Dachau revisited

I’ve been to Dachau twice now—the first time was in the early 80s during my first marriage, and of course yesterday’s trip.

The first trip was strange not only because of where we were (let’s face it, Dachau is somber and thought-provoking), but also because it was about a week after my older son had fallen from a window, landed on the sidewalk below and fractured his skull, plus I’d found out the day after Jordan fell that I was pregnant with Ben and to top it all off, my then mother-in-law had just arrived to visit us for three weeks. Whew, that was a lot going on. I recall that the weather was incredibly hot for Germany, in the mid to upper 80s, possibly even 90. There were no guided tours then and the gate was in a different spot than today. The museum had what I guess was a visiting exhibition of shoes because it wasn't there yesterday—an impossibly huge pile of shoes from victims (I think they were specific to Dachau but maybe not). The shoes got me, seeing all those shoes humanized the genocide there in a way that is sometimes missed by blurry, black and white photos.

This second trip was no less moving. This time we did have a tour guide and she really filled in all the blanks. The weather was not great—temps were in the mid-60s and it rained pretty hard, hard enough to soak my not very water resistant coat so that in the end I donated some money to get a plastic rain poncho. But it was appropriate to have not great weather there. At the end of the day, I’d be getting on a bus, then a train and heading to the Hofbräuhaus for some beer and a late lunch with just wet clothing to bother me.

If you have a chance to go to one of the concentration camps, or to the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., go. We should never forget what happened.

Snippets from Munich

As I remembered from living in Germany in the early 1980s, there’s just no trash here. None. I didn’t ride the subway then (our town had buses and trains, too small for a subway) but there’s no trash in there either and no graffiti.

Trains still run absolutely on time.

We saw several groups with leaflets but instead of shoving them into people’s hands, they stood politely holding them in their own hands, extended so you could take one if you wanted to.

We were on a walking tour about food yesterday afternoon, standing quietly in a small group with our guide when an older lady—in her 60s? perhaps 70s?—began lecturing him. My German is quite rusty any more but I had no problem understanding her diatribe. She never yelled but boy was she vicious. She had a lot to say about Americans, Obama and African-Americans.

Today we’ll go to Dachau. We hope to see a couple of museums this afternoon but it’s also supposed to storm here. We’re hoping it’s not heavy rain.

Time for a cool change?

I’ve always envied those people who seemed to have been born knowing what they want to do with their lives. I knew a few of them in high school and their certainty of purpose awed me. I had no idea what I wanted to do, which is partly why I joined the Army after graduating. I figured being in the military would buy me a few years to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.

That lack of defined purpose stuck with me for years. Even after graduating from college, I didn’t really have a plan or a clear goal for a career. I had flirted with the idea of law school but real life intervened there (one child developed a serious chronic illness and the marriage, which had limped along for years, finally died). Plus I was hampered by fears of failure and felt as though I was an impostor, thinking I could do these things. I was also really interested in counseling psychology but was even more afraid of going for a PhD in clinical psychology, in terms of time, money and effort. Still, that dream persisted.

In 2005, I’d finally worked up my courage to pursue the counseling degree. I’d done my research and found an M.S. program that was well respected in the area, and would prep me for getting licensed in both Kansas and Missouri. But I needed two more undergraduate courses: a stats class and one more psychology class so that spring I took the stats class and an intro to industrial/organizational psychology class.

Now keep in mind, I was still really scared about this career change. You don’t get rich by becoming a counselor or therapist, especially if all you have is an M.S. But I believed that a PhD wouldn’t be worth the time and money at this stage in my life – the juice just wouldn’t be worth the squeeze. I still thought maybe I was being presumptuous by thinking I could do any good in this field. Long story short, I let my fears derail the original plan and I ended up not going for the counseling degree. Instead, I got an M.S. in industrial/organizational psychology.

But that dream of being a counselor, that desire has never left me.

Here I am, nine years later with an M.S. in psychology, and I’ve enjoyed some of the work I’ve done. But I’ve realized the areas I’ve enjoyed are the ones that help people rather than organizations. It probably sounds like a subtle difference, but over the course of the last six years as I’ve practiced in this area, that difference has become bigger and bigger.

If you’re still reading, I’m almost done. All of this prefaces the changes that I’m in the process of making – I turned in my notice at my job last month. I’ve narrowed down the counseling programs to two choices. I’ve identified at least one area where I can volunteer that will get me moving toward the field I want to be in and frankly, I’m still scared to death. I'd love to know what you think about this change. Am I crazy to think I can do any good here? Should I just suck it up and return to corporate America? I'd like to know what you think.