accenting life: looking up

Monday morning, in its typical Monday fashion, brought along its gloom of the week to come. Joe and I chatted a little bit before I headed out to work. It was a typical Monday work day, with a lot of running around til my neck feels like it's chopped off. Then I saw a blinking light on my phone while I was in a meeting, I entered the required password to get into the screen where my favorite picture of me and my daughter greeted me, opened up the blackberry messenger icon, and saw a message from my husband that reads "I'm in." I breathe a big sigh of relief, I knew what it meant.

Some time between lunch and 3 o'clock, he got the call that we have been waiting for, one that had kept us on edge for over a month. After almost a year of unemployment, Joe will start a new job, rather a new career, in 2 short weeks. It's finally happening, and it's happening fast.

Our lives are about to change, for the better, and I can't help but reminisce back to this past year, when our family experienced one of the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.

We added a daughter to our family and it thrills us to no end. At the same time, we had to realign our finances to make it work as a bigger family with half of the income. We trimmed a lot of fat, made a lot of adjustments, but we made it to the other side.

Now that we're here, I look back to the day-to-day struggle, and I am filled with certain anguish knowing that there was some frustration, that we sometimes took it out on the people we love the most, each other. There were days when money plagued my head and entered my sleep. There were days I didn't know how we were going to make it. There were days when I saw our saving dipped by thousands of dollars when I hit "pay bill" on our mortgage, knowing that we didn't have the income stream to replenish it in the near future, and my heart broke a little. Finance is a part of life, and there were days when it became a much bigger part than I would have liked.

Things are looking up now and it is a good feeling to know that we no longer have to look forward to that unemployment check or that pay day. We will make changes, as another regular stream of income enter household, to replenish our saving, to plan for a much needed vacation, to adjust our lives so that we still have the necessary quality time with each other as a family. But for now, we are basking in the new state of mind, a relieved state of mind, a feel-good state of mind...just in time for spring, a time of revival and renew, and as we welcome families from afar in two short weeks.