Graduation: Part 1

It's May 12th, and I woke up at 4 AM. I couldn't go back to sleep because my mind was so full of the past eight years of our marriage - specifically, the last five.

 We got married young. I was barely 20 and we were both only two years into our four-year degree programs.  My husband was a music major, but about three quarters of the way through he came to realize what all music majors eventually must - that the only realistic and dependable career in music is teaching.  And unlike me, he did not want to teach.

So he went to technical school.  It was an eighteen month program which certified him in all things electronic - wiring, building, welding, soldering, circuits, computers, and a whole host of other things.  He went through the program quickly and easily - too easily.  The work did not challenge him.

As I finished student teaching, he started to think about other options.  We had just moved to Lawrence so he started looking into programs at KU and found architecture.  I remember sitting in our living room in our first Lawrence apartment listening to him tell me how much he loved humanities in high school and how his favorite part of his job (a custom home-theater installer) was designing and building rooms for sound.  We decided he needed to make an appointment with the architecture department at KU.  He ended up speaking with the dean, but before they talked, he received an application form for the school of architecture.  The last line of the application said, "Use the back of this paper and draw your shoe."  He started to get nervous, as he wasn't an artist.  He did his best and, after viewing the work, the dean suggested architectural engineering.  It was a five-year program, but seemed like it was more in line with his passions and goals.  It sounded good to us.

He enrolled in the spring of 2007.  True to music-major fashion, only 15 of the credit hours he had taken were worth anything outside the realm of music, so he was essentially starting from scratch.  He quit his installation job and began working at a bank in Lawrence.  With me teaching full-time, no debt, and no kids, we were living quite comfortably.  But when year two hit (aka studio), he realized swiftly that if he was going to do this and do it right, he needed to quit his job.

To be continued...