Banking...and crying

Image courtesy of Ashley Herrin's Flickr

I fell into banking after some very convincing phone calls, sound words of advice, and the best possible contacts in the finest possible places.  My Aunt Erika once told me I was born with a horseshoe up my ass.  I have to agree with her on this point: it seems that every place I turned, if I put a modicum of effort into a project, it worked out.  I can’t remember not getting my way until 2009, when my life fell apart.  Then again, I suppose it was always me getting my way: I created my own destiny every single step of the way and blaming anyone else for that is just an exercise in futility.

My boss at the bank thought I was some sort of protégé, so she excelled my education and allowed me to take tests I must admit I wasn’t entirely ready for.  I was studying all the time while in the throws of a very intense, entirely wrong-for-me relationship; I was a first-time homeowner, and I was working full time.  I was in over my head.  I failed the test that would make me a financial advisor in a very short time and I spiralled into a pit of self-pity and seemingly eternal doubt.  What was I doing?  My job wasn’t satisfying me and I was miserable.  My windshield was hit by a brick-throwing punk (I need to sell this house and move, thought I on the daily), rendering me completely dependent on someone else to get me where I needed to be…it sucked.  Though I can’t completely remember in what order these things happened, I can add that I was kicked by a horse (yes, a horse) in the lower abdominal region and suddenly it dawned on me: I had to get out of this life.

Another branch of the same bank was desperate for a financial advisor and would let me take the two-week crash course in London, Ontario, where my alma mater was located.  I took the job in a heartbeat, much to the chagrin of the woman who thought she would “make me a financial star”, and took the first opportunity to get on that course.  It was the best two weeks of my life that I could recall.  I learned all day with this entirely geeky financial guru, ate great food all the time, worked out with people who became (and remain) friends, and studied well into the night.  I was hooked: I needed to be back in the classroom.  It came as no surprise to me that I passed the test with flying colours and was officially an FA.  It was a great feeling to be responsible for people’s personal fortunes, but I felt ever-thwarted at the bank.  Every trade I made had to be checked and cross checked for compliance (I would thank the bank later when Canada wasn’t hit by the sub-prime mortgage crisis that helped the US crash into a depression, but that’s another story), and I felt like my work didn’t matter.  This theme will recur over and over again as this tale gets woven.   I needed desperately for my work to matter.

Since I’d always been a (very successful, entrepreneurial) math tutor, I continued doing this well into my years of finance.  One night, I was tutoring a kid whose name slips my mind.  He was a brooding teen I’d known for about a year who much preferred the company of his video games to that of girls, and he rarely cracked a grin.  This evening though, he was all-smiles for some reason. I looked at him as if for the first time and said, “So-and-so, you got your braces off!” 

“Yeah,” he replied bleakly.  “Like two years ago.”

Sh*t.  Note I’d known this kid a YEAR and had never known him NOT to have braces.  What a tool.

That night, I confessed to his mother what had happened and laughing about it (because she certainly didn’t miss a chance to have a giggle at this prize’s expense!) turned into talking, which turned into sharing a pot of tea.  She was a professor or accountant or physician or something equally impressive, so I quite liked her company (poor kid wondered why I still hadn’t gone home) and drank in this quality time.  The conversation turned to the age-old question about finding meaning in life (told you it’d come back) and she asked whether or not I’d found it. 

Nope. 

This quickly turned to tears as she coached me through many a scenario where I may have actually found the meaning I so eagerly sought.  None was to be found. 

“Why aren’t you a teacher?” she asked me.  “You’re so good at it.” 

We cried (cried!  Together! Can you imagine?) about all the lost opportunity and lost time, shared some stories, and I left thinking hard about how things had shaped up.  After the failures and the kick by the horse, it seemed the only thing I excelled at was making math fun for kids.  Ha! 

That night, I talked to Laura about going back to school.  I’d be a teacher, wouldn’t I?  And suddenly it was decided: I was going into education.