Plan B (Pass the cheese, please)

Sometimes, life throws you a curveball. You research, plan, prepare, organize, and carefully make decisions. You can do everything “right.” And then something unexpected happens, and you have to throw out the plan and get a new one.

About two months after starting work, the hospital Mike works for restructured, eliminated his department, and shifted him to a different department. Instead of doing outpatient behavioral pediatrics, they moved him to the child and adolescent inpatient units. Mike does not do, and never has done, work with an inpatient population. After talking and meeting with many different people at the hospital, it became increasingly clear that they were not going to change their minds and that he was stuck.

So we had two options at this point. Stick it out, pray that someday things will change, but in the indefinite interim be miserable at work. Or, realize that the job is not going to work out, and start looking for something else. During the course of all this soul-searching, Mike decided that he wanted to go into academia, a field that he always thought he wanted to do but was worried he would miss the clinical side too much. Unfortunately, the Bangor area is not large and there are not many university faculty positions in the area.

Well, as luck would have it, the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire had just extended their search for an administrative faculty position, someone to direct their Human Development Center on campus and also be a faculty member in the Department of Psychology. Mike didn’t think he would be qualified for the job because they wanted someone who already had been granted tenure, but the job description seemed as if it was written for him – clinical work, research, teaching, training grad students, running his own clinic – the list goes on. So he contacted the search committee chair, submitted his vita, and got an interview.

Long story short – he got the position and decided to take it. It starts in August, which means that we will be moving YET AGAIN. We have already sold our Maine house, and last weekend we bought a new one in Eau Claire. We close on the Maine house August 15 and on the Wisconsin house August 19. I feel like this has all been done in secrecy, but Mike didn’t want to resign too soon here, so we had to keep it all under wraps until he resigned yesterday. His last day at work will be August 15 and he’ll start at UWEC on August 25.

I’ve gone through a lot of emotions in the last few months – shock, anger, sadness, acceptance, and now excitement. I feel bad that Mike has to give up his dream of living in Maine, but when you are not happy at work, it doesn’t really matter where you are, you are miserable. And although I was excited about moving to Maine, I was sad to leave my friends and family in the Midwest. I feel more excited about moving to Wisconsin – I never had a bad feeling about moving to Maine, but I have a really good feeling about moving to Wisconsin. It just feels right.

So more details to come later – I’ll be blogging a lot this week, so stay tuned!