So here it is folks. I would like to apologize for being so absent in the bloggosphere, and mostly I would like to apologize to all of those folks who feel like I left like a fugitive with no goodbyes. Once you read this you will understand our plite. My loving husband is the worker in our family, and he was working at a medical implant start up company. No, we can not get you a good deal. :) We moved from Austin - the city that we loved - to try our hand at self employment before we started our family. So I moved from all of my friends to a strange little town in the northeast to live in a small log cabin on a lake in the middle of nowhere! I had just had a baby, put my career on hold, and moved from my family. It was so hard, but Pigpen, who was four months at the time was a trooper, and so was mommy. We made it work, and I made some really fabulous friends who helped me figure out how to be a stay at home mom. I love you guys for that!
So we knew that the start up world would be full of uncertainty. I approached it like Vegas. I am a super big risk taker, and my husband is not, so we really balance each other out that way. I supported him on this, and was ready to accept the outcome. It was going to be really good, or we were going to lose our shirts. I was ready for it, and I wore my big girl pants the whole time. Everything went really well for the first two years and his company was in the process of being sold while I had Birdie, and from that point on it was always touch and go. We were constantly in save mode so we could walk away if we needed to with some money in the bank. I think it's known as "f-you money" in the man world. He even told me at one point when the company was almost totally out of cash (the cash crisis occurred several more times) that I might need to go back to work. This conversation happened about a week and half after I had Birdie when I was still riding the emotional rollercoaster of motherhood. It was not a fun conversation to have. It was like being stuck in the trash compactor on Star Wars when all of the walls were closing in, and you were just sitting there knee deep in water full of floating trash with a hairy monster who can't talk and a smelly space captian.....awful! I couldn't imagine putting her in daycare for someone else to be responsible for since I had been with Pigpen the entire time. It just didn't seem fair to her, but I was willing to do what we had to do. I am able to get through these things with my Scarlett O'Hara mentality. "I will think about that tomorrow." I think that might be my best trait.
So, we were always in this perpetual limbo of uncertainty. I can't tell you how many times he would say, we might know something next month. They are supposed to tell us if they are going to buy the company next month. It never happened. They never made up their minds.....they would extend it and extend it, and I had no idea if I was staying or moving somewhere else. I decided to just live my life like nothing was happening. We both decided to just stop trying to predict the future and live life like we were staying. I made plans with my friends and never mentioned that I could be leaving soon. I thought that was the best way to go since we really didn't know. The possibilites were: build the company up locally, stay put for about two more years and then move to the town of the company that acquired them, move to Salt Lake City, move back to Austin, move to San Diego, or move to PA. I looked at real estate in each city every day. It was nuts! All the while not knowing what we were doing or where we were going. It changed on a daily basis, so we just started to approach it with a sense of humor.
Then, we were in PA over Thanksgiving and there were several companies bidding on the start up. My husband got a call from one of the big ones, and was asked to formally interview for his dream job sometime before the end of the year. I think he hung up the phone and crapped his pants a little. He really didn't, but maybe he wanted to. So, it was the Friday before Thanksgiving, and we were leaving that evening to head to PA to be with his family. He talked to the President of the company right before we left and decided to take some suits along just in case they could put an agenda together. Thank goodness he did! They called him Sunday night and told him to come in to interview Monday and Tuesday. He brought exactly two suits....lucky. This company had been looking for someone to fill this job for the past 6 months....it was a big job...
So he left early in the morning for his "meeting", and I had to sit there and tell everyone it was just a meeting with one of the companies that wanted to buy his company.....the whole time I was dying inside because I knew that his family would do cartwheels if they knew that we might be an hour and half away. My family, not so much, but it's nice to make at least one family happy. San Diego wouldn't make anyone happy.
The job interviews took all day long each day, and he was so worn out when he got home, and I was under a strict gag order to not mention one word about this to anyone. He was sensitive that if it didn't work out, the added pressure of seeing his family get excited and then disappointed would be too much to handle, so I just had to sit there and not tell a soul about any of this!!!!! It was torture!!! Maybe I told one person, but I will never confirm that ever!
Time passed, we made it through the holiday and prepared to go to Texas for Christmas. The buying of the company was coming to a head before the end of the year (they really were totally out of cash by this time), and his presence at the office was more important than ever. This meant we weren't going to get to Texas, and my mother's heart was going to be broken! We broke the news to her, and told her it wasn't for sure, but that we were probably going to have to stay in the frozen North until the deal closed. She was very sad, but understood. It sucked to say the least.
