By Amy Nielsen

I want to help families stretch their benefits and dollars and improve their health. I want to teach people to return to simple, ancient techniques and use whole fresh foods to produce maximum nutrient digestion. I want to write a book that will teach families why these foods are important, and how to use them every single day.

And this is the short list of what I hope to achieve as I set upon building my non-traditional career.

Every step of my life as a military wife, as a child who traveled the globe with her family and as the mother of a medically complicated child has sent me down this path. Now, I want to teach others.

And, I am going to create a non-traditional career, in a non-traditional way. I need this journey to fit within my current lifestyle where my family comes at equal value. I want to be able to maximize our family time while still supporting my business and my passions.

Education doesn’t have to follow a standard path. However, we must be certified by someone to practice what we choose to preach. And I am creating a practice from the ground up.

My hope is that I will come out of this at the end with a master’s degree in nutrition and a license as a registered dietitian and nutritionist. In order to teach the people I want to teach, I will need to have not only a master’s degree, but I will also need to pass a state licensing exam.

In order to do that, I will need to focus on not only my non-traditional studies, but also work towards my traditional degree and license. I expect my journey to take between three and five years, depending on how things play out.

Luckily, I have already built a solid foundation of life experience.

First, I come from a long line of excellent home cooks who taught me well. And, I am a first generation American. The time I spent traveling as a child opened my eyes to smells, tastes and sights that most people will never experience. I spent as much time in Europe as in the U.S. between the ages 5 and 18. I have visited urban and rural China and India. I have eaten in the roadside stands of Mongolia and at the Four Seasons Hotel in Paris, at Mackie’s on the North Shore of Hawaii and at The Barking Crab in Boston. I can cook and always have been able too. I can taste too. 

I first tried to follow my passion as I headed to college. I considered hotel management but decided instead to follow my other passion, lighting design. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my career as a lighting designer, I had some great experiences and it is still my preferred art form. But I also wanted to do something with food. 

I wish then some of our family and friends had told me that it could be a super classy and high end career to be a micro hotelier or personal concierge, but alas, people kept their mouths shut, even while staying at these kinds of places and using these services regularly!

Note number one: speak up if you think you have a rabbit hole career that you might like to try out! If you have family and friends who are in the business, talk to them! Ask them to intern with them, bug them for a job, offer to carry their suitcases. But be prepared to risk and just do it. If you take one thing away from this whole process it is that you have to stick your neck out.

Seven years after I began working in lighting design the company I worked for folded. I had to decide what I really wanted to do with my life, again.  

I took the summer off, got divorced, and went camping. I applied to and was accepted to a small culinary school with local connections. I learned very quickly that I was overqualified for the classes in technique and that I should have chosen a bigger school with better connections to the wider culinary world.

Granted, there were many world class chefs that were local connections who taught guest classes, but the drive of the school was to produce upper end sous chefs for the white tablecloth industry in the greater Boston metro area.

I did land a job doing kitchen stuff, as the assistant director of dining services at a multi-campus K-12 private school in Cambridge, Mass. It was sort of what I wanted to be doing. But not really. I loved being in the kitchen every day. But it wasn’t the sort of food thing I really wanted to do. 
 

Then I met a Sailor. Thanks, Universe.

And, I moved to Virginia. Then, life in the Navy with two children, three deployments, seven moves, retirement, two more moves and a new career for my husband happened.

And again, seven years later; what is it with seven years? I am finally starting back down this path again. This time older and wiser and more focused on the ways of the world. I think I had to live through this much life and see enough to be able to be ready to take the steps with the stick-to-it-ness I will need to come out the other side of this with the career I want to have.
 

Of course, I am also at the point in my life that if the universe tosses me another curve ball or a shinier baubble, I might just follow that too.

Now, I don’t want you to think that I spent my time as a Navy wife sitting on my dependapottomous. I met a bunch of really amazing spouses who opened my eyes to a whole bunch of life choices I wasn’t even aware were out there. I started learning more about herbology. I started changing how our family eats. I started reading the good, bad, and ugly, of all holistic health guru works. I started picking out who I had an affinity to and whose words rang true to me.

I didn’t know it then, but I was setting the seeds for this endeavor.