Tonight I handed in all my Practicum IV requirements — the final documents needed to complete my Master of Arts in Counselling degree. Which means that I am done. Done except for one last trip to Calgary to meet with my classmates over brunch on Friday morning for our final practicum class.

Done.

Did you hear me?!

Done! Done this 60-credit masters degree that has been in my life for the past 4 years and 4 months.

And what was my first response?

I cried (not tears of joy) and had an overwhelming desire to debrief about all the ways I have done poorly over the past four years.

(Trust me, this was not the way I anticipated feeling after being done everything.)

But alas, that is what happened. And so I pressed “send” on my email, went to the bathroom, and then sat down on Marc’s lap (breaking our Poang chair would’ve really added to the moment, but it thankfully didn’t break) and proceeded to tell him about all of my worries about how I could’ve been a better wife and mom, how I’ve been caught up in my own stuff, and have not been the person I should’ve been all of these years. I didn’t get crazy negative and I didn’t break out into sobs… but it was a pretty solemn moment, a bit of a fearful moment, and tears were shed.

Because what’s done is done.

Yes, I now have done the work to put two new letters after my name. But what I’ve done (and not done) to get there is also done and there’s no changing that. I know I’ve done pretty well and that I’ve grown so much, but my first response wasn’t to embrace the good, it was to acknowledge and worry a bit over the bad.

And maybe that’s okay. And maybe I can do it now and get it out and let it go, and I will learn from the mistakes as much as the good, and, thankfully, I have an extra-gracious family who has loved me through it all. Thankfully. I know there is much to be thankful for. Truly.

So there you have it. It’s all over. And hopefully the crying is over too. Maybe just some tears of joy when I walk the stage on April 26th.

Just over four years ago, in January of 2010, I started my first course in the Master of Arts in Counselling program at Providence Theological Seminary. It was a psychopathology course and apparently I was the only one in the class to read the textbook. At least that’s what my good friend Amanda said. Except at that point she wasn’t my good friend. I actually met Amanda for the first time in that class. I remember so clearly her standing talking to some students at a break and calling me over and asking if I was “Marc’s wife who we’ve been waiting to meet.” The running joke that whole week was that I’d finally be allowed to leave the trailer! Another memory of the week was when the professor was highlighting symptoms of OCD and said in a panicked voice, “Did I lock the front door this morning?!” I replied very casually, “We don’t worry about that. The cold shifted the ground over at the trailer, so the door doesn’t even close anymore.”

And so I began a four year journey to get this masters degree. Something I hadn’t even thought of a year prior nor had ever considered as a career option in my life. But the more I learned, the more I loved what I was learning and saw how well it fit with my interests and abilities. And I did well, academically. And I tried my best to balance life as a part-time student, full-time mom, and wife of a full-time seminary student (and later, pastor) all while living in 800 square feet of trailer with the nearest family 900km away. The kids were 2, 4, and a just-turned 7 year-old Madeline when I started. Olivia was in diapers! And now at the end of this, I will graduate on my 35th birthday and Olivia will turn 7, herself, two days later!

Marc and I will have our 14th anniversary this August. Right now we’re sitting at 13.5 years of marriage. We got married right before our final year of university. I did the math last week. In 13.5 years of marriage, one or both of us have been in school for 7 of those 13.5 years. And you know what we were doing the other 6.5 years? Those were the baby years of course! So we’ve either been stressed and sleep-deprived from taking care of kids or writing papers.  I know that the regular 9 to 5 work world is stressful in its own right. But the only time we’ve ever lived that life was for the 9 months I was pregnant with Madeline and we moved twice in those 9 months. (We’ve moved 6 times total in our marriage, and, truly, I don’t feel like we are as gypsy-ish as we sound.)

So I am simultaneously looking forward to having just work (because did I mention that the counselling agency I’m interning at has asked me to work there after I graduate?) and also feel like I may have a slight identity crisis. I feel like I’ve lived life for so long with, at the very least, a constant low-grade (moving to medium to high depending on the week!) stress because of deadlines that I know it will take some time for me to adjust to the lack of  external stress and pressure in my daily life. I know this because at the end of every semester (if it actually ended before the next one started), I always took about a week to not feel lost in my days because the deadlines weren’t there. I also know this because today I found out that one of my courses from the masters of philosophy I started after university will count as my final theology elective and so I am now a half a paper away from being done my degree! And when I got the news I cried tears of joy and felt such relief. And then as the day went on, I had these moments of feeling lost and disoriented, but eventually the relief of not having one more course to do would come again and I’d try hard to believe it.

