Next

I started this draft weeks ago, back when I really didn't know what we were doing next, and every time I went to try to finish it, our plan would have changed anew.  It started as a retrospective- I was musing on the past and the decisions we've made to create the dotted lines of our career paths and addresses so far. Everyone has a path that jumps around a bit, but it gets a little more jagged when you marry young, before you're settled anywhere, and you have two people planning on careers and additional education. It gets even more jagged when you have differing opinions on what states and types of cities you want to live in (I'd love to live in DC, he won't consider anything within 100 mile of his parents; I love big cities, he hates them; he loves Texas, I... do not). And then if you start your family rather early in the path, you quickly have to start worrying about things like schools and neighborhoods and maybe not moving every 3 years so your children can have a simple answer to, "where'd you grow up?". Mostly, the jumps in our path have been caused by situations entirely out of our hands- a great job opportunity for one party, grad school acceptance for another... other than our first 6 months in Chicago, I'm not sure it's ever truly been in both of our best career interests to be wherever we've been. Luckily, we like each other far more than we care about our next career move, but it's still interesting to muse. Particularly when things are at a crossroads, as they've been for JP (and us generally) over the past few months.

We have three framed posters by our front door of the three cities we've lived in before Fort Worth: Houston, Chicago, and Austin. All of those moves were for JP. I went to Houston to mooch off him after I graduated early from college and he was working for a Big Oil Co. That one barely counts since I just used his credit card to fund our life while I planned our wedding and occasionally worked in the men's section at the Houston Galleria Banana Republic. But the big move to Chicago actually started out as a career move for him. I'd been accepted to NYU and Columbia's law schools and assumed we'd move to NYC in the fall. JP was looking around for finance jobs there when he found out he was being transferred to Big Oil Co's Chicago campus. I found out later that week I'd been accepted to UChicago law school, so despite never having been to that city and already owning a "Not For Tourists Guide to New York City" as well as a collection of NY subway maps, I accepted the school's offer immediately. Big Oil Co. would pay for our move, we could afford a much nicer apartment, and Chicago seemed pretty in the pictures- why not? Of course I immediately fell in love with Chicago and hoped to remain after graduation. I had offers from some fantastic top firms in the city, but JP hated it there by the end of our three years and only applied for grad school at UT in Austin. And so back to Texas we went. When he graduated from business school, I encouraged him to look for jobs in Houston, because there's so many more companies there that fit his profile and I could go much farther at the firm, and get much better work, if I was in our Houston office rather than Austin. I didn't push hard though- I love Austin and it was a great place for our family, but there's no doubt it was limiting to my budding litigation career and he was job searching in a much shallower pool. Just when he really started expanding his job search to Houston, he got the Dell position and we settled in once more. Seven months after that, I applied for and got my dream job at the SEC, and this time, though the timing really was not great for him, we felt like I had to make the jump. I couldn't grow in Austin, he didn't want to move to Houston or Dallas or any other big city, and there was truly no possible better career move for me to make as a mid-level associate. The SEC would give me the opportunity to develop expertise, substantially boost my resume, potentially jump to partnership when I went back to private practice, and I'd get to do it all while spending 50% more time with my children and husband. And so we went. Eight months after that, JP lost his job, and now we've spent 6 months wondering what next.

We looked at other big cities and JP even applied for a few jobs scattered throughout the country. I'm always up for a move- I love change and exploring new places and I'm always up for living in not-Texas. It was a little frightening to look at law firm positions again. I'd basically be back as a midlevel associate facing all the same career concerns I had one year ago today- not enough good experience, too much hierarchy, too little flexibility, and too little chance of making partner. I'd need a new solution to the same problem and the SEC was one of the best solutions I ever came up with. As an added wrinkle, we really wanted another baby. We didn't want to want another one, two is so easy and so perfect and they get along so wonderfully well, but we can't seem to shake it. We've known it forever and have spent most of the last year trying to talk ourselves out of it and now we're in the weird position of trying to get pregnant at a time when we might be moving and I might be needing to change jobs in the next few months. This is the problem of two careers in an economy where layoffs happen with some frequency and finding another job is not always an immediate fix, and a husband who doesn't like big cities so we always end up living somewhere that works great for one person and not the other.

And so we went in circles until a month ago when it seemed like moving back to Austin was the perfect solution. It all started when a partner I used to work for left the firm and started his own firm and asked if I wanted to come join him. For a brief moment I realized I could make a lot more money and free JP up to do whatever he wanted next. I had realized one of the reasons it wasn't as hard on him (and us) to look for a job last time around was because he was coaching the whole way through- something he loved, something that made some money, and something he knew he was good at. As I phrased it to him that evening in January, "you could stop getting ripped apart looking for a corporate job you don't even want. You could coach and pursue your entrepreneurial interests and pick Landon up from school- everyone wins!" When he replied, "well, I mean, that would be my dream," I was done, we were going. While I enjoyed my job in the SEC, I also genuinely missed much of what I used to do as a litigator (writing, oh I miss the writing), so I immediately contacted a bunch of other people I know in Austin (one benefit of your section at your firm imploding is you now know people scattered all over the city!) and got a few more solid leads to balance against the first one. As it turns out, while getting a job in Austin as a 1L looking at big firms is quite hard, once you have that big firm experience, there are a much larger number of boutiques- boutiques with better work and good clients because Austin companies generally like things like that are local- that want and need you. I went to Austin the first week of March, met with lots of people, got two job offers, one at a fantastic, established firm with a promise of being partner in 2 years and a lot of other great things.

