Part 35: Beauty School Dropout

 The summer of 2022 had such a fun feeling. I was officially preparing for my move to Calgary and Brody's return home in September. The James family had agreed to let me rent out a room in their home, and my grandpa was helping me find my first car.  

It was an exciting time of life, but sometimes I would get really sad thinking about how I was moving away from my family. The sadness was just a bit less than the amount of excitement I had about seeing Brody again.

We took a trip to Bothell to see family for my mom's birthday, and it is still one of the best weekends of my life to date. 

Jill graduated high school in June and went to prom looking so grown up and beautiful

We took a trip to Veranda Beach. It was our first one since the pandemic and it was so fun 

I was finishing up my Cosmetology and Barbering program and was supposed to graduate in August, so I could get a job hairdressing in Calgary. The program had been full of great highs and lows. The school was extremely disorganized and nobody ever seemed to really know what was happening. For example, they held a graduation ceremony for the August graduating class in June, and they handed a diploma to the girl who had started the week before. 

I would show up to an empty classroom with no teacher, no students and no lesson plan. I felt like I was learning how to do hair, but nowhere near ready to do it on my own. Nobody seemed to be able to tell me how the practicum program worked or what the next steps should be to get a career in cosmetology. The thing was, I was getting increasingly fed up with this. I had a lot at stake here, and this school was not helping me get to Calgary. There was no way that I would be done in a month. I hadn't even been taught how to cut men's hair and I had three weeks left. 

One morning, my dad dropped me off at school like he normally did. But when we pulled up, all of the lights were off and nobody's cars were there. This was probably the fifth time I had dragged myself out of bed to be at school at 8:00 AM only to find that class had been canceled and nobody told me. I couldn't afford to be missing any classes, since I wasn't exactly being set up for success. I had been getting the sense that I didn’t enjoy this enough to do it as a career. But I couldn’t tell my parents that. They might make me pull the plug on my move to Calgary, and that wasn’t an option.

I told my dad not to leave while I went in to see what was going on. Sure enough, I walked in and I was the only one there. I quickly called my teacher to see where she was. No answer. I called again, and this time she picked up and said, “Ugh, I just couldn’t get out of bed this morning.”

That was it for me. Actually, it gets worse.

While I was still on the phone, I heard someone outside laying on their car horn. After I hung up, I told my teacher I was leaving and walked out to find the headmaster honking aggressively at my dad for parking in her spot. One thing about me, is that nobody is messing with my family without some consequences. I got into the passenger seat of my dads car and told him to drive away, but he wasn't moving. "Dad, let's go" I said. But he wasn't leaving. I guess the whole "don't mess with my family" thing went for my dad too, because he got out of the car. Obviously my dad wasn't going to deck the headmaster of my school. She was about 4'10", sixty years old and very grumpy, hence the honking. I watched from the car as my dad went to confront her about not just being rude and honking and shaking her fist at him, but for giving me the worst school experience known to man. 

My dad is definitely fed up. I had spent a lot of money to do hair school and it was turning out to be a complete waste. My dad came and got back into the car, and the headmaster followed. She gave me some lame excuse about why the teacher wasn't there and why nobody felt the need to tell me. Again, this had happened multiple times. This school had ruined this experience for me, and I was done. Even if I had decided to move forward with it, I wouldn't have been able to pass any exam or work as a hairdresser because I simply had not been taught. 

The headmaster told my dad that she didn't mean to offend him, to which he said, "I don't care about that, I care about Becca's education." As he drove me home, I broke down in tears in a sorry confession about not wanting to continue with the program. I had pretty much felt like the worlds biggest disappointment since birth, and this was not helping my case. Manda was set on her career path at this point and had always excelled in school. She didn't just do well, it seemed to come easy for her. She was naturally smart and I was naturally slow. I was humiliated that I couldn't even complete hair school. 

My dad, in his awesomeness, let me drop out with grace. I felt a huge load off of my shoulders. I went home and sang "Clean" by Taylor Swift and hung out with my mom. I felt so happy. I was moving to Calgary in about a month, to be reunited with Brody and start a new chapter. Kaitlyn James landed me a job at CMP Auto, the dealership where she was working as a receptionist. I was set and ready to go. 

- 

A few weeks before my departure to Calgary, Luke and Holly were away at FSY, when Luke suddenly had to come home because he had gotten sick. Kids get sick, no big deal. Except it became a big deal when Luke was then hospitalized for the Rhinovirus and Pneumonia. It was horrible. We all got the Rhinovirus, but because Luke had Pneumonia stacked on top of it, he was not doing well. He was in the hospital for about a week, over my dad's birthday, only a few weeks before I moved away. 

This was the first time I remember feeling overwhelmingly sad about leaving home. I sat in Luke's hospital room while he slept, watching him struggle to breathe and I thought about what I would do if something happened to him. What would I do if something happened to any of them? I couldn't stop the tears from flowing as I sat by Luke's bedside. I was so, beyond excited for these exciting changes coming my way, but how was I going to leave my family?