Believing

"Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around."


--Henry David Thoreau


Now I know why Thoreau never married. It is difficult to spend your time in the woods observing nature, writing, living out philosophical ideas when you have kids that need to be insured, feed, and clothed and a wife that demands running hot water and a flush toilet.

When Greg turned 40 he fell into a melancholy. Things were moving slowly on the building, he spent half his waking hours at a tedious job he hated, he wondered how he could have had such potential and ended up stuck. He wanted to move into the trailer at our land. I put my food down. Until the point we had running hot water and a flush toilet, I was not going anywhere. I figured if this was really important to him, he could quickly get to that point.

Maybe I was blinded by my own happiness at the moment. Looking back, I can now see how miserable he was. How he was shrinking to the point of disappearing, how he struggled every day with the thought of leaving.

My degree is in Social Work. At the time, I planned on continuing with a Masters and working as a counselor. I thought this would be a flexible job where I could work part time and still make a decent income. The funny thing about university degrees is that you don't complete the internship until after all your course work. I quickly realized that this was not the right field for me. Maybe I have too much empathy; being around other people's problems all day weighs too heavy with me. We ended up having children earlier than planned anyway. I went straight from college to motherhood.

When our youngest went to kindergarten, 2003, I knew it was time to find a job. I applied to many and interviewed for a few, but was never offered a job. As a stay-at-home mom, I spent time volunteering at the school and was asked if wanted a one hour a day job as a First Grade Reading Aide. It wasn't much, but it was something.

I had never even for a second considered a career in education, but here I found a niche. I loved this job to the point that even though I was paid so little, I almost felt guilty about taking the paycheck. Everyday I had kids, parents, teachers, and supervisors thank me for the great job I was doing. I have never felt so appreciated or that what I was doing was worth-while, making a difference.

Working at a school is a perfect mom job. I took the kids to school, spent an hour volunteering in the school library, worked my hour as an aide, and still had time to volunteer in my kids classes and fill my PTA position of Reflections Chair. The next year I was given a 6 hour a day kindergarten TA position. To have the same work days and hours that your kids have school is wonderful. To not have insurance, retirement, paid sick leave, and be on an hourly wage is not. December's pay check with the two week vacation was small and I didn't earn anything during the summer. I could have kept this job forever, but knew I needed to find a better one.

The resource teacher at the school recommended me to a second bachelors special ed program. Despite Greg (who worked for a few years as special ed aide) and my mother who is a special ed preschool teacher telling me that a career in special ed is too hard and stressful, I took the required tests, filled out the paperwork, met with an advisor, and signed up to take my missing prerequisite of a Psychology Class. I couldn't convince them that Social Work Classes had the same information. I had been saving as much money as possible, but there was no way I could pay for school. This is when an old high school friend asked me to interview for an Ameri VISTA position with a STEM focused charter high school that would be opening the next year.

I had never worked with teens, but this job would be part of the foundation building, logistics, recruitment, things like that. I did not enjoy my high school experience. As a shy person, I was invisible in the world ran by football players and cheerleaders. This small academic focused school was something needed in the valley and being part of that would be wonderful. The Ameri VISTA program provides manpower to nonprofits, the federal government pays a small monthly living allowance and gives an education stipend at the end of a year's work. The living stipend was just enough to cover our mortgage and utility bills and then I would have money to pay for school.

In spring of 2006, Greg quit his job. From the time we meet, we had an ongoing argument. Greg believed he could build a house with $20,000 and a summer. I thought this to be impossible. By this point, he thought I was the ultimate killjoy and I knew he needed to have his summer. I believe following dreams, even if they fail, is vitally important. We only had $10,000, but we also had the foundation finished.

We had the mortgage and utilities covered, it would be an interesting experience to live off garden produce and food storage for a summer, it was the lose of insurance that worried me. Greg would just need to be very careful, Ameri VISTA provided health insurance for me, and I thought the kids could get coverage through CHIP, a federal and state supplemented health insurance for kids of working families. I applied, but we were denied coverage because we made too little money. In all the years of slaving to pay this huge monthly obligation, we had only had a broken arm, a couple of needs for stitches, and the removal of a nickel lodged in the esophagus. We were healthy, so we bought basic accident insurance through the kids school, and felt covered.

Greg spent the summer working at our land, I worked in a cubicle out of USU making arrangements for all the necessities of a new school, and the kids went to summer camps and spent time with my mom.

When school started, the person hired as the high school librarian at the last minute took another position. Since I had library experience, I took this role (though still only paid through the Ameri VISTA program)and the Principal at the time told me that when I completed the school library masters program, he would give me the librarian job through the school. I then studied for and took the GRE and applied to this program at Utah State University.

Everything with the building took three times as long and cost twice as much as we thought, but Greg was happy for the first time in years. Then that fall, we had a major medical emergency. One day our son complained that his back hurt and his leg felt funny, the next day he couldn't walk. He had a cavernoma in his spine. A rare tangle of blood vessels that ruptures, the bleeding putting pressure on the nervous system that causes paralization. He was the seventh kid in the world to have spinal surgery to remove this pressure. We spent two weeks in the Primary Children's Hospital in Salt Lake City, and many more weeks relearning all bodily functions. For a while we didn't know if he would ever walk again. But the amazingly strong and dedicated kid amazed all the doctors with his miraculous recovery. He now leads a normal healthy life. Even the scar has faded to the point that you wouldn't know just by a casual look at him.

Now that the emergency was over, it was time to figure out how to pay for it. I would have paid a million dollars, and worked two jobs for the rest of my life to get him walking again. We learned that you can apply to medicaid retroactively, and went through this painful process just to be turned down because we had too many assets. The bills came by the dozens. Bills from doctors I never remembered meeting. I divided them into two piles. Those that charged interest and those that did not charge interest. For those that charge interest we used our rainy day savings, the money I had saved to pay for school, what was left of our house building money, and the money generously given to us by family, friends, coworkers, and even strangers. That amazingly paid off all the interest charging bills. The rest we paid a little every month. Primary Childrens Hospital has the philosophy that they never turn anyone away, or devastate families with bills. They charge uninsured families on a sliding scale fee and don't charge interest.

Greg took a peon job at a furniture factory, that went from 6 am to 3 pm, and I got the kids to school then started working as a part time secretary for the high school in addition to my hours as an Ameri VISTA, roughly from 8:30 am to 5:30 pm. The school had a "full time secretary" who was also a full time student. She left the building for a few hours every day to attend classes, and I covered for her. My curiosity of learning new things outweighed any thought I had of unfairness. While I was gone from work for a month caring for my son, another Ameri VISTA had to cover the secretary's absence. She do not find this fair in the least and made a big deal about the secretary being paid for a full time job when she was only working part time. This ended up as a blessing for me, when I was offered this job with the option to purchase family health insurance. Most of my extra income went to pay for insurance, the rest went right to medical bills. It took us two years of scrapping together every extra penny, but we paid off all those bills.

Spring 2007, Greg started working for himself... landscaping, tile work, remodels, handyman stuff. We use a lot of recycled materials in our building acquired from these jobs.

That summer we spent on labor that didn't cost money. Win-win, hauling rocks out of the fields that surround our land. Have you ever priced a rock? It is amazing what they cost. We haul loads of unwanted rocks out of fields to use in landscaping and for the stone veneer of the house.

All of this is just another hiccup on the journey of believing.