Mastering the Art of Success
FOSTER
I’d be pleased to. I think it all started when I turned thirty. I
remember very clearly when I was walking home on my birthday with
my youngest of three children and suddenly r ealized, “Gosh! I have to
be doing something else in my life.” We were in a place where
we needed to move and we were both working all kinds of hours and
shift work. At that time I was on eternal night duty, and we were like
ships th at passed in the night. We saw some possibilities and took
some action.
I said to my husband, “Would y ou like to emigrate?”
He laughed at me and said, “Okay, well you go ahead and get the
stuff,” so I did, and within seven weeks had sold our house and got our
visas and were ready to go. We h ad nothing oth er than a letter offering
me the possibility of a job as a casual nurse in a hospital in a very small
northern town in B.C., very tiny, less than three thousand people. I
have kept that lett er to this day!
So we left everything and took off and trav eled to northern Canada.
We bought a house and a car, and then a small local business cleaning
carpets and windows. My husband went off and did lots of fun things.
He’d b een a policeman before and he couldn’t do that in Canada when
we arrived because he wasn’t a Canadian citizen. He got his pilot’s
license, and Class 1 driving license, and he taught in a school. He d id
personnel management for a forestry company and we had lot of fun.
We’d never cut down our own Christmas tree before or had wiener
roasts (I didn’t even know what a wiener was), or eaten angel f ood cake,
so let’s say it was a lot of fun.
Anyway, when you are starting out on any project, you have to take
a look at where you want to go and where you want to be. It was nine
months before I actual ly got a permanent position up in the north. I
knew I couldn’t advance in my career with the level of education I had,
so I knew I had to go back to school and earn my undergraduate degree. I
was thirty-eight by the time I had finished that.
For my husband, it was different and very challenging trying to find a
good fit. I remember it clearly. We were in the kitchen and I said, “If
you had a second chance, what would you do?”
“I think I’d go back and do medicine,” he replied.