Growing up in a small town in Oklahoma, I always had the same dream every kid has. Do better than your parents did. I wanted to be the President of a company one day. From a young age I knew I wanted to be an accountant. While other kids in high school were trying to figure out what they were going to do, I was already focusing on college courses to take when I got to college (because back in those years you couldn’t take dual credit courses).

I was one of the lucky ones that right out of college, I fell into a small area of accounting that most accountants don’t find. I do cost reporting (tax returns basically) for hospital companies for Medicare and Medicaid. I have done this for the past 20 something years. I was lucky enough to get in with a great group of people who taught me the ropes but some have become lifelong friends through the good and the bad they have been there for me and my family.

It’s amazing to me throughout my life how much priorities, dreams, and expectations change. When your young, it is all about what you want to do, then kids come along and you put “you” away to be mom and dad, then they grow up and go to college/military/move away for jobs and you are left with an empty house. But you still have jobs (and some have college to pay for like we do). So you go on with your lives, seemingly happy with the way you raised your children and how they are turning out. You might see one get married, have kids, graduate college even. If you are those parents, I congratulate you on making it through.

BUT….you also might have tragedy strike like I did. The perfect world you had built, managed, and ensured showed you were making it in life, disintegrated with one brief moment in time. One phone call that took every breath out of your being and took you to your knees where you prayed that God would take you instead or someone had made a mistake and it was just a misunderstanding or a nightmare you would wake from soon.

Life has a funny way of making sure you don’t get too far ahead of yourself before it shuts you down and reminds you that you are not in charge. There is a higher power (whatever your belief is) that will make sure you know they are there, and you can’t live without acknowledging their presence in your world.

Over the last seven months, I have asked myself where was God that day? Why was he not with Big Bubby? Why did he let this happen? Was it because I wasn’t following his ways better? Answers that I will never receive in my earthly body.

What I can tell you is that in that one instance, 11/10/15 at 5:12 AM, in Dallas Texas, my entire world including my old priorities fell away and new ones began to form. I didn’t know it at the time because of what we have been dealing with since. But as the fog begins to clear, as the title of this blog states, priorities, prospective, dreams, ambitions, all those things that you are trying to achieve when all is right in the world, begin to not matter as much as you thought they did before.

Now, my focus is on my family and what we need to do to support each other. Whether that is to call every day and talk to each other, send cards, emails, or whatever. My family is first. Luckily, my job has been very forgiving in this area and has allowed me to be with them probably more than most jobs would have.

I am 14 hours away from my babies here on earth. It is difficult to see them on a regular basis. I know that families do this all the time and that is how life is now in this world we live in. Now, my dreams are not so big anymore. They don’t include owning a huge house, driving the latest car/truck, etc. They include watching my kids (even if on Facebook, skype, calls, texts, etc) make their dreams come true. I no longer have the ambition or the drive I had before to live in the “rat race” of life that most people live until they die in it.

It is time for me to take a hard look at my present life and decide what is really my true calling now. Do I really care what title I have other than Mom? Was losing Big Bubby a call for me to make a change? Was it a calling to try to help others by just writing this blog? I don’t know, but over the next year or so (since they tell you don’t make drastic changes for a year or so after a tragic loss) those answers will be decided along with my husband’s input.

Again, as in other posts, everyone should at some point in your life, take a step back and ask whether or not what you are sacrificing is worth the reward you are receiving. Sometimes that answer is going to be no and you are going to have to decide if a change in your situation is necessary.

More to come on this topic later.