I digressed a bit in my last post, but I felt it necessary to get a good sense of where I was in my life. I was a small town girl…. even though I was raised in the church and knew all the bible stories you teach young kids, my personal biblical knowledge was lacking. I like to refer to my knowledge as the “highlights from the bible” (reference from Mel Brooks To Be or Not to Be – Highlights from Hamlet), so it was no surprise that when defining moments struck, I had nothing to draw from except my own experiences – but more on that later. For now, we’ll just say my heart and mind were in turmoil and I was trying to find my place in this confusing world. I struck out to find something new as everything I had known had failed me or at least I thought they had failed me. At this point, I had not fully walked away from Christianity. I was identifying as spiritual, but not religious. I still believed, but felt organized religion was the problem and the bible could be fallible, as it was written by men. I was headed down a slippery slope. Anyway back to my journey…..
So, James decided to take that job in Florida. It was decided that I would follow him in a couple of months time. He claimed it was so he could settle into the new job and see if he was going to stay and for me to be able to find work, but in reality he just wanted to test his feelings for me. Within two weeks time, he had asked me to move there with him. He told me not to worry about a job.
I put in my two weeks notice, I packed my 2003 Olds Alero with as many of my belongings that would fit, and took off on my solo trip to Florida armed with my indestructible Nokia phone, map quest directions, and my first pet ferret. And I was off on an adventure of a lifetime.
My furthest solo trip up to that point was a three and a half hour drive on familiar roads in a jealous rage to keep a boyfriend from cheating (I cringe at the memory). I had also driven with the same said past boyfriend to Nashville, Tennessee to the airport so we could go to the Bahamas.
As “luck” would have it, while I was driving in the mountains of middle Tennessee, I received a phone call. It was for a job interview at the same company James was working for. If I had not taken off on that solo journey when I did, I would have never made it to the interview on time. The drive down was fantastic. It was proof to me that I was capable of being on my own.
I mean it was an emotional trip, I was leaving the only home I had known. Even though I had been living on my own with a full time job for the past year and a half, this time I didn’t have a fall back plan. Before if things went poorly, I was only an hour from “home”. This time there was no safety net, family and friends were a thousand miles away. It was a risk and a defining moment in my life.
I got to Florida in one piece, went to my job interview, experienced my first tropical storm, and started that job a couple short weeks later. At first life in Florida was like a perpetual vacation. We were living the beach life… good food, drinks, and beautiful weather. We made new friends and were having a blast. We were enjoying our new jobs, I was getting to do a lot of traveling for work. Life was going great, until it wasn’t…
About a year and a half in, the company started restructuring it’s workforce. I was fired about the time they started cutting back the employees from our market. Mostly because of my low numbers due to the back-outs I had from traveling to different locations. At any rate, it was the first time I had ever lost a job. It was an eye opening experience. I went on unemployment for a couple months while I was searching for a job. After no success, I decided to reach back out to an employment agency that had called the first week I was looking, and accepted a temporary to hire position.
It turned out that position was with Citibank in their anti-money laundering department. The job it’s self was rather thankless and took very little of my brain power to do, but I am extremely thankful I took the job. During that job I met my now best and closest friend, Kristy. And everything was going great again.
The friends we made were on similar life paths as us. DINKs (dual income no kids) mostly, though by the time we left Florida our friends without kids were a dwindling number. These friends were mostly atheist or at least agnostic. One of them was even the daughter of a preacher, who left the church and married a man that had been involved in three other relationships at the time they were dating and had friends with a number of porn stars. They were (are) also extremely liberal politically leaning. Most of our friends and acquaintances matched those beliefs. If they were Christians, they were mostly “spiritual” and “non religious” types.
I felt like I really started growing in Tampa. I was making diverse groups of friends and acquaintances. I was exploring other parts of myself. I was really breaking through walls on my beliefs and even compromising some of them to fit into the group. For example growing up, I was always pro-life. But as I was surrounding myself with other types of people, I came to believe that just because something wasn’t right for me… doesn’t mean it wasn’t right for others. I started to compromise my stance on abortion and other topics of great importance. I couldn’t be that worldly city girl if I held on to these small minded, small town thoughts.
Down the slippery slope I continued to slide, until I felt something was missing in life…..
A Mother's Special Calling 