We gave the Dutch the email equivalent of a verbal acceptance of the offers. It'll take a couple weeks for them to get confirmation on our work visas, though, and we won't give notice at our current jobs until then.
In the meantime, Mr. Baroness got a different job offer yesterday from his old boss. I think it's slightly less than he's making now, but about the equivalent of what we'd be making together in the Netherlands. It would be a better career choice, although not ideal. There's a chance we won't get the visas, and Mr. Baroness can't stall him for weeks while we wait to know about the visa status. I suspect he'll take the risk and turn down the offer.
I've been trying to wrap my head around who I've become as an adult. I think I used to be much more self-confident when I was younger. I wasn't necessarily any more outgoing or outspoken, but I thought more highly of myself. At work in particular I feel like I have so much self-doubt. It doesn't help that I'm so indecisive. I look around me and people seem so much more self-confident - arrogant even. So assured that their opinions are the right ones, and everyone else is wrong, if not inferior. But I do wonder if it's just a good facade. I know I try to appear more confident to my co-workers. I'm far more self-effacing with friends. Maybe everyone else has as much self-doubt as I do?
And yet - I'm planning on going and living overseas for a while in a country where I don't even speak the language. How do I reconcile that? Part of it is Mr. Baroness. I know we'll be in this together. Even with the job - we'll be working with each other, and I know he can help guide me along.
I do wonder where my self-confidence went, though, or why. Sometimes I think Mr. Baroness might be the cause of that, too. Not that he has made me think less of myself because of how he's acted toward me - but because of the example he's made of himself that I don't usually feel I measure up to. Or maybe it's the six months I spent looking fruitlessly for a job in San Francisco. Or maybe it's humility taught by my parents or Lutheranism or growing up in the Midwest.
A friend from high school sent me a really interesting email the other day. She'd been reading through my old blog entries about trying to conceive, and she wrote about how much she admired me and wanted to be like me "when she grew up" (or something like that). She seemed to have read some more admirable qualities into my writings than I would have thought were there.
Part of it is, with something like dealing with infertility or IVF, people who haven't gone through it either don't understand (or don't try to understand), or they make it out to be something even bigger or braver or more courageous than it feels to the person who's gone through it. In my case, there wasn't really a choice to be made at all. It was a matter of accepting what we needed to do to try to conceive.
Regardless, her email made me think that maybe I need to listen more to others and believe them when they compliment me like that.
-The Barrenness