3 Years "Back East"

We lived in Pennsylvania from 1997 until 2000.  Our first year was the hardest, as we didn’t care for our apartment, Jen was (initially) unemployed, and we hadn’t yet made many friends. My main focus was on school, but I gave her as much time and energy as I could on evenings and weekends.  I think she resented having to rely on me for so much, because she had always been very independent, with her own large network of friends.  She filled some time with the occasional crafting class (jewelry making) and focused her energy on fitness and finding work. 

Her first job was as a counselor at a residential treatment facility for teenage boys – essentially a private juvenile detention facility.  These were boys from bad homes with few positive role models and fewer resources.  She helped those she could, but most were poor therapy candidates, well on the way to becoming little sociopaths.  Within six months, she found a job as the undergraduate academic counselor for the university’s psychology department. This was much better, as we were working in the same department, interacting with many of the same people, and her job conditions were infinitely more pleasant.

Things improved over time.  Our second year we found a much better apartment.  We brought home a kitten (a gray little imp I named Gwarsh – still here 14 years later, though slower), we made more friends, drove throughout the mid-Atlantic and New England, and gradually got used to our lives there.  But Jen was never really happy – partly because she felt displaced from her home and friends, and partly because she felt her graduate training was going to waste.  I felt guilty that her unhappiness was because of the choice to come with me, and I hated feeling that way.

In the winter of 1999, she decided to go back to school for her doctorate in clinical psychology.  Two years of counseling undergraduates on how to pursue graduate degrees was enough to convince her to go back for another one herself.  She jumped through all the hoops, wrote the applications, did the interviews, and in the summer of 2000 we were headed back to Portland, OR so that she could start her program.