Fear Knocking at my Door - Post #9

Date: March 21, 2007
Personal Temperature: Scared

The fear is creeping back. This dual job search thing is not going well at all. To date, I have two applications out there...one at my "dream" school and one at my current institution. The initial review date of applications at my "dream" school was March 15th, last Thursday, and no word yet from them. I am trying to stay positive...I am trying to stay focused...I am trying to remember that fear will only lead me back to Cheese Station C where the cheese is starting to get moldy and depleted. But let's be honest folks, this job search stuff is hard enough when it is only you...let alone you and another person. I keep invisioning myself three months from now, jobless and my little girl sick and we have no health insurance and living with my parents or The Husband's parents! AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! It is usually during one of these depressive rants that my husband begins to laugh at me and tells me to "Lighten up. We will find something. We always have." Sometimes, The Husband's light mood really helps me to get through the fear and other times I just want to give him a piece of my mind and say, "You are right. We have always found something, but this time is different. This time we have to find something together at the same time in the same place. This time, it is not just the two of us we have to watch out for it is also The Daughter. This time we have to think about finding jobs that don't require us to give 50-60 hours a week each so that we can be there for our little girl. This time we are in a time crunch and I have to let my current institution know if I am coming back soon so they can hire someone else or commit to another year working here and stop looking for jobs. This time around, I'm scared."

And lets face it, there is the crux of the issue. Fear! Fear can make people do crazy things, and right now, I can feel the fear of not finding a job closing in around me and making me want to crazy things like 1) committing to another year here at my current institution, 2) throwing our values out the window and looking for jobs away from family, 3) apply for positions that I am not even remotely interested in just to have a paycheck and health insurance and 4) consider leaving the higher education field. One of the readers posted a comment after my last entry asking if you really can do a dual job search with such restrictions. I'll be honest, at the beginning of this journey, I was 100% confident that the answer was YES! YOU CAN!; but now, I am waivering. The cold hard truth is that no matter how qualified of a candidate I am, no matter how much I want to serve an institution, no matter how interested I am in a position, I can't do anything if either a) there is no position posted in the area I am looking at and b) the hiring committee chooses not to give me a look. These past two weeks, I have been thinking more and more about the reality of our situation and wondering if we have set ourselves up for failure by limiting our search so much. But then I go back to the fact that family means so much to us and we want our parents to know our child and future children and we want to be near enough to attend family events. These are huge aspects of our life that impact our greater happiness, but then so does finding the right jobs.

I think another reason I am beginning to panic is because I am watching those around me have so much success in their searches. All my graduate students are headed to numerous on-campus interviews. My co-workers are headed off to the joint conference in a week with tons of interviews scheduled. And here I sit, with two irons in the fire...neither of which seem to be getting hot. And The Husband, you ask? Well, still no change in his status. To date, there have been no jobs posted for him to even submit an application for. I hate to say it, but I think the writing may be on the wall. I think we may have to broaden our search and look beyond our desire to be close to our extended families for the sake of our little family of three. How much longer do we let good opportunities pass us by? And how much longer will my current institution wait for me to give them an answer?