Dominican Housewife Chronicles - Knowledge vs. Wisdom

Here is a picture of my husband with his daughter this week   My stepdaughter who is twelve has been visiting us from Germany for the past two weeks.  My children are all grown so it’s been awhile since I’ve had a pre-teen girl in the house.  Well let me tell you it brought back some memories and not all of them were fond LOL.  It was great watching the action from the sidelines though and being the stepmother I’m the nice parent which was kinda fun.  I’m sure my children would say that I wasn’t so nice when they were growing up LOL.  Watching my husband interact with his daughter brought me back to my childhood and even when I was raising my own children.  

Things you wish you would have listen to or things you wished you would have said.

I realized a long time ago that I really should have listened to my mother and my grandparents more when I was growing up.  Someone once told me that the longer you live the more you learn.  When I heard this, I thought well of course dummy everyone knows that.  What I now realize is that no matter how much schooling you have or how many books you read in your lifetime you may acquire knowledge but acquiring wisdom is a completely different skill.  Let me explain.  If you ask google for the definition of knowledge it says this, facts, information and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.  The definition of wisdom is, the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgement; the quality of being wise.  So, it seems that having wisdom involves more than just having knowledge it involves using your knowledge in such a way that would be considered good judgement or wise.  I think I can finally say that I’m at a point in my life where I have acquired some wisdom, not as much as my mother has but certainly more than my children have.  There are so many things I could list as things I should have listened to my mother about but for this blog post I’m going to focus on one area.  It’s not really something she tried to tell me that I didn’t listen to or follow it’s more something she tried to explain to me and until now I really didn’t have the knowledge or wisdom to understand.

I grew up most of my life as an only child and my mom was a single mom.  She remarried when I was in my late teens and adopted two little girls but for most of my childhood it was just me and mom.  From my perspective we weren’t rich, but I didn’t consider us to be poor either.  I had a roof over my head, a bed to sleep in, clothes to wear and most of the things I wanted.  I say most things because there were two things in my childhood that I always wanted but never got, the first is a hamster.  That never happened because my mom does not like rodents at all.  Like she can’t even look at a picture of them.  The second thing I always wanted was the big box of crayons.  You know the 64-crayon box with the sharpener in the back.  I always wanted that, but I never got it as a child.  I think was I was almost 30 years old my mom finally got me the 64-crayon box and to this day I still have it hidden away in my closet from my grandchildren.  It was probably one of the best gifts my mom ever gave me.  It’s kind of like the running joke between my mom and me.  I used to tease her all the time about my creativity being limited because I didn’t have all the crayon colors.   

Besides not having all the crayons I had a great life as a child.  My mom and I had and still have a special bond.  I watched how hard she worked, and I was very aware of the fact that she worked and made money and that’s how the bills got paid.  From a very young age, sometime in elementary school I can recall sitting at the dining room table with my mom once a month because she only got paid once a month.  Once a month she would go through all the bills and put the money into separate envelopes.  That was her budget system and it worked well for us because I can never recall a time where my basic needs weren’t met.  I didn’t understand everything, but I knew enough to know that my mom needed that job to keep things afloat.  I think one of the most traumatic things for me as a child was the day that my mom came home from work and told me that she quit her job.  I was a young teenager at this point and I remember feeling horrified.  My mom seemed so happy and calm and inside I was freaking out.  I recall asking my mother why she quit her job and at the time I didn’t understand but I recall her reasons being something like she wanted to do more with her life, she wanted to find herself.  I was thinking to myself, well how are all the bills going to get paid?   For the first time in my life I felt insecure but maybe it was foolish of me to feel so secure in the first place.  Anyway, we survived, we never slept in our car or anything like that.  Things changed a bit, but we made it.  I have always attributed that experience to my inability to take risk.  I’ve never been interested in any job where there wasn’t a base salary.  I had to know what my income was going to be on a bi weekly or monthly basis. 

Fast forward to now and why this childhood experience is relevant now.  In 2017 I took an early retirement offer from my job of 27 years.  I loved my job and I’m way too young to retire but something was pulling me away from that corporate American life.  It wasn’t my husband in fact I made the decision to take the early retirement the week before I met him.  The offer came in Sept 2016 and I made the decision to accept it in Oct 2016 right before my trip to the Dominican Republic with my daughter Jennifer and that is when I met my now husband.  The retirement package that I took gave me an 18-month payout instead of a lump sum.  At the time 18 months seemed like a long time to figure out what would be next for me.  Well now it’s month 16 and I’m getting a little anxious about what’s next.  It’s like that feeling I had when my mom told me that she quit her job BUT it’s different now because I completely understand now what she meant when she said she wanted to do more with her life and to find herself.  As I’m nearing the end of my payout I too feel like I’m not sure returning to corporate America is where I belong.  I feel like there’s something else that I am supposed to be doing with my life.   I also have a strong feeling that being here in the Dominican Republic now with my husband is a part of me finding my way to the answer.  Over the past two years I’ve been doing things to set myself up for something else.  I completed a Chaplaincy program which allows me to be a volunteer chaplain for one of the local hospitals in my hometown.  I also completed a course and have my certification now as a Certified Recovery Specialist.   I also recently started a non-profit organization called A Blessing For you.  We provide blessing baskets to new mothers in need.   I haven’t quite figured out how all the pieces fit together yet, but I know there’s something bigger out there for me.  Bigger not necessarily from a monetary perspective but bigger from an impact perspective.  So, stayed tuned as I continue on my journey.