Archive for Living Abroad
FAQ: How Much Longer Does Joe Want to Play? Is There a Limit?
Posted by: | CommentsIn regards to how much longer Joe wants to play, sometimes I think it depends what day you ask him! There are days when he feels like he could go until he is 40 years old, and other days when he is ready to throw his basketball shoes in the garbage immediately. When talked about in a reasonable frame of mind though, it looks like he would like to play until he is about 34 or 35 years old. This would take us to the end of the 2014 or 2015 season.
Obviously there is much that he cannot control about how much longer he plays. There are career-ending injuries that can take place. There are also the possibilities of a team not picking him up for a season. These situations would obviously force him into retirement, but his desire is to play until he is ready to call it quits.
He is also open to the option of playing shorter seasons towards the end of his career. Many basketball players as they get older and their bodies begin to breakdown opt to wait until after Christmas for their agents to look for jobs. At this point many teams are looking to make changes and bring different players in. Obviously there is a pay cut when you do this, but it can prolong a career and still be a substantial income.
We have also been asked if we have a line in the sand that would determine whether we would move back to the States permanently and do something else. Again, this can be hard to answer when you don’t know all that could happen. There are a few things that we could see would cause us to move back permanently to the U.S.:
1. A health issue. If there were to be a serious health issue with me or one of the kids, we both agree that we would feel more comfortable with having treatment for that issue in the United States. In that case, if the treatment were something that needed to be done on a continual basis, we would move back to the U.S. and Joe would do something else.
2. A financial issue. If it would get to the point where Joe was no longer making enough money playing basketball to support us on one salary, then it would be time for him to be done. He would have to take a significant salary cut for that to happen though. As of right now there are large amounts of luxuries in our lives that we could easily cut out to live on much less than what he makes now. We have lived through Joe only playing half a season twice with adjustments in our budget and spending. We also have money put away in an emergency fund and other places to deal with times of financial hardship. A book that has served us well in living relatively simply, paying off debt, following a budget and saving with the future in mind (for example having money set away for the transition time between the end of Joe’s career and beginning a new career) is Dave Ramsey’s “The Total Money Makeover“.
3. An involvement issue. Obviously as the kids get older, it will be harder and harder to have them overseas and away from community, friends and activities. One of the hardest things for us as a family is being away from our wonderful network at home. If it would ever come to the point where we feel we are not thriving as a family anymore being out on our own, it would be time to stop. We also consider the activities the kids want to be involved with. So far, we have been able to supplement them with things overseas and may consider some extra time at home to do so. Although we used to spend the entire season overseas with Joe, recently we decided to come a few weeks after Joe, spend about a month home at Christmas and possibly leave a few weeks before Joe at the end of the season. This allows our connections at home to stay stronger and for the kids to be involved with activities at home (for example, maybe being a little late for spring activities like t-ball but still being able to participate), while still having us away from one another as a family for no longer than a month or two. If it comes to the point where we feel like that time at home would need to be longer in order for us to be a part of the community and the kids to be involved in things we think should be priorities, we would need to be done with overseas basketball. Once again, the option of Joe playing shorter seasons could be something that could be done in a few years to alleviate this problem while not totally quitting basketball.
Again, we have no idea what the future may hold, but those are situations we have discussed that may lead to Joe being done with basketball. For right now, the plan is to continue on this path until the two of us are in agreement that God has called us elsewhere.
FAQ: Why Do You Travel? Why Don’t You Work?
Posted by: | CommentsThe decision of whether to stay and/or work in the U.S. while your husband plays overseas is one that may families have wrestled with. It is one that we have spent a good deal of time talking about and have come up with the best solution to at the present time. This is not to say that this will never change because we truly can’t know all the situations our family may face in the future. So right now, these are the reasons we make the decisions we do for our family, and that is not to say it is what is right for every family in our situation.
Currently Joe typically plays overseas from August until May/June. For the first year of our marriage, Joe started off in the minor leagues. He had just finished up his rookie season in the NBA and wanted to give it another try to get back to the NBA. At that point we knew there would be a possibility of either him being called up or us heading overseas after a few months. So this did not lend itself to me finding a job where he was playing. And me staying home was not an option for us in our first year of marriage. We felt the first few years of marriage to be crucial to be together as we worked through issues and figured out what we were going to be about as a couple. Since we did not believe in living together before marriage, the turning point of the wedding was a time when now we were in a covenant relationship with one another and could live together. We spent the first few months in the states and then headed to Greece from February until June. It was a great time to learn about one another and store up lots of time with the Lord through private devotions, reading and listening to sermons.