In the mean time, JP got an offer to start a swim school in Fort Worth. There is a good USS club program here and there's a high school team, but there isn't much of any swim classes or groups for kids. You can do a few rounds at the YMCA, but then you either need to be ready to jump into the rather intense world of club (something I didn't do until 8th grade) or you just splash in your friends' pools for a while and maybe remember you like swimming in 5-6 years when you could join club. There was a retired club coach who was sort of running a program, but he didn't have enough time to dedicate to it and he passed away a few months ago. JP's master's coach (part of the club team) brought the idea to him, said he could have the website and client list for free, and that everyone- the club, master's, and high school- just really wanted to get a kids' swimming program going in the city. He sat on it for a while, which I didn't understand at all, and then just when I thought he was going to pass because he just couldn't get excited about it (my concern at that point was that he wasn't going to get excited about anything), I went to Austin to get something there so he could be in his favorite city and I could make more money and take the pressure off him (though, about that time I'd gotten to some really substantive parts of my investigations and no longer missed litigation quite as much).  It was literally while I was on that trip that he decided to dive into the swim school head first.

In the last two weeks he has incorporated, got a merchant marketing account, hired a graphic designer, and been to mixers and meetings and every pool in Fort Worth. He is working on a bank account, on getting licensed as a pool operator, on designing progress reports and lesson plans for classes. He has meetings and phone calls all day and most of the night. His website is launched, he has hired two instructors and has met with them several times to practice the lesson plans on our kids, and he is already getting phone calls and requests for lessons. He's excited. He's withdrawn from the few corporate job leads he still had pending. I'm excited (also, terrified, but mostly excited- as I told him a few weeks ago, if I was going to invest in a company of his, and that's exactly what I'm doing as I watch him pull out of his job applications, then it has to involve swimming/coaching. It's what you love, it's what you know, and it's what you're incredibly good at. I'd make that investment with no qualms- or as few qualms as I'll ever have in anything besides putting money in my mattress).

This decision has meant not only the reawakening of my husband, but also some much-needed certainty on our future location. We're staying in Fort Worth for the foreseeable future and we're all excited about that. Landon will be registered for our nearby public Kindergarten for the Fall (ah!), Claire will move back up to full-time at our beloved little Montessori-light daycare in the summer, and Landon will be enrolled in various summer camps around the city until school starts. And I, I will stay at the SEC and soak up more experience and try harder to adopt a Plaintiff/Prosecutor mindset. And even more importantly, I will soak up every single extra minute I will have with JP and the kids because I'm there. Interviewing at the firms in Austin really made that hit home for me, with the talk of hours and billables and surprise working weekends. I genuinely enjoyed my work at the firm and I miss certain aspects of it on a regular basis. However, and this is a HUGE however, my life working 8-4:30 at the SEC cannot even be compared to my (relatively laid back) schedule at the big firm. Not only do I have double the amount of weekday time with the kids, and every minute of my weekend time has become my exclusive property to do with as I (or, usually the kids) wish, but I have so much more of me to give them in that time. That is the part I wasn't prepared for and didn't realize was missing (and then found I wasn't ready to give up). It's not the minutes- though those have grown increasingly important as the kids have gotten older. A 9 month old is thrilled to see you whenever you cross their line of vision- their day is the same at pretty much any hour and you can "be" with them at any hour you happen to be there for. But with a nearly-6-year-old, I can't force togetherness. He's always excited to see me of course, but sometimes he's busy when I come home. Sometimes he's already told his dad about his day and is pretty sure it's far too great a burden for me to expect him to go through it again. He has more events and sports, he opens up at random times about random things, and now, I can be there for so, so much more of it. And, even more importantly, I'm generally open to receiving whatever input he offers. I'm not working, I'm not looking at my blackberry, I'm not looking at the clock worrying about a deadline and rushing bedtime so I can get back to work. I'm just here, quality and quantity. Cooking, dancing with Claire in the kitchen while Landon looks on with mockery and amusement, doing word flashcards at night, and planning weekend excursions only the weather can ruin. And just as important- I can curl up next to JP every night on the couch with my Kindle (that I have time to read) while he asks me his 600th question about how the swim school website should look or how he should word his response to a parent email. There is so much more of me, and even as I worry about how the swim school will do and how we'll afford any unforeseen expenses in our already massively trimmed budget, I'm more glad than I thought that my path will stay the same for "what's next."