With our youngest graduating from high school in five months, I have been perseverating about my own purpose or calling.
I remember well, as a teenager, being asked what I wanted to do when I graduated. I also remember my immediate thoughts to be of being a wife and mom, followed by lying and giving more ‘driven’ responses of professional goals.
Years later I discovered that I was pregnant … my life’s dreams were coming true … until, at about seventeen weeks, it’s heart stopped beating.
Twenty-one months later our ten and a half pound daughter was born. I was happy and challenged more than I ever imagined mothering to be.
The next seven years were filled with four more pregnancy losses, the birth of a daughter (who cried for two years) and the birth of our son.
My pursuit to hold the professional title of mom, was earned through PhD-like blood, sweat and tears. I awoke each day ready to go to work at my practise of mothering and homemaking.
As they headed off to school in succession, I realized it was time for a new, or more specifically, another vocation. What to do, when one grows up? became a regular question for me to ask.
So, I went back to school … to work as an Educational Assistant. I have had the privilege of going to work, with a contented heart, for almost fourteen years, learning daily from the students I have the honour of working with.
Now … now, as my favourite three are moving into their adult lives, I see an opportunity for me to, once again, ask “what will I do when I grow up?”
So I have looked at different jobs, courses and schools. I am still looking.
To this point, the only thing that keeps resurfacing, the only message I keep encountering that resonates with me is that relationships matter.
I am not sure that this message is for me, in terms of my vocational pursuits in the years to come, or in terms of me as an individual, in my life.
When I came across the words of Mother Teresa,
“we have been created in order
to love and to be loved”
I realized that, in considering what I want to do, I must first start with who I am.
Still no answers, yet all the answers are wrapped up in that core awareness that we are to love and to be loved. From that statement a stewardship of and to humanity is known.
itsawonderfilledlife 