Andrea’s post Are We Defined by Our Mistakes? touched some nerves at So Over Debt. Her personal life with being broke and professional experiences helping the impoverished and the reactions to her conclusions illustrates how complex the issues surrounding poverty. And every time it seems defined, there’s another rock to label.
There aren’t simple, easy, sound-byte answers. There isn’t even an easy list of questions. If ever there was an area in which we tended to chaos, this is it.
Yes, our choices make us who we are. But yes, our nature make us who we are. And yes, our surroundings and environment make us who we are. So yes, until our mettle is tested, we won’t discover who we are. The snake eats the tail. As much as I hate that image. All of those influences feed into one another, all of them overlap and intertwine and jostle for position.
*****
If ever we were emotional about money, I find that we are that much more reactive about the lack of it. And our neighbor’s lack of it. And his neighbor’s lack of it. Because no matter what politics you vote, no matter what religions you preach or practice, social inequality and ills touch us all. And it roots deeply, for some more deeply than others, for some more personally than others.
There’s what seems to be need to stifle compassion lest it be construed as weakness(?) in many reactions particularly for those who haven’t experienced it; someone else’s poverty is to be mocked lest it taint, spread or corrupt. Judge lest ye be included, I suppose. It is a fact that in the greater picture, the existence of poorness affects us all. It could be you, there, one whisper says. It’d better not be, roars another voice, I work hard, I don’t deserve that! It’s another version of “there but for the grace of God go I.” It’s another version of “Get away from me.” And so on.
And it could be your sister, your brother, your parents, your son, your daughter, your grandparents. Your friends, your cousins, your aunts or uncles. It could be anyone you know and love. And for every single one of those people who might be poor, we can search to find reasons why. Why this one succeeded and why that one did not, and eventually you may find patterns. There are, in fact, statistics and patterns – I’ve seen them, anecdotally, but I can’t for the life of me see how to put them together and draw a good analysis from which we can do better.
There’s also resentment, resentment that we work hard and have to keep doing so while others who are less well off are being helped along. Therein lies judgment. Therein lies the willingness to lay blame at others’ doors whether or not it makes sense. I’ve been guilty of this a time or two with my brother. I sincerely doubt that his newly bloomed mental issues were always the cause of his behaviors in the past and it’s still hard to move past that to a place where I can unreservedly do what I need to do. But that’s hardly productive and doesn’t get at the real issue. He needs help and with boundaries, I am capable of rendering basic assistance. It’s always easier said than done. But that’s the bottom line.
If there’s a complicated question to be asked – why him? Why not me? He was born with a myriad of talent, I, very very little. And raised in the same household with the same parents with the same educational benefits, except his was actually a little better. He had every bit as much privilege as I and yet here we are.
*****
But the story, my friends, the story isn’t over until it’s over. Deep in the fabric of this country, in its soul, is the foundational Horatio Alger archetype that we can all bootstrap our way from rags to riches will-he, nill-he, the American Dream, the dream that we can all one day become successful – whatever that means.
That too, drives much of the emotion and expectation, by the way. Why can’t you lift yourself up from the ashes? Well, sometimes, coming from someone who barely believes this in her own life but knows it really is true: sometimes you can’t. And you certainly can’t do it alone.
I do wholeheartedly know this: It’s sheer folly and hubris to believe we exist in a vacuum and can succeed and achieve wholly on our own. There is an enormous amount of effort and blood, sweat and tears that has to come from you when clawing your way up. But alone? Unlikely to the extreme.
Before there were helping hands, there were free internet forums and smart people setting up systems to make an extra dollar and sharing resources. Before there were scholarships, there were libraries with free books to borrow. Before there were blogger-friends, there were real friends who stood staunch in the breaches and supported me even when there was no personal gain or experience of what I was going through. Before I graduated college, there was at least a thousand hours of overtime. I had to do just about everything with my own hands, my own brain and my own breath and I had to sacrifice a lot to get there. But I had the support of a few good friends whether or no it made sense to them and I had one heck of a lot of resources provided by other people. There’s no way I’d ever say I did it all by myself.
