Poor serving the poor

I recently started my job working weekends at the Saint Louis Crisis Nursery, and I LOVE it.

What is it, you ask? The Nursery is a non-profit kind of shelter for kids to prevent abuse from happening in the home. Parents call us up and ask if we can take their kids for a few hours or even a few days while they are going through a crisis. The reasons vary from needing day care so that the parents can go to work, to a parent feeling suicidal, and needing us to take their kids while they receive psychiatric help.

I know it's only been my first week, but I really do love what I'm doing. I was concerned that it would be too tiring for me to handle, but so far serving other people has just energized me, if anything. I do miss having time together with Jeff and Maddie on the weekends, but the bills have to be paid.

In case you're wondering what my schedule looks like - I watch maddie during the days, go to grad school classes at night, and work on the weekends. Thank goodness Jeff and I are taking the same classes, otherwise we would literally never see each other except in passing.

For this next part, I need to do some back-tracking.

Graduating with your bachelor's is not what it used to be. Jeff and I honestly (and naively) thought that graduating would ensure more income, better jobs, etc. We were wrong. It has brought Jeff one low-paying job after another. We quickly realized that the only way to break this cycle would be to go back to school and get some kind of graduate degree.

While we always wanted the end goal to be to recieve our PhDs, I was intimidated by the competition for clinical psychology programs, with their acceptance rates around 3-6%, they're harder to get into than medical schools. So we decided to get our master's in counseling, so that we could financially be able to counsel and support ourselves through our PhD, and so we could develop more experience, making our Resume's more impressive.

Well, I'm here to say that I was wrong. And so dumb. The master's program here will essentially take as much time as a PhD program (because you have to work to support yourself, you end up taking less classes), and more money, (because PhD programs are almost always paid for, and master's are not.)

So now here I am. Three years later after graduation, we are still poor, and we are back to square one. Not to worry, we're going to continue with the master's program, but all the while, we are going to try and prepare a doctorate.

That gives me one year to increase my GRE scores, do more research, and send in applications. On top of everything else we have going on. yikes.

I couldn't feel more sheepish. Why didn't I do all of this when I was completing my undergraduate? Why did I ever tell myself that I should wait a few years? How could I ever have been so young and arrogant and naive and foolish about this stuff?

Welcome to real life, I suppose. I hope one day we'll break the cycle and be able to look back on this and laugh. Until then, I will be working at the Crisis Nursery, a poor woman, serving other poor women. At least my experience helps me have empathy.

And here's a maddie gram to brighten up an otherwise depressing blog post: