Doors and Windows: A New Chapter

And just like that, my job was eliminated.

It's difficult to put into words what it means to get up every day for almost twelve years and go to a place and then one morning be told, there is no place for you there anymore.

All it took was one solemn conversation. Tears. Disbelief. An office door closed and I was left with a new reality. Suddenly everything was different. "My" computer wasn't mine. Or "my" phone. I had a "last" day of work on a day I'd expected would be like any other. There were boxes to pack and a hundred phone calls to make.

Surreal doesn't begin to cover it.


I've already posted this, but it's just so perfect that I keep going back to it. I might edit it with "when something unexpected happens." Because I refuse to believe this is necessarily a bad thing. But unexpected? Oh. Yes.

I think I've certainly learned the lesson that life is full of surprises and that as much as we might like to think we have control of things, we really don't. All it takes is one extra chromosome, one hurricane wind-gust, one wonky cancer cell or one name on a list of lay-offs, to turn life as you know it, into something quite different.



The day I got the news (almost a month ago to the day, hence the quiet on my end) I left work early (obviously!) and did what any logical person would do. I got a mani/pedi. Then I walked the streets of our snowy, bitterly cold neighborhood (keep in mind these pictures were taken the day before snow storm #I'velosttrack).



It's funny how one big life event can make you look at everything with a different lens. These were the same streets I drove by and walked on every day. And yet. Everything seemed just...not the same.

Because it isn't.

For now I'm suddenly doing things like making chicken stock out of bones from a leftover roast chicken and discovering I can drop Ellie off in the morning in the front of her school, to thus avoid hauling twins through a parking lot when it's twelve degrees outside (to say nothing of negotiating Lucy in and out of her carseat twice--there's a good thirty minutes right there).



I'm not sure what my next act is. I am trying to be very When a Door Closes a Window Opens about all of this.



The best is yet to come? I think so. I really do.