognize that it could be beneficial in the non profit down the line.
