quest for a faerie child

things my children say.

I am feeling a little calmer today than I was the other day.  Make no mistake, this is not because our situation has altered dramatically or anything life-changing like that.  Oh no, buddy.  We are still "poor as the day is long", as my husband recently put on his facebook status.  It's more so that sometimes I just really need to explode, to vent, to scream.  Once I do, I'm good for another couple days.  Before and after I wrote the last post, I recalled how I blogged the entire way through my incredibly stressful pregnancy with Max, which also included our last financially disastrous experience.

I used this blog as a means of dealing with all that stress and I decided that perhaps it might do me some good to do a little exploding in written form, rather than keeping it all bottled up inside, which is what I have a tendency to do.  So, you'll have to excuse me if you find me less than cheerful in my postings from now until things begin to look up.

However, I am going to throw in something positive about being poor and this is simply because I can't stand to be doom and gloom constantly.

The fact of the matter is that finding yourself financially strapped to the level we are, truly makes you appreciate what you have now and what you did have in the past.  It allows you to see the beauty in simplicity.  It provides you with a sense of accomplishment when you continue to find ways to cut back or to make things happen you didn't think you could possibly swing.

Let me just throw in a little caveat here, though... and that is this:  Believe me.  When I say we are 'poor', please know and understand that I consider this a relative term.  We are not applying for foodstamps.  We would not qualify if we did.  We are not on welfare.  We do not receive any type of governmental assistance.  We are living in as close to a dream house as we have ever had together.  However, we are behind on our bills.  We are behind on our rent.  We had to give up childcare completely and rearrange our work schedules to take care of the kids ourselves.  We have no available credit and we have no savings. 

At any point in time, the world could come crashing down in the form of one us losing a job.  That's all it would take to send us running for assistance.  We would not make it even one month without our jobs.  And that is a fact.

What is also a fact is that it is this "dream house" that is vastly contributing to our issues.  We are paying $600.00 more a month than we were paying in the old house and when you combine that with the fact that James is making half of what he was before and just after we moved (something that was not foreseen, I might add), you might be able to comprehend how it is that we plowed through our savings and got so far behind in about 6 months worth of time.  We kept thinking this was going to turn around.

It has not.

And I don't know if it will this year.

I wish we had realized it in January.  I wish we could have instituted our austerity plan back them.  If we had, we'd be in a great deal better shape than we are now.  Hindsight is 20/20 and all that jazz.

For now, I am just trying to take pleasure in the simple things:  like how extraordinarily beautiful my children are, how even though Moose and I are under an incredible strain... we somehow manage to rarely fight.  We pull together.  We work together.  We strategize.  Sometimes we snap, but generally within minutes... we've reached an equilibrium once again.

I look at my children.  I listen to them talk.  I watch them interact with one another and it all brings me such joy, my heart swells with pride and love.  They are the sweetest things I have ever come across and they have absolutely no idea that I only have 10 dollars in my bank account and I don't get paid until next Friday.

And for the curious:  no, Moose still has not gotten paid.

But, thanks to Moose and his habit of sometimes taking the boys to share an order of fries, they are beginning to understand what it means when we say we have no money.  In the words of Rowan to a bank teller:  "no fries.... no money...."

And we try not to let their budding comprehension break our hearts.

where's the justice in that?

There was a time in my life with Moose, back towards the end of my pregnancy with Max, where we went through a period of financial desperation.  I've spoken about that time period on here from time to time.  I actually wrote about it as it was happening on here, as well.  When I think back to those times, the stress we were under seems to magically disappear and in some ways, I see it as an almost magical time.  A time where we pulled together and did what needed to be done in order to survive.  A time where we bought each other a pair of socks for christmas at the Freddy's buy one get one free after-thanksgiving sock sale and where we lived on the cheapest coffee we could find, and never went out to dinner.

In short, I think I was romanticizing it in my mind. 

I think I was doing exactly what happens to women after they give birth.  They magically forget the pain they were in so that they can someday undertake the process, once more.  It's the way in which the species manages to continue to propogate itself.

I am here to say, though, that there is truly nothing romantic about being poor.  There's nothing magical about not being able to afford to get your hair cut, about worrying whether you've set aside enough money to make it to the next paycheck and still pay for milk and diapers and whatever else your children are going to need.   There is nothing exciting and inspiring about being so far in the hole that all of your hard-earned credit begins to seize up on you, no matter how great a customer you've been in the past, no matter how long you have been a customer and no matter whether you are carrying a balance or not.  Those fuckers will close an account on you, even if you owe them nothing, simply because you've been late too many times on a credit account with an entirely different company.

Believe me, it can happen.  I just lost a completely unused $14,000 dollar limit credit card because there was a mixup when we moved and we missed a couple car payments, which we promptly rectified by robbing Peter to pay Paul, because....yanno... we are poor right now.  Never mind that we had actually been months and months ahead on car payments before I forgot to change my address with them in November and we stopped getting statements.

It was a simple, though stupid and careless mistake. 

On top of the loss of that big credit card, the remaining credit cards promptly dropped my limits to exactly what I owe.  So.... yes, I have no available credit and we have plowed through whatever meager savings we had managed to cobble together despite all of Max's healthcare bills.  We are constantly late on every single bill and by the time payday rolls around for me, I am lucky if there is a dollar in the bank.

I have cut just about everything I can possibly cut.  We don't have cable/TV.  I've cut our cell phone back as far as I possibly can, considering my husband uses it constantly for work.  I make calls to people who are not also verizon customers from work or I have added them to a friends and family list so that I don't use any of those precious minutes.  We don't have a landline.  We buy nothing for ourselves.  Ever.  I spend less than 10 dollars a day on food and staples for a family of four.  We have a plumbing issue going on in the house that we can't afford to fix and that we don't want to bother our landlord (and friend) with because we are close to two months in the hole rent-wise (that was the robbing peter to pay paul bit...)

We are getting ready to drop a baby and while my husband is at least employed, his employer can't seem to manage to get a paycheck out on time to him.  As it stands right now, they owe him for 162 hours worth of work plus a second quarter bonus.  This should not be difficult, should it?  I mean... your employees work, fucking pay them on time for fuck's sake. 

I am a walking ball of stress.

I worry constantly about money.

We need every last bit of that money owed just in order to get even.  It won't put us ahead in any way, but I think it will actually bail us out of the yawning, gaping, deep, black hole we find ourselves in right now. 

If only he would actually get paid...  I can't believe he actually works in the labor movement, trying to help employees get what they deserve from their employers and yet his own employer treats him worse than I have ever seen anyone treated, ever in a professional position.  Where's the justice in that, I ask you?

T