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.
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