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By admin. Filed in attitude |Tags: attitude, back home, change, coping
…Our adventure in the USA was over and we safely transported our little family back to Australia. Now the challenge was settling back into our life down-under. There were friends and family to catch up with. We had to move back into our house, unpack get the kids settled and start back at work. I had a few weeks to settle in before I had to go back to work but Michael went back to work pretty much straight away.
If you remember, Michael had the year off work whilst we were in America and so it was a big adjustment for him to go back to paid work. At least he was still his own boss and it didn’t matter if he got to work 5 or 10 mins late. His challenge was to get his business back on its feet. The staff he left running his business while we were away didn’t do a very good job and so there was lots of rebuilding to be done.
Rebecca started kindergarten a couple of weeks after we came back and settled in really easily as she always does. Her American accent was a big hit with the other kids but it faded fast.
Tali was the one who had a big adjustment to make. Firstly she went from living in a 2 bedroom apartment with essentially only 3 rooms to living in a 4 bedroom house. She no longer had to share a bedroom with her sister and she spent the first few days getting lost in our house. I’ll never forget her little voice calling “Mummy” when she lost me and couldn’t find her way around. She was about 16months old by this time. The other thing that we had to do was get Tali settled at crèche before I started back at work. She wasn’t too pleased the first time we left her especially since for her first year of life she was looked after by her Dad and the only time she got left with anyone else was when Michael did a workout.
I’ll never forget the look she gave me when I came to pick her up from her first trial at crèche. She was 16 months old and spoke a little, just one or 2 words phrases really. When I picked her up after leaving her for maybe 2 hours she clung to me. There were no tears but she wouldn’t speak to me either. She just kept looking at me with extremely sad eyes and she seemed to be saying, “How could you do that to me? I trusted you!”
My next job was to get me back to work in Australia. I completed my anaesthesia training whilst I was overseas so I was now a fully fledged paediatric anaesthetist. I got a full time staff position at one of the big teaching hospitals in Melbourne, not too far from home.
I had to adjust to being the person completely responsible for every anaesthetic I gave. There was no longer anyone else looking over my shoulder. The buck stopped with me. It was a bigger jump than I had initially expected and I was glad to be in the nurturing environment of a big teaching hospital. We never know everything and it was good to have more experienced anaesthetists around that I could discuss the more difficult and complex patients with.
I guess returning home was a huge adjustment for all of us in different ways. It’s interesting to think about how different people cope with change in their lives.
I wonder if you cope better with change if you are more used to it or does your underlying personality predict your reaction to a change of circumstance in your life.
Perhaps it’s all about your attitude and the way you approach things.
Maybe once again it’s all about your perception whether you embrace change with ferocious curiosity or whether you approach it with fear and foreboding.
Tell me what you think
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