A Year I Won’t Forget

I took an unplanned, three month hiatus from this blog. I am back!

It has been a heck of a year, the stress became undeniable around my last post in March. This past year I lost my job, our nanny was denied access back into the country, Dylan was waitlisted from every kindergarten (our zoned school was a 3 out of 10), rejected from every job I interviewed with, it seemed like every turn we took there was 3 steps back.

Oh the letdown . . .

Getting out of bed became harder and harder.

I had to keep going.

My family was depending on me. Everyday I would rip myself out of bed, take Dylan to school, job search, be a mom, etc.

Our former nanny’s roommate watched Tabitha 2-3 days a week while I had unemployment. I would job search non-stop, phone interview, in-person interview . . . I was rejected from every job I interviewed with. I got to the final round in most cases, then would be given a stupid excuse why they went with another candidate or I would not hear anything at all.

There is only so much rejection someone can take before it affects them.

Then, my unemployment ran out.

To save money, we let the sitter go. I looked for a job while Tabitha played in the mornings, napped and after the girls were in bed.

When I interviewed, my mom or Alex would watch Tabitha. The rejection continued — almost a year into my unemployment my attitude became sour. I started to get annoyed by the idiotic questions I was asked or the lack of marketing questions for a marketing position. Really?

So Alex convinced me to take a break from my job search.

Around April I stopped looking.

That’s when we started to hear from the elementary schools we applied to. We were waitlisted from all of the schools. The only option we had was our the school we were zoned for which is a 3. We gave the school the benefit of the doubt and took a tour. The principal was lovely but there was no way we would going to send Dylan to this school.

Once I realized that was our only option the search to move out of our neighborhood into the Valley was on.

I was not messing around. I contacted a realtor I met when I first moved to Los Angeles 9 years ago, that I have barely spoke to since then. Within a week, I was looking at homes in the Valley and within two weeks we had a signed lease. It all moved really fast.  We hoped it would since Alex and I had a trip planned for my 40th birthday.

We had the most amazing trip to Paris in the midst of the stress. (more on our trip later)

By the end of May we moved.

The move was really emotional for me. Alex had lived in that apartment for 10.5 years, and I 8.5. I hated that apartment as soon as I moved into it. I never stopped talking about moving from his bachelor pad. When the time came to move, I was incredibly emotional. I thought about everything that happened in this apt that I hated so much; we got engaged, married, grew our family, watched them grow, etc. Plus my community, my support system was within a 5 minute radius of each other.

Now, almost 4 weeks after our move we are feeling more and more settled. I am hoping this is the corner our family needed to turn for things to start moving positively forward.

Dylan and Tabitha will be at Camp Mommy this summer.  Then, Dylan will attend a school that is an 8! Tabitha will start preschool, once I find one we like. Hopefully (pray, cross your fingers, send positive vibes), I go back to work this Fall.

I am learning change can be good. How have you cooped with a big stressful change?

Let’s give each other pointers on how to deal with stressful changes!