Nov. 28: Talk about 1 opportunity that you are grateful in hindsight for having passed you by. For most of these blog challenges prompts, I've focused on my teaching life. After all, my blog is a teaching blog, and this challenge concentrates on the qualities of a reflective teacher. For several days I've tried to think of a professional opportunity that I am grateful for missing, but I really can't come up with one. In Missouri when I was wrapping up my first year of teaching and they needed a Journalism teacher, I said yes. And for two years I worked with some incredible young people and learned invaluable information about the publication world. A year later when the dual credit English position was available, I said yes to starting my masters and got involved with the Ozarks Writing Project. After we moved to Iowa and I got the job here, they needed an individual speech coach. For three seasons I spent long hours at school with some of the best speech kids in the state, an opportunity I will never regret. So for today, this will be a personal blog. A personal blog about love. Prior to meeting my husband, there was the Boy I Loved in High School and the Boy I Loved in College. Still to this today I think of my high school boyfriend when I hear "I Can't Be With You" by the Cranberries, and the sight of a two liter of Diet Coke or a certain bridge over the Cedar River will always make me think of my college boyfriend. But the timing wasn't right with either of them, and we went our separate ways. Then I met Chris on a fateful day in late December. We dated long distance for several months before getting engaged. Then with incredibly terrible timing, after our engagement both the Boy I Loved in High School and the Boy I Loved in College contacted me in an effort to reconcile. This sounds made up, but it isn't. In difficult conversations I had to explain that while I had loved them at one time, I was now with Chris, embracing this new opportunity that life had presented to me. And here's the thing. I don't believe that there is The One for any of us. Marriage is hard, hard work. But life's chapters were unfolding in the way that was best for me, with only a brief prologue of previous love. The pages turn now with the man who loves me well still so many years later, who was willing to go on a crazy adventure across the ocean to grow our family. Chris proposed with poetry, is an excellent sous chef, and cries during Big Fish every time. (Don't tell him I shared that.) So there were other opportunities, other loves along the way. But today I will shout from the mountaintops that I am so very grateful that I let those chances slip through my fingers.
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