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I don’t remember the last time I opened up my laptop to write a blog post, after the kids have gone to bed. Tonight is different. Tonight it feels like I’m coming back to something, to a place where the need to write, to blog, is stronger than the exhaustion, stronger than the pull of the couch and the TV and giving in to the end of the day.
It was officially announced today, provoked by an official email that finally arrived: As of November 10th, I will be an Instructional Technology Specialist at the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Mary Washington. The place where Domain of One’s Own was created. The place with a vintage living room filled with the technology I grew up with (and the couch I grew up with). A public liberal arts college that values innovation in teaching and learning. The team is amazing, including the new director, someone I know well (but we applied and were hired independently).
I could pinch myself.
But it is never as simple as an opportunity of a lifetime, is it? There is leaving a job that I love, at a place that took a chance on me, that has revived my career, leaving mid-semester. There are kids who have moved so much and have found a school and a place where they are thriving. There are students and work and friends and commitments and community and a hard-won friendships and networks. There is moving away from my family for a not-insignificant period of time, delaying my start, delaying my departure, but in the end, there is no perfect time, no perfect solution.
But there is possibility. There is a husband who has long wanted to move to the DC area for professional reasons, and that our two-headed problem can be solved and we can be in the same place at the same time with the same level of professional opportunity and fulfillment. There is the national capital (or National Capital – I am never sure) and Northern Virginia that costs so much but offers so much for all of us.
There is excitement. There is excitement that gets forgotten in the anxiety. There is the feeling of being waned, of being celebrated. There is the feeling of guilt. There is the excitement of opportunity, of growth, of love. There is all the work, all the years, all the people, all the time, all the struggle. There it is: all the things that I have long wanted, all the things my family wants, all the people who I want to work with and who want to work with me, all of the voices, the chorus, of support. All of the sacrifice.
There is relief. There will be changes. But these changes will not stop. And so there is relief that these changes, these changes are happening as they are.
On November 10th, I will be I will be an Instructional Technology Specialist at the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Mary Washington. In my most quiet moments, I am so excited and stunned and overwhelmed, I don’t have words.
