The Recesses of My Life Returning

In my other life, the one before having a baby and getting swept up into art buisness dreams, I was a student in a doctoral program for Marriage and Family Counseling.  It was all I did, all I thought about, it consumed my life.  I was a career girl, driven and focused to reach the peak of my chosen field.  I was good at counseling and even better at academics.  My ego could not have been any bigger.  Even though I was still finishing the Masters portion of my program, I was adopted by one of the more sought after professors in my Dept, and he began mentoring me through my first steps of conducting research and publishing in professional literature for my upcoming doc program.  My interest was in further developing Adventure-Based Counseling and Wilderness Therapy into benefiting couples and families. 

 found here

This was a passion of mine and I was throwing all my energy into this project.  And then everything started to change.  A summer mission trip to Haiti and the unplanned arrival of my son the next spring shifted my heart, my mind, and all my focus.  Research and doctoral programs were the farthest things from my mind.  My life now revolved around this new little person that entered my life and my heart and passion became focused on families and wanting to help people more than help my profession through teaching and research.  So I stopped going to school, I stayed home with my son, and 2 years flew by. 

Now I find myself in this strange space of wanting to continue to stay at home raising my son and keep plugging away at building my art buisness, but I have this almost completed Masters degree (1 clinical left to graduate) looming out there in the fringes of my heart and head space.  I have no intention of going to work until all the children we choose to have are all in school, but I have to finish my last clinical in the next 2 years or I cant graduate AT ALL! (there is apparently an expiration date on learning).  I struggle with the choice of when to go back and finish, EVERYDAY.  I know that I have come too far to not graduate, and I know that when my children are older that my passion and focus for practicing counseling with families will probably return, and I dont want to regret not finishing.  So after a lot of family discussion and prayer, my husband and I have decided that I will start back up in the Spring 2011.  What I have to do is do a 2 semester internship, where I practice as a counselor at a clinical site and get weekly supervision from a licensed practitioner.  Then at the end I write a really big paper and get reviewed by the department where they decide to sign off on my graduation or not.  Fun, right? 

My heart is torn,  I want to finish and the thought of doing counseling again is a bit exciting (it is one of the very few things in my life that I feel really good at), and I am really excited to incorporate more art therapy techniques than I had before, but I look into my son's teary eyes on the few times that I leave the house without him now, and I wonder how will I manage to leave him day after day for 8 straight months?  My prayer right now is that I get accepted into a clinical site that allows for night and weekend appointments, so that my husband will be home with him for most of my time away.  So here goes,  I am filling out my application and sending it in today.  No more thinking about it, no more should I or shouldn't I, no more wondering when, it will just be and I will take what comes one day at a time. 

 Trash Art done by my son and I

prints available here

Any advice from the fabulous working moms is appreciated :)  How do you deal with the separation of your heart and mind?