*****
People come here, my people came here, to live, to thrive, to make lives worth living. Not to fall to the depradations of political strife, corrupt government, grubbing out a living from the riverside or out in the jungle. Instead they faced a new world and its urban challenges of prejudice, language barriers, drugs, a corporate world rife with sheathed-claw politics, business conducted fairly or unfairly as the tempers befit the owners.
Should they be sketched, though, I suspect that the patterns of poverty would fall out similarly even accounting for personal choice and individual deviations. There are enough patterns over the generations that even my untrained eye can note them.
*****
Excerpts from what John Scalzi said:
Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.
Being poor is a six-hour wait in an emergency room with a sick child asleep on your lap.
Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn’t bought first.
Being poor is knowing you’re being judged.
I could keep going down that list, nodding, but the even more compelling parts are the comments. This set, John’s response to a (particularly, I thought, smug and righteous) comment, and the bolded bit is my emphasis, that was in no way reflective of the tone of the thread sums up much of why I’m going on about this:
Kathy Shaidle writes:
“Instead of posting a semi-romanticized, heart-wrenching litany of the things poor people have to put up with when they’re too lazy and/or dumb to get their acts together like we did, why not write another post telling poor people how you went from poor to not-poor.”
Ms. Shaidle, as you may or may not know, I live in a small Ohio town, most of whose inhabitants can be described as the rural poor: They work on farms and they work as blue collar workers. Many of them are poor, because as I’m sure you know farming and rural blue collar work doesn’t pay particularly well.
Very few of these rural poor are lazy, Ms. Shaidle. In fact, they work as hard or harder than anyone I know. And while many of them are uneducated, uneducated is not the same as stupid. In all, these are good, honest, hard-working people. Perhaps you are comfortable classifying them, and other hard-working poor, as “too lazy and/or dumb to get their acts together.” I am not.
Conversely, I’ve worked in high-tech and publishing for much of my life, and as a consequence I’ve known lots of middle and upper class folk. Some of them are quite lazy and/or stupid — so many, in fact, that I am quite comfortable making the observation that dumb and lazy can’t possibly be the deciding factors in who is poor and who is not in this country, because if they were, I wouldn’t be stuck in a three-hour meeting with this idiotic schmuck who is about to dump all his work on me so he can get out to the golf course.
I think it’s a problem that people assume that all the poor are either dumb or lazy, because it’s false, and because it allows the not-poor to go, oh well, they had their chance, and they didn’t do anything with it. As I mentioned before earlier in the thread, lots of poor people are doing everything right to improve their situation, but they don’t have any wiggle room when things go wrong. The fact that people seem so willing to write off the poor as dumb and lazy is of course why I wrote in the original essay: Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid. Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.
“Much more helpful than all the guilty white liberal, pseudo-Russell Banks stuff, what?”
I don’t feel in the slightest bit guilty, and I’ve never read Russel Banks. Also, Ms. Shaidle, I write what I choose. Maybe at some point I will write a “how I did it” piece. However, at this particular moment in time, for various reasons, I think it’s helpful to note to the comfortable what the experience of being poor is, because oddly enough, sometimes it seems like they don’t understand it well, even some of them who have come up from it.
*****
I’ve been there. I’m still there, in my head. My parents were there. For periods in their lives, separately and together, they experienced a poorness the likes of which most, average, middle and upper-class Americans simply do not know. But the fact they had experienced a poorness even more staggeringly numbing, or at least my mom did, the period in the later years was easy by comparison. Physically, anyway. That’s the one thing you can really count on with poverty. Once the grit works under your skin, some bits of it will always stay.
I know people judge. I know they assume. I hear it all the time. And there comes a time hearing shallow judgements, suggestions and assumptions leads to cutting off conversation about it completely which isn’t productive, but it is protective. Appearances to the contrary, I’m no naive child who doesn’t understand finances, the market economy or the basic idea that you get a job and hold it to make money to support a household. I’m experienced enough to know that in the game of life, whether there is margin for error or not, errors will happen and having zero margin (we call it cash flow, an emergency fund, or cash cushion) is just one part of the inexorable slide into debt and poverty. So to all the people who said, “Why doesn’t your dad just get a job as …” while he was taking care of Mom ….That was not the problem. It was one of many problems. But it was a solution in the morass of problems I was dealing with.
