30 Days of Gratitude: Day 19

As I posted today on Facebook, I need to refocus my trust in God to provide what we truly need, so I think it is time to start up some thankful posting.

Today, I am thankful for being respected as a musician, teacher, and advocate for the arts. What a blessing and a dream fulfilled to be doing exactly what I'm meant to do and earning the respect of my colleagues in the process.

I have known since the age of sixteen that I want to be a professional musician and music teacher.  I have worked tirelessly for the past twenty years to make this dream a reality.

When I was in high school, I poured myself into my music and schoolwork as a means to garner recognition, awards, and scholarships.  I was determined to see that I "got out" of West Virginia and made something of myself.  As time passed and I gained more and more recognition on the national level, I realized how much my music was a part of who I was, a part of my very soul. There really was no other career path for me. I was meant to be a musician and a music teacher. That is just who I am.

Following graduation from college, I moved to Minnesota to begin my new life with The Boy.  When I moved to Minnesota, I knew no one other than my then-fiancé.  After working in the engineering and mathematics fields for the first 15 months, I was absolutely miserable.  Granted, I loved teaching College Algebra at the University of Minnesota, but it still left a bit of a hole.  I will not even go into the horrible experience I had with civil engineering and how depressing I found it as a career.  Suffice to say that civil engineering is definitely not the creative outlet I need.

While a newlywed and freshly pregnant (my honeymoon souvenir), I began to seek out new opportunities with my music.  There is a fantastic music store in the Twin Cities that hired me to teach beginning clarinet and saxophone lessons for them, and my studio began to bloom.  I became bolder in my self-promotion, and my friends and colleagues suggested me to many schools as a teacher.  Before I knew it, I found myself with a clarinet studio of 30 students per week and a waiting list.  What a huge blessing.  Performance opportunities were always available to me, as well, but my mainstay was my teaching studio.


It was quite difficult for me to leave behind the business I had spent cultivating for ten of my eleven years in Minnesota, but I was able to suggest replacement teachers with confidence.  I have begun this process anew in Maryland, and I am feeling much more confident in my ability to build another successful studio.  I have been welcomed with open arms by the county school system here, and it has given me renewed hope for future success.  While I know it will take time to build another program, I know that God is with me every step of the way.  He has lead me to so many incredible music educators already.

I Don't Know How

I don't know how to keep rolling with the punches life keeps dealing us. To recap the past three years:

• My husband got fired from his job, even though he was receiving awards and accolades for his work.

• My husband moved across the country, staying with friends for nine months, because he got a lower-paying job in a more expensive area of the country.

• I packed up our entire house, moved every box to the storage unit, fixed up the house, listed and showed the house, continued working part-time in the evenings, and still took care of my precious daughters.

• I watched my music studio dwindle to only a handful of students by the time I moved, because no one wanted to start up with a teacher that was leaving.

• We moved across the country to join my husband, only to find a tiny apartment in a not-so-good neighborhood waiting for us.

• The kids hated their new school.

• We hated their new school.

• I couldn't teach in the apartment, so I wasn't able to work.

• My husband was awarded an incredible raise that saved our bacon.

• The girls started a new year at their school, and we were happy with their teachers. They still didn't really have friends, though.

• Our eldest needed to get braces. Goodbye, $5000, which we're still paying off.

• When our front neighbors moved out, their cockroaches moved into our apartment.

• We found an incredible real estate agent through the Dave Ramsey ELP program, worked out a loan with our amazing credit union, and moved into a large rental townhouse.

• I decided to apply for admission to graduate school in music at a smaller school in the area, assuming that they would have an appropriate assistantship for me. I was heartily granted admission.

• I was not offered any sort of assistantship. I turned down the school.

• The air conditioning in the van broke, so we were going to fix it. It turned out to be a lot more involved and expensive than we expected. On the way to the mechanic to find out what to do next, my husband's car lost the clutch. So, the clutch got replaced, at the expense of the air conditioning in my van, all our savings, and the money we'd scrimped and saved in order to attend the wedding of one of my best friends.

• I finally started teaching again.

• I was hired to play for a musical and teach a band camp in my hometown area, which allowed me to purchase a piece of musical equipment I desperately needed.

• The possibility of several more students was dangled in front of me, but those opportunities fell through.

• Now, our second daughter needs braces, and there is no way we can pay for them anytime soon.

• We haven't taken the girls on a vacation in eight years.

• We don't eat out.

• We only go to free movies.

• I have managed to lose forty pounds and gain all sorts of muscle in the past year through loads of hard work and eliminating meat and dairy from my diet.

• The girls cannot take music lessons or dance classes, because we cannot afford to pay for them. We have residual debt from our youth and crises of the past that takes up most of our income.

• I have been trying to gain momentum with my photography, which seemed to finally be happening, and my camera broke.

• I haven't found anywhere to play here yet. I haven't been hired for any gigs in my area at all. I have only met two other clarinetists, and one doesn't even play any longer.

• The real kicker: my dad has cancer.

Yeah, that's been my three years. There are some great things in there, but the bad things that I've listed have only scratched the surface of the mile-long list I could make.

At this point, I could lose my faith, or I could place it more firmly in God's hands. I'm choosing the latter, because I know God has a plan for me. I just hope that plan has some really good things coming soon.