I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about turning 30 and reflecting on my twenties. I don't know how much time I have to do this, so I need to give up my usual perfectionist proclivity when it comes to blogging. Today, our Sonja turns 9 months old and tonight, we celebrate my birthday (yesterday) by going to Pacific Grill in downtown Tacoma with friends.
I remember turning 20 on February 23, 2002 and I thought I was old- or I felt old rather. I had been a child or a teenager my whole life and now I actually felt like an adult. (I don't remember the same feeling when I turned 18 or 21, other notable ages.) I was in the middle of working on a fine arts degree at PLU and my career path remained very uncertain in life. I majored in what I was drawn to and what I was good at and what I'd been doing my whole life: art. My choice of major received much admiration and criticism from those around me in my life. People admired it because, well, it is art after all and I was proficient at drawing/painting portraits. I found that expressing oneself through the visual arts was not something that many related to because it seemed as though many just needed more rules and guidelines than art supplied. Now that I look back on it, majoring in art was very difficult because of this. I pretty much majored in creativity and reinventing the wheel; I don't know if I could do that again. Once I began my biology/chemistry prerequisites for nursing, I remember feeling relieved that the directions for how to do the lab were already in the lab notebook. Art will present you with an example of the desired product and then ask you to make your very own original creation, which is no easy task. I always hoped to utilize my art major in some career field, whether it be in arts administration, education, or museum curatorship. It was when I was 20 that I first felt a nudging to join the Lutheran Volunteer Corps after graduation. Someone in a literature class I took told me about her plans to join LVC after her May graduation and I was intrigued. I don't think she had any idea how pivotal that discussion was to me. I am actually facebook friends with her and, randomly, happened to be on the same flight from Minneapolis to Seattle as she and her husband last June. During the flight, when I leaned over and whispered to my husband this, he prodded me to go introduce myself. Being to bashful, I declined, but now in retrospect, I wish I'd done just that and let her know how important that discussion-long since forgotten by her I assume- was to me. I always kept LVC in my back pocket for post-college graduation plans, unless prince charming should come along and propose to me before then or I should get a fellowship to study Chinese in Norway or something. I applied and was accepted and prepared for a cross-country move to Washington DC in the fall of 2004. I met Joe one night at dinner during orientation. I remember joking to him about how "it's pronounced 'Or-y-gun' not 'Ora-gone'". (Since I am originally from there.) The joke completely fell flat, but the good news is that he didn't hold it against me. He asked me on a date (his female roommates told him to ask me on a "date" to let me know of his intentions) at the end of September and from there, we were always together. He was there when I went into the hospital in DC and when I discharged two weeks later. I'd had a brain hemorrhage on my left cerebellum, unbeknownst to me or the reason why. I was forced to curtail my LVC tenure and move back to "Or-y-gun". We wrote letters back and forth during the winter, spring, and summer of 2005. He reconsidered his career path from seminary to music education and finally moved out to Tacoma on August 30, 2005. (I recovered and finally moved up to Tacoma in May of 2005.) The next two years were hard as they were colored by jobs that barely provided support, a rejection from art therapy graduate school, a botched first-time engagement (another story for another blog), unstable living situations (I think I moved 4 times in 2 years), and just striving to find my purpose in life. We got engaged (this time for real) in June 2006 and married on July 8, 2007. That may seem like a long engagement to you, but I think I would've had a nervous breakdown if it were 6 or 8 months. It was on a trip to California to attend my grandma's funeral in February 2007 that I decided to pursue nursing as a career. My aunt Linda is a nurse and somehow we got to talking and something about that conversation "sealed the deal" on my future. Again, it was another enormously influential conversation that, in retrospect, has transformed my life. Just like Katie who initially told me of LVC, Linda has no idea how much her words meant to me. We lived in a tiny, but charming apt in North Tacoma with our 2 cats for the first year of marriage. Joe finished student teaching and I worked 2 jobs to support us, which meant I had to defer my goal of becoming a CNA for a while. We moved to University Place in 2007 when Joe received a middle school choir job in Steilacoom. The past 4 years have been so challenging: learning how to love and communicate and to work on the budget together and to keep the house clean. We never really talked about "when the best time would be to have a baby", considering I was in the middle of my nursing prerequisites. Folks, the most I'll say is that it just happened as it does all over the world. And we wouldn't change a thing. We were shocked when Sonja was born on Joe's 29th birthday on May 24, 2011. We really don't know how we're going to celebrate both Sonja's and daddy's birthdays. Do you make 2 birthday cakes? And sing "Happy Birthday" twice? We are excepting ideas...
The day I turned 30 found me waiting with much anticipation for the arrival of a certain letter from Concordia College's nursing department letting me know if they've accepted me into their post-bacc nursing program. I don't have "plan B". So I don't know what I am going to do if I don't get accepted.
One can only hope...
