I married late, a man with two troubled children. Their birthmother and eldest sibling, a sister had been killed in a car accident that the two boys were in with them. Before that, the mother had divorced the father. All three of them when I married into this family were walking wounded.
There was absolutely no way I was going to go to work with this much trauma to deal with.
And it has paid off.
I don't regret it. It was the right thing to do. I may never be a tenured professor, but I will pass on to the world two people who are much less scarred and wounded than they would be. And who knows what will happen next?
Our future depends on how we treat our youth. And honestly, America has been doing a semi-to-very-shabby job of it the last twenty years or so.
God bless you, Knitting, for your compassion and for changing the downward spiral of two young people to an upward spiral of hope and possibility.
You have a reward now, but a greater one in heaven. You, go!