FAQ: How Does Your Family Feel About Your Life?
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.
I have to admit that this question always makes me smile. No, I was never interested in marrying a professional athlete. I never really thought about what a professional’s athlete’s wife was like, so consequently I never desired it.
When I went to Penn State in 1998 to play soccer though, my brother somewhat prophetically told me he thought I would end up with a star football player (wrong sport, but right idea). I laughed at him and told him soon after getting there that I was certainly not interested in dating athletes. Being a part of the athletic scene, I was close enough to the action to see what most of these guys were like. Although I did end up dating several in my time there, it was usually by default. Just as many people in the entertainment business end up marrying one another, athletes always seem to be together and to understand the different pressures of the athletic life. Plus athletes all had a very similar schedules due to practice times and were required to do certain things like mandatory study hall all together.
As mention in my story about how we met, when I first saw Joe as a basketball player, I was anything but impressed. And when we initially began talking, his being an athlete was not a positive in my book. And the fact that he completely disliked school and was really only there for basketball wasn’t exactly a turn-on to a girl who was in the honors college and preparing to write her thesis. But any time he talked about playing professional basketball, I did fully believe he could do it. I knew from the first week of dating that he had no other desire than to play professionally once his four years at Penn State were up, so if there was to be a future between us, I would need to be bought into being a professional athlete’s wife. Of course, at that time I had no idea all that would entail!
FAQ Series
By · CommentsWith a lot of questions to answer for my FAQ page, I am going to make them a series of posts. Then I will compile all the answers on my FAQ page. Here is what I will be addressing so far:
About Me:
1. Why don’t you stay in the U.S. and work? Why do you travel with Joe?
2. Did you always want to marry a professional athlete?
3. How do your parents/family feel about your lifestyle as a professional athlete’s wife?
4. What is your favorite/least favorite part of your life as a professional athlete’s wife?
5. What is your favorite place you have lived?
6. Do you ever want to work?
7. How to find time to read so many books?
8. How do you start a blog?
About Joe:
1. Is Joe’s personality off the court similar to how he plays on the court?
2. How did you and Joe meet?
3. How much longer does Joe want to play basketball? Is there a point where if something happened with your family he would definitely stop?
4. What does Joe want to do when he is done?
About Our Family/Lifestyle:
1. Why don’t you put the kids in school overseas? What schooling options do you provide for your children?
2. Do your kids speak more than one language? Do you encourage this? How do they deal with the language barrier?
3. Do your children have friends while living abroad?
4. Do the kids feel pressure because of Joe’s job? Does your son feel like he has to play basketball?
5. How do you go about starting to cloth diaper?
6. How do you employ grace and mercy in your parenting?
7. What is your family’s diet like?
8. How do you pack for living abroad 9-10 months out of the year?
9. How do you travel alone with young children?
If you have any other questions you would like to add to this list, please feel free to do so in the comments section or by sending me a message. Some of the questions that I have already answered in prior posts/pages, will simply be referenced, while others will become their own post. Hopefully some other basket wives will weigh in with their own experiences as well!
