A Light at the End of a Tunnel
Moving to Indianapolis was a fresh start, but it also presented new challenges
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Everything about our move to Indianapolis was different from three years before. We had a house to sell and far more belongings. We had a dog moving with us. The school was paying for a moving company instead of us depending on family to help us move our small apartment’s worth of furniture. We had a house to sell and a new house to purchase. My husband Jeff still had to find a job. And it all felt like it was happening so fast.
While the year ended in a whirl, I also couldn’t wait to pack up and change everything. I took at least one trip down to Indianapolis to start planning for both the move and my new teaching job. I would no longer be the only English teacher, and my new colleague Monica, one of the three members of what we would eventually call our three-headed English department, invited me to spend the night at her house during my house hunting/job planning trip. I quickly discovered a dear friend in the woman who had ten years of experience on me and the possible advantage that she was still single and completely independent.
Jeff continued his commute to Michigan while I prepared for our move, finding pockets of time to apply for jobs so we could finally live and work in the same city. He interviewed for one promising job shortly before we packed up the moving truck, but without an official job with real income, we decided I would make the move south while he lived at his parents during the week so he could keep working. For the first month of living in Indianapolis, he stayed in Michigan five days a week and then drove home on the weekends, helping to slowly unpack our new, smaller house in a neighborhood only five minutes from my new job. While I relished no longer having to drive through Chicago traffic to get to work, Jeff couldn’t wait to finally be home and have a much shorter commute as well.
Our prayers were answered in a matter of weeks. It took longer than expected because of our changing phone numbers, but the company Jeff had interviewed with finally offered him a production scheduler job. It was full time, came with benefits, and it would allow us to finally live and work in the same city in the same state in the same time zone.
After three years of simply existing, we were finally ready to live and dream of a future where Indianapolis could be our forever home.
I went from teaching all four levels of English to just two, the primary focus of my day four periods of sophomore English. I dove into my work, for the first time truly falling in love with my chosen career. I was no longer just surviving, I was thriving. It was still a lot of work, but I quickly learned there was so much more I could do when I wasn’t splitting all of my attention in so many different directions. Where my previous teaching job had seemed like an opportunity because I would be free to do whatever I wanted, I learned the benefits of having two other English teacher colleagues with more experience than me. We were all still relatively young, but they could give me advice on how to best spend my time and energy. They had taught books and writing assignments I hadn’t and were able to share those materials with me. And our lunch periods became extended department meetings as our other colleagues listened to us bouncing ideas off of each other before we returned to our classrooms.
We went camping with a friend from Michigan that fall, and he commented on how I seemed more relaxed and less stressed than I had in years. And I was. I loved my new colleagues, I loved my students, and I felt like I was finally growing into the teacher I had always been capable of being.
But it didn’t take long before new career challenges came my way.
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