I’ve been waiting for this day for so long. It’s always seemed like something so far away — possibly even something that wouldn’t happen or that I couldn’t do. But here it is. And so tonight we celebrated. Marc and the kids and I drove into Camrose and we celebrated “Dixie-style”. Meaning we ate as cheaply and efficiently as possible. East Side Mario’s has this great “4 can dine for $24.99″ deal with bread, soup or salad, and pizza. Knowing we’d be out for supper, I gave the kids a little bit of pop with their lunch so that we didn’t have to buy drinks at the restaurant. Then we ate lots of bread and soup and salad, so that we got full on that and took some of the pizza home. Marc thought our lack of beverage purchases wasn’t very celebratory, but I thought it was the perfect way to “celebrate Dixie.”

And while it seems like I have been in school forever, I know that these years will fade in memory pretty quickly. So tonight I want to give a few snapshots of my life as MA student ma.

That first semester, we had 30 days to from the end of the modular to complete all of the assignments, and I recall locking myself in the bedroom of the trailer a few times when Marc would get home from school, telling him, “I just need 30 uninterrupted minutes to write this paper.” And that’s how I’d do it. I’d power through with gusto when I could be by myself — which was not often. I worked a lot during naptime. The thing was, the school work was not my main focus being a mom way. I always thought of the degree as my hobby of choice, rather than — say knitting — and so I could jump into pretty easily whereas the full-time students would easily get bogged down with the never-ending schoolwork.

Then there were the week long courses that took me away from home. I had three in Calgary and one that took me back to Manitoba after we’d moved to Alberta. The first time, Olivia had burnt her arm the week before and so Marc was left with the responsibility of taking three kids to the ER for dressing changes every night before driving 1,400km on his own with them at the end of the week to pick me up. During the other courses, the kids were, inevitably, sick. My modular in Manitoba last year included Marc texting me pictures of Olivia’s swollen face and telling of trips to the ER while I was in class. Then there was the time that my license plate fell off on the drive to Calgary. Yes. Those modulars were always very interesting. And I know Marc is an exceptional dad.

I recall finishing up my class on the book of Job (with the president of the seminary, Gus Konkel, who actually translated Job for the New Living translation) while lying in bed with strep throat two days before we moved to Alberta. I did *really* well on that paper. Seriously. Because, I have also learned that 20 drafts of a paper doesn’t necessarily make for a better paper. I have gotten some of my highest marks when I’ve said, “Screw it!” and submitted my paper thinking that it would just “have to do” and then finding out what I did do was a 98%.

You see, the researching and writing papers has always come easily to me. I enjoy it and know I can do it well. The biggest stress came when I actually had to counsel people. I felt so inadequate. Part of the reason was because I had done quite a few courses online and so I felt like my professors maybe didn’t have a good gauge of whether I was capable of counselling. And I also never really knew (still don’t!) how I compared to my classmates and whether I had learned “enough” to be able to really try this counselling stuff for real.

So imagine, if you will, Dixie going in for her first counselling session — a roleplay — with her dear friend Amanda as the fake client. Luckily, Amanda knows how to run the videocamera in the session room, as she was also a counselling student. And, so Dixie goes to hit “record” on the video camera and turns to Amanda and says, “Just one minute.” And out she goes, down the hall to the bathroom, because Dixie has a bit of a “nervous stomach” which needed to be relieved before she could press record. But she did come back and press record and she did her first session ever and didn’t get one negative comment, and the prof even commented that Dixie and her nervous stomach didn’t seem at all nervous on the tape.

And after that I knew I could do it! Of course! I mean, I did it once, so, of course, I could do it again! I would never have to run to the bathroom before a session again. I certainly wouldn’t have to go before pressing record on the second session…

Thankfully, that was a Practicum I only condition. And I have now made it through 120+ real counselling sessions without having to go to the bathroom once! I’m still not sure if I’m doing this counselling stuff up to snuff but I am listening to the words of my supervisor and am “being Dixie” more and more in session. And that is, for the most part, good. And I’m learning so much and loving the work the more I do it. I will always love the research and the security of having my nose in a book and the possibility of formulating a sentence in ten different ways before it comes out in a satisfactory way. But I am also finding joy that I never thought I would in the interactions of the counselling room, even if there is less security and more risk involved in participating in the story of another in-the-moment.

