Oh Yea Gods… PROGRESS!!  How I wish for PROGRESS.

Lately everything in my life has felt stagnant, dull. I feel a little trapped in the tangles, a little unsure which way to dig myself out.

It isn’t BAD, necessarily, but it isn’t MOVING in any way.

What do I wish PROGRESS ON?

Physically:

I want to start progressing with the physical goals that I have had. In the last year I have started to gain weight, and it’s been bothering me a lot. I have always been a naturally thin woman, and I would still be considered to be within the healthy range in my weight, but the gain has made me feel sluggish. I have noticed a huge change in my energy levels.  This summer I intended to get out more and do more… but I have found that by the time I get home and make supper neither Reg nor the kids wants to really do anything other than watch tv…

While I would like to get out more, I want to have a MIXTURE of different activities that we can do together not just biking. This weekend we biked to the aquatic center and went swimming for 2 hours before biking back, which was good… but can get expensive with 3 or 4 kids and can’t be an every day activity.  I would like to do more walks mixed with biking… as I find biking can be a bit less social. I also want to find ways to take yoga and zumba classes once in a while to get more flexibility…

My employer has  (supposedly) been working on getting a subsidized gym membership at a local gym, which would allow both myself and Reg to go to the gym (if we could find someone to take the kids), and which would give me access to yoga and zumba classes… but so far that’s been just a dangled carrot promise.

Financially:

Right now I am supporting not only myself, but Reg, his daughters and my 2 children on my income while trying to fix up my basement. This is leaving me in a financial worry-zone. I am almost debt free (other than the mortgage) and would like to not only get to debt-free status by the end of 2011, but also progress in tucking away savings. So far I contribute bi-monthly to a less accessible high interest savings account ($100 a month) and have RRSP contributions regularly socked away by my employer (complete with employer matched contributions), but I would like to be in a more secure place.

Career:

I want to see progress in my career. Currently I have been in my job for almost 4 years… 4 years of the same job while being promised that I could train for other areas of the business. And it seems very likely, given my current manager, that I will get nothing more than idle promises to be allowed to take training to forward the ambitions that I have, to pursue the path that I have been pushing to walk for the last 8 years. To that extent I have been exploring the option of taking an online master’s degree program…

Only… it all comes back to money. I can’t get answers from any sort of agency regarding how to apply for a student loan to cover the cost of the courses when I am in Canada and the school I have been accepted to is in the USA. I don’t think I can afford the whole thing on my own, I just don’t have enough savings, but a lot of the options that I have found also do not allow me to be earning as much income as I am and qualify for a loan at the same time – but how else can I pay my bills and feed and clothe my children if I don’t work?

I could get a little funding from my employer… MAYBE. The biggest problem with that is that my manager has to sign off on me getting the very training he has been trying to deny me for the past year, and which my former manager denied to me for the previous 3 years! My manager has indicated that he MIGHT be willing to assist me with this, but that I cannot expect to be putting any of my skills to work on the job as they already have 1 engineer, 1 estimator, and 2 engineering COOP students who have been promised the position – I could get the assistance, and then be locked into employment with them for an additional year either unable to use my education or having to take on both the new role and my current one at my current pay level as they have no interest in hiring another “office girl” here…

I know I need a challenge and I need to push myself to move forward… but I am unsure how to do it without destroying all that I have built up in the past three years. I want to put myself BACK on the career path that I intended to travel so long ago… but I can’t do it without assistance and that assistance isn’t in the cards yet.

Family:

This summer is a testing ground for a blended family with Reg. Unfortunately, with my kids at their father’s 50% of the time and his younger daughter not really wanting to anywhere but his parents, we haven’t really had a chance to establish a family identity with everyone.  This is causing all sorts of difficulties.Not getting a chance to see the kids together, to get them used to being together and having the same rules and expectations is making it hard for me to figure out if this is what I want, if Reg is strong enough to take on my kids and their problems, if I can deal with the behavioral issues that his daughters present, if we have compatible parenting styles and ideas, and if we can work together to make a loving, peaceful household (with 4 kids “peaceful” would be relative, of course)…

Adding to this is the idea that I want to try for another child someday (hopefully within the next 2 years, as I am past 35 now) and all the issues that will come up from that – my desire to not have any of the grandparents “take over” parenting on me, concern about how S would react to a new baby taking her place as youngest in her family, repercussions from theEx, how would Reg’s family treat a new baby (the way they treat S? the way they treat C? ignore it like they do with my children?), how to manage expectations of a blended family…  Not to mention that I’m sure that very few friends are willing to accept any more children in my life… I want to see progress on my request to have my fertility restored (if only to take back something that felt taken from me by theEx).

Spirituality:

I wish to see progress on so many parts of my spirituality that feel sorely lacking lately. I wish to progress with being creative, meditating (without falling asleep) and reading tarot.

I know that all these things are things that I have to work harder for if I want to move forward (and I do). The problem is that I don’t have the capacity to do EVERYTHING all at once and I am not sure where to START, what to focus ON. Somedays I think that family is the best place to focus, then my job feels so sucktastic that I switch focus on both looking for a new job and finding a way to fund my further education, only to feel spiritually empty and focusing my meager free time into trying to light my creative fire and commune with my guides…

I feel like I really need some sort of “answer” as to what to do with my life, what I really want, what is the best thing to focus on…

I want progress in knowing what I want to be when I grow up…