Three Things: Notebooks

▽

Today was the last day. I will never go back to my babysitting job. It has been a month of hardnesses relating to the closure of this job, but now it is over. I described the experience of riding my bicycle away from the house to my roommates as an emotional roller-coaster compressed into a ten minute ride. My first thought was to tell myself to stand tall and look confident as I walked past the windows of their house, in case they watched me leave for the last time. My second thought was, "Whew, this month of stress is over." My third thought was, "I spent over a year investing into the lives of three boys whom I will likely never see again." 

△

I told you in this post that I wasn't ready to talk about the details of my getting fired. I still won't go into minute detail but I will say this: I made two major organisational mistakes in the space of three days. Neither of the mistakes in and of themselves would have been that big a deal if a) they had not been made so close together and b) if they had not caused the mother severe worry. No children were injured or abused, it was just two foolish, forgetful mistakes on my part.

The strange thing is this: Up until this one week I had never made any such mistakes. My track record was great. I had been afraid of making these mistakes the whole time, but the Lord somehow always protected me from my own tendency of forgetfulness and losing things. But this month He allowed the floodgates to open.

In this other post I talked about the ways this has brought me closer to knowing God. It has been a heart-rending experience to leave, but it has also felt right. I never would have quit this job on my own, even though it was taking up a huge chuck of my study-time. I would never have quite even though I wasn't doing anything that ostensibly involved my art-skills or my teaching skills (I did attempt to incorporate them into the job as I talked about here). Although it has been one of the most prolonged and painful things I think that this opens up time and space for me to seek out drawing and story-telling opportunities.

What are my Three Things for today? They are the three single-folio notebooks I made for each of the boys I babysat. I skipped a class today (Shh! Don't tell!) in order to make them. I ran home at 2:00 PM and sat at my desk. For a solid hour I folded, measured, cut and drew. By exactly 2:55 PM I had finished. The end product was a simple, blank book with a drawing of each boy's favourite video-game character or pet. The photos I took of the books are very bad, because I was rushing to get to the job on time. The boys loved them. They were sweet and kind in their goodbyes. I presented one to each and told them some things that I see as valuable in their characters.

1.

2.

3.

When I got home from my roller-coaster bike ride all three of my roommates were gathered and ready to offer hugs and listen to everything. Leya had left a note and a small gift for me on my desk. It was a tiny plastic Minecraft figurine in order to remind me of playing Minecraft with the boys. All four of us got dinner together and it felt like a celebration of a job well done, which is finally concluded.