It’s About That Time

Not too much has happened since the last post except my husband came home from deployment this month. It’s great to have him back home and we didn’t have any problems at all readjusting to each other. What I have to get used to all over again is the ridiculousness of the people in charge at his unit. I think that could take more effort than getting used to the deployment did!

It is about that time now-the kids are getting ready to finish the school year over in India. I have to go over to get the boys admitted into the boarding school and the three little ones will be coming back over here to the States until they are old enough to go to the boarding school. Lilly will wind up being here with us for about the next three years. I hope that Sunil keeps the language up with them like he says he will, otherwise, they will probably lose a lot of it. Not that they can’t pick it up easily when they go there again, but still.

This time when I go over there, I intend on taking alot more pictures of people and places. I did do a fair amount of it the last time, but I still feel that I could have done more. I’ll have a lot of time on my hands-so I should be able to accomplish that goal! Now back to packing…

Realizing I Miss India

I’ve been back here now since July and I finally sat down and admitted today that I miss India. It has been said that India is the kind of place that you either learn to love or you just plain hate it. There can be no mediocre feelings about the place. Having experienced it myself, I’d have to say that I agree. I don’t think that even the culture or people themselves could be remotely considered mediocre, so how could the experience be so?

So maybe there are some positives to letting my husband pursue his dreams of trying out for Special Forces. I originally had fought the notion tooth and nail. Who wants to go through all that separation? But now I am slowly coming to terms with life as it is-especially after just having turned 36. Happiness for him is doing all that hard core Rambo-running-through-the-woods-stuff. Yes, I am not included in this fantasy, but I will be part of making his dream come true-and it’s the journey that counts in the end.

And while he is running through the woods, I’ll be getting back to India where life seems so much more colorful. Of course, there are the hassles of being a foreigner; being the only white chick for miles around. It unnerved me while I was there, but after having had a break, I’m ready to go back. My threads have been forever woven in the fabric of India, as strange and inexplicable as it may seem!

So Here I Am…

I’ll be 36 in just a week and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up!

When I first got back to the states from  India, I knew I wanted to get a job to keep me busy so that I wouldn’t be focusing on how much I missed my husband and kids and also to get back to the business of paying off our debts. (Currently we are using Dave Ramsey’s Debt Snowball Method and it’s been working great in just the few months we’ve been on it! Find out more here)

So I began the job search in earnest the day my husband got back on the plane to go back to the sandbox. Fortunately for me, or so I thought at the time, I didn’t have to search long before I got lead for a job from an acquaintance of mine. I sent this company an email with my resume attached and the next day I got a phone call asking me to come in for an interview. Now I am a medical coder by profession and the job I was being offered was in medical billing. Since I had a bit of experience in my last job with medical billing, I figured I would go ahead and accept the job-after all how hard could it be?? Huh…was I in for a big surprise!

Now, I know that there are many people in this world who thrive and grow under pressure(and thank God for them!!) but I am not one of them as I found out in my short time at this job. Multitasking I can handle, but not under the gun of completing monthly task queues which are an essential element of the job. I was trained for about a week and then let loose to fend for myself during my 90 day evaluation period during which I would be held to the same expectations that seasoned employees were in regards to completion of task queues.

I took a pay cut from my previous job in New York because I was told that in Texas “You’re not going to see above $9.00/hr.” I was calling insurance companies, writing appeals and dealing with angry patients who had “just got a bill in the mail” with just a little sprinkling of coding here and there. Shortly after I started working there, I began to go to work with knots in my stomach and a horrible sense of dread. By the end of two months, I knew I couldn’t do it any longer and I put in my notice.

Now I am at a crossroads of what I want to do with the rest of my life. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Health Administration and a coding certification. The billing job has left a very bad taste in my mouth and I don’t know if I can continue on in this line of work, stuck in a cubicle for 8 hours a day, only stopping to get a breath while popping up my head above the cubicle like a prairie dog poking his head out of his hole.

So now perhaps because I am quickly approaching middle age, I am increasingly feeling a sense of urgency to feel that I’ve accomplished something in my life-to have made a difference someway, somehow. I have done the career assessment tests, personality tests, even thought about following a suggestion to re-embrace what you loved to do before you were ten years old, before other distractions set in. In my case that would be biology, which by age 10, I was reading large volumes from the library by Jaques Cousteau and other such biologists. For all my life, I have been utterly fascinated with Animal Planet, Discovery Health and National Geographic and would rather watch those types of shows than anything else. Unfortunately at this point in my life, such a drastic career change would cause me to have to go back to school and rack up way more debt than I already have-I’ve been paying on my student loans from my Bachelor’s degree now since 2008 and they haven’t budged a bit!

I think that a person is supposed to be happy in their career-I’ve heard many experts say that. My husband wouldn’t agree, but then that’s a whole different blog post! In an attempt to get my college loans paid off and hopefully pursue a different career path, I am trying to join the National Guard or Reserves. I’ll let you know how that works out. Meanwhile, I love to hear opinions on whether you think the job or career should make you happy or whether you should be happy no matter what kind of job you are in…

It’s Not An Education-It’s An Adventure.

