My life has recently taken some twists and turns that I had not anticipated. I feel compelled to write about it and figured this was as good a place as any. I have fairly ignored this space since last winter. I have been consumed with finishing school, getting the baseball season up and running, and generally avoiding anything else that required any thought or effort. Some already know this about us, but my husband and I have managed to fill up every square inch of our life. Five years ago I was homeschooling Robert and working part time from the house. When Marina was born I decided that I would take that opportunity to go back to school. You may be thinking, how would a new baby provide an "opportunity to go back to school?" I don't know. It made some sort of perverse sense to me at the time. I would obviously be lounging around and should use that extra time to go to school. I knew I would not be working full time because of the new baby. And my dad's motto is, "If you're going to be poor, you might as well be a student." Well, it turned out that there were no student loans available for my school of choice, Nashville School of Law. Therefore, as I was paying off a land note of $400 per month, I picked up a school note of $400 per month. Around the same time as this, my husband took over as President of the local youth baseball league. We played ball at a run down municipal park which needed some serious renovations. The organization itself needed some renovations. We threw ourselves into this endeavor whole heartedly. For just over three years we worked at the park non-stop. We attended city council meetings, wrote articles to the paper, applied for grants, begged for money and volunteers, etc. All the while, we never once turned away a child due to an inability to pay. We took a struggling organization and grew its numbers by 30%. We took a run down park and fixed all of the major issues. I say all of this not to pat ourselves on the back. We took this as our mission, our ministry. God gave me the ability to speak and to write well. God gave my husband the ability to read people and discover hidden agendas and the ability to conceive and implement construction plans. Combine those two God given talents and you have an effective administration of a park and baseball league. Then somewhere along the way, I recognized that law school alone wouldn't be enough to make me able to operate in the legal world. Learning the law from a book and applying the law in a real life situation are two completely different things. So I started working part time for an attorney. We put Robert in public school and Marina had a grandma circuit that she kept. This has been our life for the past 3-4 years. Law school 2-3 nights per week and on Saturday. Baseball meetings all year round. Baseball games AND meetings during the season. City council meetings. Mid terms, finals, papers due. Church on Sunday. Always, always, always some place to be, something that needs to be done, someone needing something every time you look up. I felt like I had handed off the raising of my children, one to public school and one to grandparents. I believe that the grandparents have done a fine job and I am very happy that I have them, but that didn't calm the sense of unrest that began to fill me regarding this and every other aspect of my life. My husband opened a legitimate business in this period as well. He and two partners had over $500,000 worth of contracts in the works when things started to fall apart. One of the partners had secured the financing and Rob and his friend brought the knowledge and contacts in the construction field to the table. It seemed like things were finally going to come together for Rob and his friend who had worked so hard. Then we began to see signs that the financier was stealing money from the company, but had no hard proof. There were secret meetings between the money man and employees in the company. In the end, it turned out that they intended to force out Rob and his friend and keep the company for themselves, including the contracts that Rob had personally secured through his friends in the industry. Rob and his friend took what was truly an insufficient buyout just to get away from the business before the contracts soured due to the stealing. So this put Rob back to working for a GC. Then in August, he got laid off from that. And since then, he has barely worked. Only tid bits here and there. He has been out on the street looking for work for several months. Nothing. Several companies have told him as soon as they find something, they will call. Unfortunately, you can't take a promise of a call to the electric company. Oh, then just before Christmas, we found out I was pregnant. This was an unexpected event. When we did the math on it, we realized that this third child would be born just 5 days before the Bar Exam, the biggest test of my life. I fully intended to press on and take the test. Finances more than anything prevented that. To take the Bar Exam, first you have to apply ($500 plus the cost to pull your DMV record and credit report). Then you have to take a Bar Prep course. Current bar exam materials are about $4,000. Last year's slightly outdated materials run about $1,500. I just didn't have the money. And I could feel the steam running out of me. I didn't have the energy to track down the money (beg family), track down the information for the application, go through the review, keep my job, run the baseball league, and have a baby all in the span of about 90 days. So we decided that I would put the Bar Exam off until February. That adds an additional 