or, How Much Are You In Control Of Your Own Path in Life?

I always felt like the path my life was on was very linear and pre-determined… after high school, I went to university.  After undergrad, I went to grad school.  [Those steps were accepted without question because that was just how it was meant to be.] After grad school, I moved to England.  After I moved to England though, it suddenly became unregimented, undetermined, unclear and confusing.  Somehow I managed to float through – got somewhere to live so I wasn’t staying with my Dad & Rita for longer than I had to (but even that was quite serendipitous and didn’t require a whole hell of a lot of effort on my part); landed my first job and subsequently my first permanent job (which then evolved on a yearly basis thanks to council restructuring, so it almost felt like every year was a new ‘school year’ for me again)… it wasn’t until I ended up going to that first fostering agency which threw my life into a tailspin.  In the interview, I only remember the words “recruiting foster carers” being thrown in casually, not identifying it as the core purpose of my job; if I had, I would not have been keen to take on the role, because I felt that my skills did not match that.  I persevered, though it was a nightmare for me, sitting vulnerable in shopping centres and supermarkets, hoping that someone would come and talk to me.  I could not have been more miserable.  I also felt like my manager wasn’t that happy with me and I feel she engineered my exit because, despite my difficulties, I was not getting any support as to what to do (they just assumed I’d “get on with it”, but how can you if you don’t even know where to begin??).  I counted how many days I’d actually worked there, and how they could possibly expect me to recruit a whole caseload of new foster carers in 36 DAYS absolutely baffles me.  GOOD RIDDANCE to the lot of them.  All the short term jobs which followed led to more changes to my routine… teaching assistant roles, Outreach work with teenagers, then the second fostering agency which went down the same avenue as the first eventually… after that, I had consoled myself by saying that I wasn’t actually a failure at being a social worker – I was only failing to find the right role for me and my abilities and skills.  Landing into SEN face first ended up being a blessing in disguise, though I still have little struggles here and there, but I am much more able to handle the demands of this role because it’s far more structured in relation to social care, which was chaotic and reactive rather than planned and regulated.

To a degree, that’s how Paul’s and my relationship progressed too, as I learnt from the examples set by my parents and grandparents: first you date, then you get engaged, then you get married, then you have kids.  I never felt comfortable with the idea of having kids before getting married, obviously not because of religious reasons (see first full paragraph on page 2), but because that wasn’t the right order in which to do things… what makes it “right”, I cannot define… but I feel quite rigid in that respect and can’t explain why.  Obviously, I don’t have to worry about that, because we clearly dated, got engaged and then got married, but I think I would have panicked a bit if I became pregnant “out of sequence”… but again we were both taking the appropriate steps to ensure that didn’t happen.