are you embarrassed or are you humble?

Many of us are taught to be ashamed of money. To be embarrassed if you don’t have it, humble if you do, but never open about either scenario. Admitting you are in need is to bring to light the shame of the fact that you are failing to have enough money. After all, what is more shameful than needing money. It’s a wicked little cycle to get in. I wasn’t raised financially savvy, I wasn’t raised financially anything really. I guess I was raised to work hard and figure out how to support yourself as quickly as you possibly can while trying not to go hungry. I have a complex relationship with money, need, charity, and self worth. I have wasted my fair share of it, lived joyfully without it at times, but above all else, I have lived mostly in denial about finances. It never seemed I could change my relationship with money and become more financially savvy. Or that I could acknowledge that 21 years ago I picked a career that at some point I would outgrow and would no longer serve me. By serve me, I do mean a career that does not pay me well enough for the skills and experience that I have. Basically, I have decided to make more money.

I think this is a midlife crisis, but I don’t feel in crisis at all. I do know a lot of the things I am thinking and processing right now are going to fall under that umbrella, and we were all taught to be embarrassed by the middle aged guy who suddenly needs a sports car and a young wife. What I would like to think of this as is a midlife shift or a midlife awakening if you will. I have no regret over the first 20 years of my adulthood or the career I decided to pursue when I was 17. It brought me to where I am, it was the right job for me in my twenties when I was traveling, touring about the states, making babies with my new husband, and raising them into toddlers and small children. I don’t need a sports car, though a camper van would be amazing, or a new husband, because I am content with the old man I have. What I do need is a new job that fits what I want to do with this era of my life that is now about raising big kids through this sweet and hard in between before the fly out of our little nest. As it was so beautifully put in a friend of a friends post recently, this part is about watching the unfolding of who my kids are and there is so much joy and excitement in that. It means the job I picked at 17 doesn’t really fit me at 38. When you think of it that way, is it really so shocking? I can’t think of that many things other than Sean and Doc martins that I picked at 17 and still fit me today. I am not sure where I am going with this other than just processing through this fact, I do not think I want to be a nurse anymore, but I am not yet sure what it is I want to be. I don’t know if I still want to do something in medicine, what my timeline on this is, or what it will mean to make these sorts of changes, but I do know I didn’t move my kids across the ocean (its really way bigger than a pond) to get underpaid to the point of not getting to explore and watch this new world unfold with them. If anyone knows a way to get paid for traveling with your kids and staying home to make bread, like seriously hit me up.

Alternate title for this blog: I just realized I am a millennial and I like it.