Unreasonable Expectations

Have you ever noticed that you have certain ideas of how things should be?  For instance:  when you think of a doctor a very specific image might pop into your mind complete with all the minute details you assume go along with the professional career of a doctor.  In my case I have a very fixed idea of what a counselor should and shouldn't do.  And when I realized last night whilst mentally berating myself for having to leave fieldwork early again because of my family responsibilities, I realized my idealized image of "counselor" just wasn't going to work.  


My idealized version of a counselor is someone who keeps the same hours and is available during those said hours for their clients.  Now, if life happens and keeps clients from attending sessions for whatever reason, that's perfectly find in my idealized vision.  But the counselor should always be there excepting emergencies.


The only problem is I can't be that person.  I have the responsibility of being a mother to three children who don't arrange to get sick around my work schedule.  I have the responsibility of being a military wife who rearranges everything so that when the military throws us weird curve balls in my husband's schedule he can make it work.  I can't be the counselor who is always at work during scheduled hours.  And I honestly don't know how much of a problem this is going to pose with attempting to finish my master's program.  


I'm extremely fortunate to have a fieldwork site that lets me set my own hours.  Both my site supervisor and the office manager are very supportive whenever I have to amend my normally scheduled hours.  But to finish my CACREP accredited program I have to attain a certain number of clinical hours within a certain amount of time...and I just don't know if that's going to be possible.


So today I'm going to write the fieldwork placement manager at my school and explain to her that I may be a single parent for 6 weeks at the beginning of April when I'm supposed to begin internship.  I also get to explain that I won't know until the Air Force schedulers inform us if this is actually going to happen.  (The Air Force trains its people in hurry up and wait at basic training and expect civilians to understand the concept, which almost never happens.)  I then get to see if I will be allowed to sign up for internship with the knowledge that for 6 weeks I won't be able to work any more hours than I have in practicum because part of my childcare (my husband) may be in another state.


My other major to do task today is to find a back-up babysitter.  Because having only one isn't really cutting it right now.


But the point of all this is that whether or not I get to finish this degree (which I REALLY want to do) I love my life.  I love my kids and my husband and the relative chaos we live in.  And I love counseling.  But I don't know that I'm going to be able to mesh the two right now...and I'm finding a way to be okay with that.


P.S.  The fieldwork manager at my school is willing to let me begin Internship at the reduced hours I may have to work.  Now I just need to find a potential full-time nanny and quite beating myself up over what I can't change ;-)

Just how Flexible are you?

Something being a military spouse teaches you is to be flexible.  Normally it doesn't matter when my husband's schedule gets all mucked up because I can switch mine around to accommodate it.  But I'm working on my practicum now.  And it makes it much more difficult when military things come up and I have to be flexible.  Thankfully I'm working at a practice with retired military practitioners who understand.  Because not just any site will let you re-arrange your schedule so your husband can test for MSgt.  Or go for some training thing for six weeks.  Or go to a retirement ceremony so that he's on a completely different schedule the next day.  But my site does that and I can't really express how grateful I am to have a site that understands the military family.


Things may get more interesting when I begin working on internship where I'm expected to work more hours.  Whatever the future brings, I'm very grateful for the people I work with.  They have made this slightly unsettling experience a joy.