The Dream

FYI: Not my art - if you know who made this, please tell me!

With the recent disappointment in our employment situations, I've been wondering what to do next. (I'm sure The Hubs is also wondering what he's going to do, but he hasn't confided as such and I know this is an area that he's not up for being prodded.) I love what I do, and this year has honestly had my favorite students ever (in 4.5 solid years of teaching - the 0.5 being a long-term subbing job), but the general state of education and the politics (both in-school and at large) are... off-putting, to say the least. What I'm trying to decide is if it's so off-putting as to make me completely abandon the prospect of continuing in this field. At the moment, it's not, but this changes day-to-day, to be honest.

When I'm driving around, wondering what I want to happen next, this is all I tend to see:

• A decent-sized one-story house with a warm welcoming feel, an open living room/dining room, a nice big kitchen, and lots of windows/natural light in a town or city where are close to loved ones and we like the local culture
• a decent-size backyard for our dog Daisy with healthy grass and several fruit trees; when the fruit is ripe, we'll have a harvest day and all of our friends can come pick their own fruit, and I'll use the fruit to make lemonade and other tasty goodies. We'll have friends over for backyard parties and movie nights, projecting films on a bedsheet when the sun goes down
• a couple of ankle-biters running around being boogers (but they'll be OUR boogers, so it's ok that they're boogers)
• Dropping the kids off, and picking them up from school - and working somewhere part-time in-between
•  Eating a home-cooked dinner at the table, mellow music playing, as a family; Friday movie nights with the kids, cuddling under blankets and on pillows and nibbling on popcorn
• watching our kiddos playing sports or participating in theater/art classes/whatever they're interested in doing
• a craft room for me to play in, and a "man cave" for The Hubs (we'll figure it out, but we both want our own rooms somehow, hahaha)

As you can see, what I dream about isn't my career. I dream about building a life. It's weird, for the last few years with the ups and downs of my career, most of my fantasies were about being a great teacher. I feel like I finally achieved real progress towards being a great teacher this year (and was shown appreciation with a pink slip *sigh*), and I would like to continue working in the education field, but at this point in the game I'm much more concerned with moving towards the other goals I want in life - that we want in life. If I can't have the career and the home life, then I'm choosing the home life.

Now the next step is figuring out how to make that dream a reality; work still plays a part in that, obviously, we just need to figure out how to make this dream a reality. We're working on the "boogers" part, but that takes time and my body not being a jerk. The house is the next part, we just need to get my job to be more steady *sigh* and then figure out where. We're hoping next year... we hoped for THIS year, but once the pink slip was announced we knew it wasn't the best idea; knowing that the next teaching job might result in another pink slip as well is one of the factors that make looking for other work so appealing. Which is a hard fact to consider and accept when I love this job so much, but it's hindering my progress toward what else I want in life.

BUT... my life is not my job, my "job" is to live my life.Or, as Oscar Wilde put it, "I don’t want to earn my living; I want to live."