The other shoe finally dropped

After months of speculations and hand-wringing, the list of who would be cut at the hospital was finally released...and the husband was on it.  It's a long, complicated story we don't fully understand, but suffice it to say that with a redesigned scope for the hospital and a freeze on hiring, his department ended up with too many chiefs and some of them had to go.  Which means we will be leaving Qatar by the end of this month, most likely, though our end date is a bit up in the air so we don't know when exactly we will be flying away.

Let's start with the bad news:

• Even though we had always known this was an eventuality, the reality is a bit more daunting.  I cried when I heard, and the boys are very, VERY upset about leaving their friends and their home, as you would expect, and the husband is pretty torn up about everything.
• And no, we do not have a job waiting.  We have been applying but nothing has materialized as of yet so we are unemployed.  Da da da DUM!
• We had vowed never to pull the kids out of school in the middle of year after we did it to them twice...and here we are doing it yet again!
• And thus begins the big purge, once again.  We planned when we came here on leaving all our furniture and as much of our stuff as we could so we would start over when we came back to the States.  So the next two weeks will be filled with sorting, packing, listing, and selling, all over again.  It feels too soon to be doing this now, but we have no choice.
• And I feel really guilty about leaving yet another parent organization in the lurch (not to mention the children's library and the bus parents and my seminary kids), though of course all of that can't be helped!

And now for the good news:

• The same week we found out, a few days earlier, we made the last payment on our student loans, abolishing them forever, which was one of our major goals for coming here in the first place.  Huzzah!
• That same week was also the week of J's baptism, so both sets of grandparents were visiting, which meant we both had our parents around when we found out we were soon to be unemployed.  And we had things going on, such as sightseeing and preparing for the baptism, to take our minds off of our current situation.
• By happenstance, we had also already planned a trip to Istanbul for the following week (more to come on that soon), so as soon as we saw the grandparents off, we left ourselves for a great week in Turkey, during which I hardly thought about any of this at all.  And we didn't tell the kids until we got back, so they got to enjoy the vacation unencumbered, which was a blessing for all of us.
• We are leaving in great financial shape.  We get a severance package and our end of service bonus, plus relocation money and our flights back to the States (business class, as they send us out with a bang!) and we no longer have loan payments or a mortgage payment hanging over our heads.  In addition, the husband's parents have graciously allowed us to relocate to their basement, where we live when we are visiting for the summer, until we line up our next job. We are very grateful for this for many reasons, not the least of which is that I'm pretty sure the only reason my kids are not losing their minds over this move is because they know they get to go live at Grandma's for a while longer than usual!
• We both feel very calm considering how much upheaval we are facing.  If this had happened two years ago, if we had suddenly lost our job in the middle of a school year with no immediate job prospects and tons of debt and an international move hanging over us, you would have had to check me into a mental institution.  But this time around I feel like we will end up where we need to end up, when the Lord's plan reveals itself.  Perhaps we needed a dramatic jolt to tear us away from the relative ease and luxury of our life here...nah!

So, where do we go from here?  As I said, in the immediate future, I have lots of work to do closing up the house.  The husband will have to do the legwork to get our administrative affairs in order: turns out disentangling ourselves from Doha is filled with bureaucratic hoops the likes of which we haven't seen before, and absolutely no one will deal with me, the lowly accompanying spouse who is a woman to boot, so the husband must do it all in person.   

And then there is the daily managing of emotions, mine, the boys', and ours.  We're all wound pretty tightly right now, and J was bursting into tears almost every hour on the hour on Sunday (we kept him home from school after he took it so badly the night before and woke up sobbing that morning--I decided to spare his teacher for one day).  Just now he broke down over leaving an armless easy chair the husband bought me for my birthday a few years ago....it's going to be a long, long month for all of us!