The spider on my pillow...

There was a spider on my pillow this morning. Last week my job told me that they are cutting back my classes next semester to one measly part-time class. My husband doesn't have a job. Even my daughter has anxiety about someone coming in her window at night while she's asleep. For some reason the spider on my pillow is what motivated me to write this down. Now I have lost all of my comfort zones, including feeling comfortable in my own bed. How dare that spider take that from me? How dare they lay my husband off when he has a wife and two kids? How dare they cut my classes, especially when my husband doesn't have a job? The more I look at it, the more I realize that the spider was just innocently on its way to finding a home - he just happened to be traipsing across my pillow at just the moment I pulled off the covers. My husband, similarly, is on his way to finding a "home" for himself - something with more meaning than before. He is being forced out of a comfort zone and into the mayhem of job hunting, which I'm pretty certain, will stretch him in ways that will only prove to be positive in the end. For me, maybe only having one class will push me into new places as well. (I just hope that, like the spider, I don't get flushed down the toilet in the process!)

We all have "scary" moments in our lives - from finding a spider on a pillow - to those much more serious like unemployment. What we make of these moments is what counts. Tonight I am going to bravely lay on that pillow and get the sleep I deserve. I am going to stand behind my husband as we struggle to make ends meet. I am going to be the best English professor I can. I am going to patiently help my daughter to conquer her fears. Thanks to that beautiful, larger than life spider that scared me to death, I am now a braver person than I was yesterday, because I know I can do this - whatever "this" turns out to be.