Waiting to exhale

It’s 3 a.m. and I can’t get back to sleep. Gotta love that preggo insomnia. Fabulous, that just means more time to stare at the clock.

I want the next week to be over with so badly, it feels like all I do is check the time. Just a few more minutes, and this hour will be up; a few more hours, a few more days, and then …

And then. Goodness, how to start. Have I mentioned before that my husband is in nursing school? Well, he is … but not for long. In one week, he graduates as an R.N. and starts his spiffy new job making way more money than he ever made as a teacher. All I can say, and without a trace of blasphemy, is thank God.

He’s been in the accelerated program for the last two years, plus a year of prerequisites before then. It’s an intense process, the last year so much so that he had to cut back his hours at work to almost nil if he wanted to pass his classes. It was so hard to have to tighten our belts again and again, but harder still was the tantalizing knowledge that he could simply drop out and go back to work if we were too broke. It was so tempting, that thought. But the only thing less palatable than being temporarily poor was the idea of sending him back into a profession that was slowly killing his happiness.

So we held fast. We budgeted carefully and ran our entire household of three people with a mortgage and two cars on less than $2,000 a month; most of our income was from my part-time job at the newspaper and student loans. There was one month when car repair bills and ER visits hit our bank account so hard that my freelance calligraphy work was the only thing that put food on the table. Well, that and my parents’ insistence on sending us leftovers just because they “couldn’t possibly eat all that, and wouldn’t it be a shame to let it go to waste.” Yeah, Mom, we saw through that (but we love you for it).

Oh, we haven’t been destitute: we just had to budget very carefully for the non-essentials that made us feel sane, like the cheeseburgers I so love (mmmm) or the occasional drum toy for my deserving man.

And it’s been so … tiring. Three years of obsessive coupon-clipping, penny pinching, Big K, eBay and Goodwill, not to mention going days at a time without seeing my husband because our schedules didn’t match up. For as long as the Sprog has been old enough to comprehend, he’s known that Daddy goes to school to learn how to take care of sick people, and we have to be very quiet when Daddy is studying.

And now, all of a sudden, the end is in sight. We’re so giddy we hardly know what to do with ourselves. It’s going to feel so decadent, going out to Pier 1 to buy something just for pure decoration. Nearly sinful to buy clothes that nobody has ever worn before. Positively Bacchanalian to both be home at the same time and him without a blessed thing to study for.

So hallelujah for graduation and gainful employment! And incidentally, if you end up in the hospital sometime soon, and your nurse is a kind-faced young man who drums on the table tops while he’s thinking…be sure and tell him how much you love reading mommy blogs. I bet he’ll slip you some extra Jell-O at dinner. ;)

It’s 4 a.m. now. *sigh* One hour down, almost one week to go.