6 months to my time as a non-attorney, but what can you do? I forgot to mention that back in June of 2008, members of the baseball league took half truths and innuendo and put it through the gossip mill and attempted to say that my husband and I took over $12,000 from the league. This was, of course, seen for what it was, but only after much hardship on me and my husband. The people that said these things about me were people that I thought were my friends. My child had spent the night at their house. Then these same people attempted to hijack a board vote allowing my husband to coach. He has been a coach in that league for 6 years and has a devoted following. That is the whole reason we became involved, to teach the children that there is something more to life than the poverty and drama that so many of them experience every day. Throughout the year, we dealt with repeated snickety comments from these two or three people. Absolutely no respect was shown for what we were doing at the park, only derision for what we weren't getting done. I started to feel sort of strange about two months ago. I felt like the Artic Ocean. I was so tense and overwhelmed. But I have been trained by my dad to put all of that drama aside and just get the work done, no matter what. He would sleep overnight in his car at the factory if he thought there would be bad weather that night which would prevent him from making it back the next day. This was the legacy that I needed to live up to, get the job done no matter the cost. If you committed to it, get it done. So back to my Artic Ocean analogy. I felt like icebergs were beginning to break off. Something was coming loose. I knew my life was not on track, it was out of balance. I was not living the life that God intended. I had been giving away far more than I sought for my own family. We were out of money. No phone service, truck about to be repossed, student loan in default, judgments threatened, etc. So far we had managed to keep the lights on and food in the cabinets, but just barely. I knew the end was near when I recieved a snickety e-mail from a baseball board member about concession scheduling. Bear in mind that this was an e-mail sent to everyone (board members and coaches) pointing out my shortcomings. I offered a solution, but that wasn't enough. I blasted her in an open e-mail. That stopped the BS for a brief time. Suddenly she was my best friend. Ah. I see. We had applied for a grant which expired on April 30. On the afternoon of April 29 as we finished the paperwork on that, best friend. On May 1 after paperwork turned in and money on the way back to the league, snickety e-mail about rainouts. (If you're waiting for the punch line - it's coming very soon I promise) So, a board member sent us an e-mail saying that he was having a real problem with a particular coach and didn't know what to do. One of the primary roles of my husband as President is to make sure everyone follows the rules. He visited one of this coach's games to observe. After the game, he asked the coach to talk to him for a minute before he left. Rob's intent was to tell him that he needed to get himself, his parents, and his players under control. There was unsportsmanlike conduct in all of those areas. Well, the coach went ballistic and yelled at Rob and the umpire in front of everyone. A board meeting resulted to discuss this coach's future with the league. At the board meeting, those people who started trouble for us almost a year earlier showed up and proceeded to tell me that I was lying about what I saw and heard at the game where the coach acted so poorly. I stood there in the middle of the pavilion at the baseball field. I saw this man looking at me, shaking his head at me as he called me a liar. I saw the other board members looking at him and sitting there saying nothing in my defense. A little piece of me broke off. It's like those cholesterol commercials where the little platelets are flowing through your arteries. A little tiny piece of me broke loose. The only problem was that once one broke free, another one followed. Then another and another, until there was a flood of me pouring out onto the floor of the park pavilion. There was nothing left in me. I don't really know exactly what I said after that. I do know that it involved some words that I would never say in church and involved slamming my notebook down in front of my primary nemesis and yelling, "I quit" in her face. I am glad that she didn't say anything back or attempt to stand up. I don't know where that would have led. I know this may all seem trivial to you. But this was so out of character for me. I have smiled through it all for the last year. I have tried to work even harder to show these naysayers that I was only there for the league, not my own glory. I have tried ignoring it. I have tried asking their opinion. You name it, I've tried it to no avail. So now here I sit. I feel like I am empty. This isn't just baseball. I think in the last few years I have given away so much of myself to school, work, and community that I am just empty and cracked. Now this summer I am going to try very hard to put myself back together, to reconstruct the life I either once had or that I should have had. Of course, I don't really know what that looks like since the face of my family has changed while I have been on this path. All I know is that I have learned some important lessons about balance, time management, and making your home a priority. Hopefully I will not grow forgetful and can keep my focus from this point forward. Thanks for sticking with me while I got this out of my system.
