Doctorate Degree to Factory Worker to Homemaker

This past week has been my official first week at my new job as a homemaker and I must say I feel much more at peace. I'm definitely in the easy phase as our little Pio has not yet arrived, but that will soon change in a matter of weeks! 

35 weeks with Pio at my baby shower with my sisters recently

Ever since I was in high school, my aspirations were to be a physical therapist. I did everything I needed to and more in order to achieve my goal. I worked as a rehab aide in a hospital during undergraduate school which solidified my desire even more so to become a physical therapist.

I entered graduate school and studied harder than I ever have in my life. Along with school studies, my time in graduate school was quite a time of personal maturation and spiritual growth. I had moved away from home for the first time and lived alone in a rented room within an old Victorian house. I had a claw foot tub next to my bed. As a funny side note, I would do my dishes in the tub because there was no kitchen sink and the bathroom sink was tiny! The atmosphere of the house was very quiet and perfect for reflection. There was even a perpetual adoration chapel a five minute walk away from the house!

I loved my tub!

It was in this house and city that I started contemplating more about my life. I was praying more regularly than in the past, making holy hours more frequently, I formed more of my opinions regarding femininity and feminine dress (see modesty post here), I grew to love G.K. Chesterton and his cheery Catholicism through the Chesterton society meetings I attended,  I attended the Traditional Latin Mass at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe and met some brilliant and lifelong friends as well as learned to sing the chant during mass, I met a likeminded friend in my program who also loved to discuss religion, and I also realized that I had a calling to the vocation of marriage and that I would love to be a stay at home wife and mother someday.

Statue of St. Raphael in the Adoration chapel.
I know he helped greatly with my discernment process!

Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, WI

What a time to realize I wanted to be a homemaker! Smack dab in the middle of graduate school. Well, the practical thing to do was to finish schooling of course which was a little bit harder because I didn't see the same purpose in it as I had before.

I really hadn't come across any likeminded men in this college town. So I took a leap of faith and signed up for an account of Ave Maria Singles. I'll save our courtship story for another post of its own, but in summary, Anthony and I met, and after six months of long distance (cross country) and six more months of a shorter long distance (2 hours distance), Anthony proposed.

Earlier days of our courtship and
Anthony visiting my family for the first time!

Not long after our engagement on July 8, 2012.
My good friend baked us a celebratory ginormous cookie!

During our courtship and engagement, I was still in graduate school and Anthony knew and wholeheartedly supported my desires to be a homemaker. He desired it as well! However, although we both knew I wouldn't be using my physical therapy profession long, he continued to encourage me through my tests, clinicals, and board exams. I could not have gotten through that program without his support and the support of my parents and close friends. In April of 2013, I passed my board exams. In May, I graduated with my doctorate and gave a class speech (quite a horrifying experience in my mind as I do not care for public speaking in the least!).

With the supportive hubby and classmate (as well as dear friend)!

Eek! Public speaking!

My parents were so incredibly helpful throughout my schooling!

In July, Anthony and I married in what ended up being the most beautiful and perfect day of my life thus far.

So happy!

We decided that I would work to pay down some of my loans until the baby came and then at that point I would be able to stay home. I found a job as a physical therapist at a nursing home and started the position in August.

As a new graduate, I was optimistic and full of zeal to help patients. I truly loved my coworkers, the healthcare staff and the patient's at the nursing home. However, the company I worked for had productivity standards. Now this doesn't seem like a bad concept in itself, but the application of these productivity standards lacked common sense.

The idea behind productivity standards is that they want a certain percentage of your clocked time to be billable time. So, at this particular facility, it was 86%. In general, in an eight hour day, they wanted seven hours to be billable time and one hour to be used for paperwork, patient transportation, communication with healthcare staff, etc.

Disproportionate amount of focus on this.

Now, it may be feasible in other facilities, but in this particular facility it was not. So what therapists ended up doing was to clock less hours than they actually worked in order to keep their productivity percentages up. It's quite a sneaky method to get free labor.

And overtime without pay at that.

There were days that I would work ten hours but if I wanted an acceptable productivity percentage, I would only clock eight hours. I worked overtime more often than not in order to feel like I had completed all my work in quality fashion.

Working as a physical therapist in a nursing home can be both emotionally and physically draining. It involves a lot of lifting, coordinating, and rationale for the therapy provided. Add the extra stresses of pregnancy on top of that and I was just spent by the end of a day. Life was a matter of eat, work, come home and eat dinner, watch one show with my husband and sleep.

Yep. Definitely had some of these signs. Source.

The other difficult aspect of the job was that no positive feedback was ever given for our work. We heard more about keeping our productivity up than giving quality care to our patients. I honestly felt like a factory worker that had to bill as much as possible during the day. I did not feel like someone who had spent the last seven years in school, where one would think enough education was provided to work smarter not harder.

I think this is harder in bigger companies.

However, upper management did nothing to change the situation. They kept repeating the same "solutions" to increase productivity at our facility. I suggested a rehab aide to help us in patient transportation as our facility had four floors of patients and it was often time consuming to get our own patients. Upper management's response: "We can't justify that until your productivity is higher." Talk about Catch-22.

Going in circles...

In any case, this seems to be where the healthcare world is headed. As it is largely out of the hands of religious these days, it is strictly business. A business that profits from the sick and infirm. And that's not the kind of job I signed up for. I loved the patients I worked with at the nursing home. But the company I was working for did not make helping them easy.

I have joked with my husband that if I ever complain about being a homemaker, he can threaten to send me back to graduate school or the career world. Maybe the reason why God brought me through graduate school and the career world is so I know that the grass isn't always greener on the other side. I was never in the field of physical therapy to move up the career ladder or to make loads of money. I just wanted to help and care for people.

Now as a homemaker, I can do just that for the people I love most: my own growing family. All my energies will go into supporting my husband, raising all the children God blesses us with, and making our house a home.

I know it won't be easy,
but my husband's productivity standards
are much more realistic!

It gives me the freedom and time to help others more easily as well. Whether it's helping relatives who need assistance or even visiting the nursing home. One thing I found as a physical therapist is that the patient's benefit from therapy, but they benefit equally and in a different manner from having someone to talk to and listen to them. Nursing homes are truly very lonely places. Our elderly deserve much better.

I am really looking forward to this new phase of life. I have much to learn and I am not a domestic goddess in the least, but I have a really wonderfully patient, easy going, and supportive husband. He'll often remind me that in the big picture, it's not about being able to cook or clean perfectly. Rather, the important job is that we have a peaceful household and impart the Faith to our children.

We are so excited about teaching our children about the Faith!

I look forward to sharing more of this journey with you all as our family grows.

Maybe we'll do a future post on why we feel strongly about the having the woman in the home and the man in the workforce. That one is always a fun and interesting (not to mention controversial!) topic of conversation!

Until then! God bless!

                            Sincerely,

                                         Andrea Rose