The next season I was a month pregnant when Joe began the job search. At that point I was a bit scared to head overseas to have a baby, so Joe went the minor league route once again. If he would be called up, at least we would still be in the States, but otherwise we decided to stay put in he minor leagues for the season. Thankfully, he had a great situation with a team in Kansas City and we spent the whole season there. Once again, I choose not to work, which we were able to do comfortably from a financial stand point. I did decide that since I was not able to further my speech-pathology career that I would get some education in another area that had interested me: nutrition. So for the next three seasons I did online classes to fulfill some prerequisites in order to do a masters program in nutrition science (consequently I never began the program because of the workload. By the time I was ready to start the masters program I was pregnant with our third child in three years.)
Once we began having children, the decision to stay together for the majority of the season became an easier one. Before we felt it extremely important for our marriage to be together the majority of time, but now we feel it to also be important to the welfare of our children to be with their father as much as possible. Even with the moving, different cultures, being away from family and friends, to be together as a family we believe is a much greater benefit to the kids. There are so many ways the role of the father is undervalued in our society, but we don’t wish to go along with that trend.
We also feel that the benefit of having Joe and I together as husband and wife to be of greater value than having a steady income back home provided by me. Obviously not everyone is in the financial situation where they can have the wife at home, but for us, we are committed to go to whatever lengths to make it happen (an issue I will deal with in a later FAQ). Although we aren’t against a woman working outside the home, our conviction is that a woman’s main role is to be a helper to her husband (Genesis 2:18) and a worker at home (Titus 2:5). We also recognize that in order to keep our marriage as a priority we must protect it from temptation and that requires us to be physically present together (1 Corinthians 7:5). As a mother it is crucial that I be at home as well. Especially when the children are young, we want their primary care to be given by their parents. I know that I could not fully do my work at home, support my husband and raise my children if I had an outside job that took the majority of my waking hours.
In regards to issues like will I ever work or what might cause Joe to stop playing or having socialization for the kids, I will try and answer those questions in other FAQ posts.
**Obviously I realize in this day in age, the issue of working mothers and families who live separately are touchy subjects. I am not trying to get into debates on those issues, but just to share where we stand since it is a question that is often addressed to me.
FAQ: How Does Your Family Feel About Your Life?
Posted by: | CommentsMy parents, brother, grandparents, etc. have always been nothing but supportive of Joe and me. We are very blessed in having two families who support us and love us, as well as a great church family and friendship network.
My family has always welcomed Joe warmly and is as supportive of his career as I could hope for. I know it has not been easy for them though for a variety of reasons:
1. They expected me to finish the schooling path I began. My undergraduate degree was in Communication Sciences and Disorders. This is the first part of the education process on the way to becoming a speech-language pathologist or audiologist. In this line of work though, you must have a graduate degree in able to work in that career. So when I met Joe my junior year, I was starting the process of looking at graduate schools and preparing for my GRE’s. I knew enough about professional athletics though to know that he would most likely not have a job in the same place for 2 years in order for me to finish my graduate degree. Joe and I both felt that building a strong foundation for our marriage was more important than me obtaining my graduate degree, so that I would travel with him. I will go into this issue more when I answer the question about why I travel and don’t stay home and work/go to school. But for me to give up my schooling without having actually finished (I did graduate and get my BS) was hard for my parents.
2. There is not a whole lot of consistency to our schedule. My family has learned to understand that we don’t always know when we are going to be around. Thankfully my parents have learned (like me) to go with the flow and learn to adapt. They have always been open to us dropping in to visit with little prior notification, staying for longer than we anticipated or not being able to make special family events.
3. Having your grandkids across an ocean is not easy. For both of our families, when we had children it got even harder. I am sure I will not fully understand until I am a grandparent myself, but I know ti is hard to miss much of your grandchildren’s childhood because they live overseas the majority of the year. Thankfully technology is now such that our kids do not come back seeing our families as strangers. With my parents, we Skype for about 15 minutes every weekday morning. My parents have made the effort to be up at 4:30am every morning so that after they exercise and shower, they can talk with us for a short time before heading off to work. I think this has made a huge difference in their relationships with the kids. My parents are just a normal part of their everyday life in an nontraditional kind of way.
Overall, my parents (and all of my family) has been extremely supportive, loving and encouraging through our entire marriage and my experience of being a professional athlete’s wife.
