I am a phoenix after all....

Rise up from despair and disappointment
like a Phoenix Bird from the ashes,
for a new day has come and, with it,
new opportunities and the prospect
of better tomorrows. --Garcia (art as well)


My last post about my graduation wasn't so uplifting, I know. Maybe I was just in a not so great place...maybe a little shaded by other things and people in my life but the closer I get to walking across a stage to receive my masters degree, the more I realize what I have achieved. I realized today while filling out an application that I got laid off from my job of 7 years...and most of children's lives in July of 2007. A great job...a job I worked for the majority from home and never had to put my kids in daycare (although, arguably...a daycare may have taken better care of them at times) and then I filed for divorce and then I became a single mother of four (three alive, I know) with only unemployment to live on. That was not a very good summer. Seriously.

So I embarked on a new career...I became a paralegal for my best friend from high school's husband. I learned an entirely new world...the world of criminal defense and I fell in love so I waited and waited and I finally got a really low-paying full-time job at the Marion County Public Defender Agency/Juvenile Division in October of 2008. That very same (NOT SANE) month, I began school full time to get my masters. Learning how to work full time in a corporate environment and NOT in a hippie health food store was challenging (to say the least).

And now it's May and it's 2010 and I'm Melanie Harris, M.A. -- I love being a juvenile division paralegal and I need to find a job that pays more than a juvenile division paralegal. Change is bad for me...it's tough...it sucks...BUT I think that the change ahead of me is good. I have more education (and more debt), my kids are growing into really great versions of themselves, and I have become a very different person than I was in July of 2007. I have risen from my proverbial ashes and sometimes, sometimes, (not very often)....I feel as if my tail feathers might be beautiful purples and blues and greens...that I can do anything I want and that life is, or at least will be, grand.

That is me. Full of hope for the future today. I will treasure that because it won't last. And that's okay, too, because that's just me.

school...

Surprisingly enough...I don't feel a bit differently since I've finished my masters studies. Maybe I won't really graduate and that's why...I know that's really not a viable option...I'm not quite sure why I'm stuck on it. I thought for sure that I would have some kind of epiphany...that I would know exactly what I want to do and be. I thought I would have an inherent sense of pride. I don't. I still don't feel that I've done enough.

What is this aching in me that says it's never good enough? Why do I always have to try or be or do one more thing? Am I teaching that overwhelming lesson to my kids?? Dear God, please don't let me teach that to them.

Why is there always a nasty wind at my back that says...move...move...keep moving...it's not enough...it's not enough...

I hope other people don't feel this way. Honestly.

Melanie Taylor Harris, M.A.