endings and beginnings

It has been kind of a crazy month, guys. One of those months where it feels like you don't get the chance to take a deep breath. Those times are often the tougher times, and they can be transformative.  The past couple of years of my life have felt this way - tough, lovely, transformative, and challenging.  I've been through more changes and experienced more new things in my life in the past couple of years than I ever have before - I've become a mom to my favorite person in the world, I've fallen in love with and became a fiancé to a loving, funny, handsome guy. We've clumsily ran a business together, traveled across the country three times, and learned to become parents to our little bean. I've experienced my parents going through their divorce, moved twice, started going to therapy for the first time and learning that what I had been dealing with for many years had a name, gained a whole new part of my family by meeting Chris, made and lost friends, learned to "adult" (pay the bills, cook decently well, be responsible, keep a house relatively clean), and we've made plans to move across the country with our little family of three.

Gah. Lots of learning, lots of absorbing, lots of change. Some of it is really really wonderful and some of it has just plain sucked. That's how life is. C'est la vie!

One of the big changes for us in the latest few weeks is the closing of the salon that we have been co-running for the past couple of years. It was originally Chris' stepdad's salon, and he passed away about four years ago. Chris helped take care of the salon in the meantime, and there were good years. More recently, the salon began to take a hit - it's a tanning salon, and fixing equipment is expensive and complicated. If you've ever met me, you can probably tell that I'm not an avid tanner, and it slowly went from a fun project for me to help with to kind of a burden - financially, it fell farther and farther behind, and the past couple of months it hasn't been making nearly enough to pay for itself to exist - rent, payroll, supplies, lotions, and repairs add up quickly. Last week, we finally decided to close it for good. It feels like a strange, satisfying and yet bittersweet ending to an era - the salon had been a longstanding  frustration for us, and yet we had become friends with some employees and it had become a normal part of many of our days. It has been a fixture in its community for almost 20 years, and it feels like the "black sheep" of our family has kind of dissipated. (In many ways, it was a wonderful learning experience for us - but in many ways, it also felt like kind of a dark cloud over us - we could never get on top of all the repairs and issues that were happening, and it felt like we were constantly failing.)

It felt like something that was worthy of dedicating a post to - a farewell to that chapter of our lives. It has kind of been my part-time job ever since Ben was born, and it often made me feel like I wasn't doing enough - I was still learning to be a mom all day and night, keep the house clean and our own bills paid, and many days I was driving two hours roundtrip to the salon as well, trying to make sure all the supplies were there and everyone had their paychecks for the week. I wasn't able to do mechanical repairs, but I tried to keep things semi-together, with the help of a great manager (I see you Marti!) and Chris to guide me when I was in a tough situation. Our employees dealt with customers regulating pooping and peeing in trash cans, customers who would yell at them and constantly complain, and we dealt with constant negative reviews on Facebook and people basically roasting us online. I would be lying if I told you all that it's closing didn't feel like kind of a relief, but it also feels like a small failure on my part - I had wanted to fix the place up, make it all shiny and new again, and bring up business and fix the whole thing! It was kind of out of our control at that point, and its end was inevitable. I definitely learned a lot from that salon - the basics of running an actual working brick-and-mortar business, employee dynamics (I learned that some people are going to dislike me no matter how I act toward them! It's gonna be OKAY. Some people just aren't very nice.), budgeting and learning to buy quality items. (We spent thousands of dollars on replacement after replacement of one of our pieces of equipment.) All sorts of good stuff to take with us wherever we go.

Want to know something strange? Someone broke into the salon two days after we closed it! I'm talking, breaking the glass, unlocking the door, rooting around in the drawers, and then bolting. We have it on our cameras and with the help of the police, we are trying to figure out how to take care of the situation. Kind of felt like the cherry on the sundae! (Or is it the icing on the cake? Can I use either interchangeably? I DON'T KNOW!)

Anyway, the moral to this strange and random story? If you're feeling stressed about your current situation, know that it can change in a day - and really, you're in control of it. Also, you will probably learn a lot from the hard stuff. Maybe you're in a job where you feel passionless - find something that you feel joyful about in that job. (I repainted and redecorated our front wall about a year ago, and I felt SO proud of myself when I did that! It was such a small thing.) I felt so stressed by the salon in a lot of ways over the past couple of months, and in one day, it was closed and the situation completely changed. Whatever you're working at or going through - you've got this! Thanks for listening to my long story here, guys. Hope you're all having a great week!

Hugs,

Megan