…And it certainly wasn’t an easy choice to make as a mom. We decided a long time ago before our kids were born that we didn’t like what the U.S. public education system had to offer. My husband and I were both products of it and neither one of us had experiences that we could be proud of. Even the most dedicated parents can’t shield their children from the “socializing” that goes on in public schools. Don’t get me wrong-most people don’t see anything wrong with what goes on in schools these days and if you are one of those people you can rest assured that I am not going to go into a tirade against the system. In my experience, either you love public schools, or you hate them.

We had even tried to homeschool our children, but when times were tough for us, I had to go back to work and was unable to continue in that direction. My husband had told me how Indian schools were-the discipline, the overall society that places high value on education-way higher than we do over here, and the chance to learn a second language starting in preschool. It made sense to me that if the day ever came where we could afford to send our kids to school over there, we’d do it.

Fast forward to January of this year. My husband received orders for a year long deployment and it was decided that now was as good a time as any to start our children’s education adventure. The kids and I left in July and they’ve been there ever since. They are adjusting quite well to school over there especially my oldest(a teenager) who’s picked up the language very quickly. Now I have come back to the states to get a job for the next few months while my husband finishes up his deployment. We plan to bring back the little ones at that time to stay with us until each one of them becomes old enough to stay in the boarding school over there.

Is it hard? It sure is, but so are many things in life. Our children’s education is an investment and just like any other investment, you have to give up something in the present in the hopes that you will get more return in the future. I’ve had many people, in my family especially, who are not in favor of what we are doing. They say that spending time with your children is more important than anything and you can successfully navigate the public school system if you are involved enough as a parent. In my experience, though, you can only navigate around certain things-such as a ship navigating around an iceberg-but if you know that the waters themselves are treacherous to begin with, why would you even want to take a chance unless you had no other choice?

May I note that the family member who voiced the above mentioned opinion has never had to make the choice of sending their children to public school because her husband has a good enough job where they can afford a top-level private school. U.S. private schools weren’t even a thought for us because a private school education can cost almost as much as a university education in this day and age.

So now you have the history behind our decision to send the kids overseas for their education. Let the adventure begin…

Deployment 101

This is perhaps the hardest schooling I’ve ever had to go through in my life. Yes, that’s right-worse than 3000 word papers, worse than memorizing the entire human anatomy and latin phrases. Deployment is an education that no matter how much you study the cute little pre-deployment literature that the army hands out or how much you talk to others who have been through it before, you can never be prepared for the event when it happens.

At times in my life, I have been a strong independent person-which incidentally seem to be the times when my husband and I were together and had been fighting like cats and dogs for days on end. As a matter of fact, we had been fighting right up until he left for deployment and quite frankly, I think we were both a little relieved to get rid of each other for awhile-sort of like an extended vacation from each other fully paid for by Uncle Sam.

I was actually in India at the time my husband first left for deployment so I didn’t feel the full effect of coming home to an empty house or even missing the way he used to leave cupboard doors open or leave messes on the counter. Fast forward several months to his r&r. Since I was going a bit crazy in India with the joint family living arrangement and cultural isolation, my husband agreed with me that it was a good idea to come home for these last several months to get a job and try to save up as much money as I could. He wasn’t able to come visit us in India due to some government travel restrictions, so I flew back home to see him for r&r and then to stay there in Texas.

His r&r vacation was great-we had a wonderful time and it was a breath of fresh air to the regularly occuring fights we’d had over the phone since he’d been deployed.  Then, the dreaded day came-the day he had to pack up and return to the sandbox. The day he left, I felt so empty, like someone had squeezed out my heart like a tube of toothpaste and didn’t even but the cap back on out of courtesy.

It’s only been a few days since he left and I’m still feeling like the wind has been knocked out of my sails. Although my thoughts are not returning to him literally every five minutes anymore(I think it’s actually gone down to about half-hour intervals now) I’m still struggling. I waiver between bouts of crying, feeling sorry for myself, jealousy(how dare that couple be so happy in front of me!) more crying, loathing the army, and the occasional eating binge-which I think is an attempt to plug up that emptiness inside.

So needless to say, I think you get an idea of why you can never fully prepare for a deployment. So if you ever find yourself facing one, just accept those little pre-deployment brochures with a smile and know that no matter how much you read, study, or memorize, deployment is one of life’s little schoolings that you will need to experience from the trenches in order to fully understand it.

Hello world!

This is my first post here. I had to think for awhile about what this blog would be about. I mean, of course it would be about me and my family, but I had to think hard about a good name. Since all of us, the kids, my husband, and even myself are in some way getting educated, I decided to name the blog A Proper Education.

My kids are in school right now over in India. We have homeschooled our kids and sent them to public schools. We are sorely disappointed with the American education system so when we got the chance to, we decided to send them to school in India. So far we are happy with our choice. I’ll be writing about our kids adventures and experiences with that.

My husband’s education-well, until further notice, he has sworn off books and studying. I’ll write about any future changes in his decision.

My education-I am currently being educated on how to be a good soldier’s wife. My husband is currently deployed and I am a sceptical army wife at best. I love my soldier and my country, but I don’t support the war, so if that makes me a poor army wife, then so be it.  We are just finishing up his r&r and then he’ll be going back to the sand box. I hope to get a job, join the army reserves, and pursue my formal education-my master’s degree. I’ll be writing about how any of that goes. See you tomorrow!