The days just mopped by like a Salvadore Dali painting. The present and the future just sagged like the clock hanging on the tree branch it.....was.....so.....painfully........slow. No one would make up their mind about buying the company. I just wanted to call them all and say, "look you stupid suits, shit or get off the pot, so I can get on with my life!" But then!!! My husband got offered THE job! Not one of the million backup jobs in far away places, but his dream job at the big company in PA! It's a huge job for a huge company with huge responsibility, but he is the type of person that thrives in that environment, and he loves to be busy, so well....he's going to be really busy!
This brings me to the part about telling people. I wasn't allowed to tell anyone about the job offer because it was an offer from Company A. Company A had been trying to buy my husband's company, Company C, and then Company A's competitor called Company B was also trying to buy Company C. Company B wanted to buy C, but also wanted my husband to go there and work, but my husband really wanted to work at Company A. It was all very touchy, and very sensative, so I wasn't allowed to tell a soul for fear that something would leak to Company B, and then they wouldn't go through with the buy out of Company C because of his acceptance with Company A. Do you smell what I'm steppin in? We had been waiting for this day for over a year, so I wasn't about to be the one to ruin everything with a blab of the mouth. Wouldn't that be awesome....the one who doesn't have a job ruined the one who does have a job's chances for success. I just couldn't risk it, so I had to keep quite.
With this news, we were able to buy tickets for Texas and spend a great holiday there. We were at my parents' house in the Hill Country for the first part of the holiday, then we went to my family's ranch to hang out with the deer, and then we rang in the New Year in Port Aransas at my brother's beach house. It was soooo awesome! My brother has an enormous boat that I think qualifies as a Yacht. I'm not talking the Yacht that Goldie Hawn fell off of in Overboard, but a mini version of that with 3 bedrooms, 2 full baths, and a beautiful living room. It's unreal! We got to be "those people" one night. You know those people that pull up to the restaurant in their big boat and hop off of the back with kids in tow to eat at the restaurant while the captain stays on the boat and waits for you to finish dinner and drive you home since you drank too much wine; yeah, those people. It was ridiculous, and so much fun! I'll blog about that later.
I was feeling much more at ease since I finally knew what the future held. Nobody got rich when the company sold, but they preserved most of their shareholder's value and the product will make it to the hospital instead of a business book. That was a pretty good outcome. I could actually breathe easy and not have to wonder where I would be in a month. There really were so many ways it could have gone....the worst being all the deals and job offers fall through, the company liquidates, and we're out on the street. That was such a real possibility at times that I just chose the Scarlet O'Hara approach to all of it. I couldn't even think about it.
But now!! We are in PA, my husband started his new job which he loves, and we are about to buy the most beautifully fabulous house I have ever seen. I can't even believe that I get to live in a 100 year old house in PA that sits on three and half acres of beauty. I have waited soooo long for this. I have lived for three years in a log cabin with no bathtub causing me to cringe every time Pigpen got in a sandbox or in a mud puddle. Now he can get as dirty as boys can, and I can choose from 4 tubs to soak him in. I can even hose him down in the yard like a naked little jaybird if necessary, and no one will think I'm white trash because no one will see me. I feel so grateful that everything has worked out so wonderfully, but believe me, it took a lot to get to this point. This is the prime example of patients paying off. For those of you who now me, you know that I am Mrs. Instant Gratification, and not Mrs. Patience. I usually make a gaggy face at those Mrs. Patience people, but I have done my best, and I am quite proud of how I handled things. Now we can breathe easy and be poor because we have a fabulous house, instead of because we are saving for the worst case scenario. I like house poor better than that for sure!
So this is my explanation and my apology to all of the fabulously wonderful people I met in Massachusetts. I love and miss all of you! You were and are wonderful friends, and you will always be welcome in our home. I will make you delicious food, and we will have so much fun if you come to visit. I miss going to the gym. I miss our dreamy play-dates. I miss our girl's weekends. I miss our Natick Mall adventures. I miss our Wellesly shopping excursions. I miss my fabulous neighbors, and I even miss Dunks. You people made a Texas girl feel really happy in the frozen north!!!
