Comfort Zone

I've never thought of myself as being particularly adventurous. I'm a planner, a lover of order and predictability, a Virgo.
Before a trip to the grocery store I still map out a week's worth of meals and make a list of needed ingredients.

 I remember keeping a log in high school of the outfits I had appeared in that week so that I could avoid the social death of wearing the same thing too often.

 Not exactly madcap spontaneity.

So how does someone like me with a comfort zone no larger than a safety deposit box explain some of the choices I've made in my life? I married young, immediately had two children, and settled into life as a cookie-baking, carpool-driving stay-at-home mom, and you might think that would be the end of adventure for a while, at least. But then I couldn't seem to stay put.

I think it began with Girl Scouts. Before I knew what I had done, there I was in the middle of nowhere, building a campfire, responsible for 15 little girls who actually thought I knew what I was doing. If I could manage that, maybe I could try other things.

I took a deep breath and went back to school. At thirty years old and with two kids, I had nothing in common with the eighteen year olds and twenty-somethings in my class. I discovered that my two-year degree in television production required internships and soon I found myself standing in blood in an operating room and later running camera at a Muscular Dystrophy telethon.

After my children were older, my job as the Public Access

Coordinator for our local cable company took me out on shoots where I was always odd-person-out -  the only female, and usually older than anyone else there. A personality profiler would have said that the last place someone like me belonged would be operating a hand-held camera on stage at a rock concert, or recording from a helicopter, but there I was.

        Returning again to school to complete my Bachelors and finally, my Masters degrees while working and raising teenagers was also a challenge since my first round of college in my twenties had been more successful socially than academically.  

The most terrifying gig of all, though, was becoming a teacher, the worst possible career for someone with a love of control but with underdeveloped disciplinary skills. After my first week, most of which was spent trying to keep class after class of restless thirteen-year-olds in their seats and dealing with one student who literally ran around and around the room, I found myself by my car at the end of the day asking why I’d worked so hard to get where I was.

  A seasoned and hard-boiled colleague was also at her car and so I asked, “Did you ever have days where you ask yourself if you belong here?”

She turned to me with a cold look and said, “Maybe you don’t.”

And yet after having that bucket of frigid advice thrown at me, I continued to teach and learned to love it.

But every now and then I still had those moments of looking out at twenty-eight pairs of eyes (okay, maybe fifteen since the rest were focused on their texting) and feeling amazed at where I’d ended up.