The word "sacrifice" isn't used much. I don't know anyone who says things like: I decided to sacrifice my career for the good of my family. Or I decided to sacrifice one Saturday every month to do some volunteer work. Or I decided to sacrifice one evening a week to spend in prayer and meditation. I know there are people like that, I know they exist. But if you read newspapers, magazines, watch television, and talk to other people you get into conversations about the trials of fitting everything in at once. Literally all the women's magazines have, in each issue, peppy little articles about how to push a whole life into a small space. Make lunches the night before going to work so there won't be a crazy rush in the mornings. Cook double portions of food and freeze half. Go food shopping on a week night so your weekends don't get too cluttered up with chores. Etc., etc. Nobody, absolutely nobody, tells the hard truth that lies under these cute little "tips" for better living; that once you have children, sacrifices have to be made, and not easy ones. Nobody has it all. Not all at once. Children don't believe in "having it all"anyway. All they know about is time.

To get to where we are now--living in a lovely rural and mountainous area--sacrifices had to be made. I can only write about my own.

As a trained counselor I, before we made the move upstate, had a wonderful, cushy job working for the Devereux Foundation. I was case manager for the Behavioral Health area and my salary, benefits, working conditions, and co-workers were all top flight. I was able to help others and they helped me too. Now, because I have my masters degree I assumed that I'd find a satisfactory counseling position where we were moving.

I don't want to denigrate my friends and neighbors. I have come to love and respect many of them. However, the population here is a world away from the population I was working with in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Values are so different here. This alone is a subject I could write and write and write about. So I will say that in order to live here and enjoy the house and creek and barn and mountain I had to make a sacrifice. I had to face the fact that, and this is partly due to age discrimination, my counseling career was over.

So what does one do? Sell the house and land and move back to the suburbs or a city? Peter and I discussed it at length. What I did was put my counseling career aside and get retrained for a new career. While going through the retraining and searching for a new job I would get very nervous, thinking that something would go wrong but I would look at the mountain and barn and our beloved home and think: Something to fight for. This is something to sacrifice counseling for.
Has it been worth it? Oh yes.