For this blog post today, I thought I would focus a bit more on me just so you can get to know me and how I wound up here a little bit more. I’ve always been a planner. Planning the future plagued me for much of my tween and teen years. I wanted a goal and a set path with 1-2-3-4 steps to get there. I’m not what you would consider spontaneous, that’s for sure. I have my moments but most of the time I’m freaking out if I don’t know the exact itinerary of a travel plan or know exactly when company is coming to visit. I like to be prepared, what can I say! So, unlike many teens, I was thinking about what I wanted my twenties to look like, what I wanted to do for work, the kind of person I wanted to marry, when was I going to have kids, where did I want to live, all these questions plagued me in the kind of way that would keep me up at night stressing about these important life questions.
Particularly marriage kept me up at night, I wanted so badly to be married but at the same time, society has obliterated a generation of men. It’s a bad sign in society if it’s easier to find a man that wants to have a one-night stand than it is to find a man that values women and marriage and wants to find someone to protect and provide for. And that was the type of man I was looking for, so you can understand that I felt a little bit hopeless sometimes. Men like that are a rare gem nowadays so the odds weren’t in my favor. So, I invested my hope in God in prayer that I would find someone and focused on every other area of life I could control that would help set me up for the life I eventually wanted, to be married, have the freedom to be a stay-at-home mom and focus on my family and my homestead.
Sacrificing endless choice
The main thing I pondered that I don’t think enough people ponder fully and completely and think about how it will factor into having a family, is your job and/or your career. I knew right off the bat that certain careers are easier to fit in with family life and having children than others. And I wrote off anything that was not going to have flexible hours, the ability to jump in and out of the workforce fairly easily, and was something I could do part-time instead of full-time, and also something I could do that would not require massive amounts of school debt. It made zero sense to me to invest tens of thousands of dollars in schooling for something I probably wouldn’t be focusing on and doing for a long time while I raised children. Why put myself into debt and saddle my eventual husband with supporting that debt since what I wanted was to stay home mainly anyway for at least a decade? Those requirements write off a lot of careers, but I was okay with that. I wasn’t going to hang my dreams on something that I could eventually cause me regret. My focus in everything was to make it as easy as possible to be a stay-at-home mom and to be there when I needed to for my future children. So, sacrificing the endless choices of careers was fine with me.
No regrets
I tentatively researched and pondered for many years what I would want to do, finally in the last few months of my senior year of high school I settled tentatively on massage therapy. After I graduated I threw myself full flung into another month of researching the massage therapy industry, looking at job advertisements, researching experiences of massage therapists, looking into how much the average job paid, whether it was easy to do it part-time, or jump in and out of the workforce or do it on the side, how expensive and how long schooling was, and box after box I ticked, ultimately deciding to start school for my license at the end of July of 2018. I absolutely fell in love with it, and I felt so secure in the fact that I would be able to just work part-time, focusing on dating for a while to hopefully find a husband, and ultimately do it just on the side privately for a few clients or not at all if I needed too when I would hopefully start a family with my future husband.
My plan worked perfectly, and thus I have the freedom to write this while my daughter naps and do just a couple of massages every once in a while, for a little extra money, with no school debt, and a fun little job to jump back into part-time once the kids are older or out of the nest if I so choose
Examining your future
It is quite sad to me that women nowadays are not encouraged to think about factoring marriage and family alongside their career choice while they’re in high school. It is something that in my opinion is essential to think about, and even more essential to examine if you dream about being a stay-at-home mom for your kids. Certain careers are just not good choices if that’s the type of life you want to set up. The late and long shifts of a surgeon are not going to lend themselves to focusing on a family the way being a freelance photographer will. And we are doing a huge disservice to the young ladies in our lives by not having conversations about that. Because if being a stay-at-home mom is your goal and your dream, and even if it isn’t, and it’s just an opportunity you would like to be open to you if you so choose, why would you make career choices that will ultimately make that dream even harder to achieve? I’m nowhere near stating that women should not choose the career of their choice if that’s what they decide. If family life is not for you, if you’ve dreamed about being a lawyer or a psychologist your whole life, pursue that. But if having a family and focusing on it is something you want to do, you need to at least think about how your job will fit into all of that as well. Wing it if you want to, but many a working mom will tell you that it is not easy. So, a little forethought could potentially save you and your future family many countless years of stress and heartache.
Think about your future, think about the life you want to have in 15 years, not just the next 5. Don’t make the choice of work versus family harder than you need to, because a lot changes when you bring that first little bundle of joy home, and you may find yourself at work 6 months after that wishing that you had made different choices and prioritized different things 10 years ago. You can’t plan for everything in the future, but family is such an important part of life, it is worth examining what you want that part of your life to look like. Remember that you are ultimately completely replaceable in whatever job you choose to do, but you are irreplaceable to your future family.
You definitely have a planned life. 🤗