So, those are my seminary memories. My semories. I remember the good and the bad. The highs and the lows. And I think, as I look back, I don’t regret too much. I’m certainly more aware of my own struggles and faults now than I was four years ago. But I also have a lot more compassion for myself now too.

And tonight we raised our glasses of water to having my masters being done just a few months sooner than we thought and the palpable sense of relief that comes with that. And we raised a glass to our dear friend Jeff in the registrar’s office who emailed the good news today. And we raised a glass to making it through these months and years of stress and change and still loving and caring for each other in the middle of it all — and probably loving each other better because of it.

So, here’s to four years and 60 credit hours and *cough cough* thousand dollars done… well, after I finish that last half a paper.

I may have spent more time planning coffee dates than reading my textbook… but in the end it was the better choice (and the test is only on the first four chapters of the textbook which is exactly what I read!)

I have come there and back again. There being Manitoba. Back again being the snowy, snowy province of Alberta and the little bit of land in the country we call home. I had such a good time in class. It was a class on psychological testing and assessment and when the teacher asked what our anxiety level was over the course (especially the statistics portion of the course), I answered honestly:

I have no anxiety because I still don’t think there’s any reason for me to know this stuff. Other people know it and that’s fine with me. And I’m hoping by the time I become anxious about the stats portion of the class that Iwill already know how to do it and just bypass the anxiety altogether.

Sometimes this ability to repress my feelings and direct them towards external sources comes in handy…

And, like most good things in life, I stuck my foot fully in my mouth and I absolutely loved the content of the course, especially the statistical analysis part, and I  now see just how useful this will all be in my practice. So there. Now that my foot is no longer in my mouth, I can tell you that the class was excellent and I learned so much and look forward to adding all that I’ve learned to my counselling work.

So that was the main reason I went to Manitoba. But the added bonus was being able to see old friends. How many different coffee dates/different sets of friends did I plan to see during my 7 day trip to Manitoba?

8.

How many did I end up doing?

10-ish.

I am so glad that, even though a snow storm prevented me from making my original flight, my plans didn’t have to change too, too much (besides too little time with Heather P! and a few faces missing at Faith). This is quite remarkable when you consider that I brought the snow with me to Manitoba.

And it was so good to see old friends. And to connect. To really connect. It was nice to know that after a year and a bit, we can still have good and true and deep conversations, even over a short lunch hour. The connection was really good for me. Life-giving and good.

Reason #2 for going to Manitoba.

The other reason I went was for the sanity of my family. I have a pile of counselling hours to get through before I graduate in April. But I also have two (hooray for only two!) more classes to take. I could’ve taken this same course in Calgary in March but I knew that because I’ve had a slow start with my counselling hours that I’ll be making up for it in the winter. Thus, it would’ve been too much to cram another course in to an already busy semester.

So off I went last Saturday thinking a little bit, but not too much of Olivia’s slightly sore-sounding throat. I got her to gargle a few times before I left and we threw some vitamin C at her. But I wasn’t expecting to wake up Wednesday morning to one side of her face being swollen! Well, technically, I only saw it through pictures via text message that Marc was sending me… But I was getting him the Alberta Healthlinks # and advising him on what to do while my class was going on. Long story (and a trip to the walk-in clinic, the ER, a snowstorm, and another trip to the doctor) short, she has strep. Which showed symptoms on her poor, puffy face. Poor, poor girl. What a scare it gave us too! Marc woke me up with a text Thursday night (technically Friday morning) wondering if he should take her back to the ER (in the snow storm) because the other side of her face had suddenly swelled up…

Luckily, Olivia wasn’t feeling sick (just looking awful!) and Marc was still able to do youth and could work from home Thursday and had already planned to use up a holiday day when the kids were off on Friday.

So I did not get the illness-free week that I’d hoped for. But everyone seems to be doing fine now.

And, except for the Livia stress, it was a wonderful week away. I feel like I have grown in many ways and I actually feel a new measure of peace — can’t quite put my finger on what or how. My way of being in the world just seems a little easier and lighter (despite the poutine, cheesecake, and other must-have Manitoba foods consumed this week).

Things are very good.