In this newly married life, I’m having to relearn how to open these conversational paths, slowly and painfully, pointing out the complexity of the issues to PiC because he’s never lived this life and frankly, I’ve guarded that side of my life from those in my life who had never experienced deprivation in their lives. And while explaining the situation that developed with my brother, I also had to explain county benefits and welfare, shadowed with the embarrassment of “this is life when you’re poor.” Bad enough poor, bad enough mental issues, we had to go and combine them.
Those nerves of mine had been exposed this holiday weekend as I visited home and caught the tail end of my brother storming at some dentist’s office over their treatment and I don’t know what. He muttered, stomped and threatened to call the corporate office.
What corporate office? You’re poor. You have no money, no insurance, so you’re using a county facility where the dental care has been notoriously poor, negligent even, and that’s the normal state of affairs there. Do you think they care? Because I could tell you they really don’t.
But there’s no telling him. He knows what he knows and when he’s waving his Sword of Righteousness there’s no telling him anything. Then he comes to me. Do I know what dentist he can go to? Do I know the number he can call? Because he was given a “fake” number to their “corporate office.” Because clearly I still live around here and can fix everything after he’s gone up a tree again, as usual.
I was silent. He maundered off after a minute.
See that? See the blaming? It’s still incredibly hard for me to let go of the rage he elicits by continuing in remarkably familiar behavioral patterns even with the revelatory knowledge that he’s not in his right mind, probably.
But it’s also incredibly hard for me to choose to suit up and get back into the cycle of poverty that he lives in because there’s so little I can do to break it. It’s going to be the county dentist unless I come up with cash, and a lot of it, to pay for his dental work. And then will he take care of his teeth? I don’t know. And will that prevent any accidents or just regular degeneration that happens even when you do take care of them? No. And will I then come up with more cash when he next needs it? How long can I keep that up? And what other medical issues can I support?
Knowing I’m going to fight an endless fight is draining before it even begins, and I’m not one to back down from any fight. I suspect that may be part of our society’s problem in learning how to deal with it. Because there’s no simple answer, because there’s no secret plan to fight poverty, because we can’t list ten action items and know that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s debilitating and it’s distracting.
*****
I had a conversation with someone who’s been a second mother to me. He’d gone to their house and had a meltdown. At first I wanted to be furious that he exposed us that way but then I just breathed deeply. There’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. And I’m going to have to accept that this is the state of affairs. So we had a conversation. She’s convinced that he’s fried his brain on drugs. She’d had some professional experience in the area so I couldn’t say she was wrong; I haven’t been there, I literally couldn’t say what happened. She’s the staunchest conservative thinker I know, but even she agrees I should try to get him into therapy when I am able to deal with it.
That takes us back to the boundaries and the limits. He is my brother but I, too, have to do as much as I can and no more than is sensible for our lives. And because he’s poor, because we’re not rich or well off, because he’s legally an adult and because I can not push my new family to the brink to provide for him, I don’t think there’s going to be very much I can do. At least, not to my satisfaction or socially acceptable conclusion, anyway. By which I mean, somehow get him to be in therapy, on whatever medication he may require if any, and working to support himself, out of the house, on his own. He is going to have to be some combination of those things, but I can’t hold my breath that he’s going to become a fine upstanding citizen any time soon.
Having to discuss this openly, in real life, made me realize – there really has to be a way to have these conversations with less shame and less blaming. There has to be a way we can productively find big or small solutions with some heft behind them. Certainly this situation as an example is complicated with the mental illness muddying the waters, but when do they ever run clear? Poverty encompasses this and many other encumbrances that could be managed tolerably in some circumstances, so while I haven’t got the answers, I do think it makes sense to embrace the complexity in the conversation.
Outside the courthouse, it was positively gorgeous. The sun was out, everyone arrived nearly at the same time, I was given two beautiful bouquets because two of my friends knew I wasn’t going to even think of flowers. And one was also turnabout for taking care of hers.
I spent some time with people in the parking lot as they gathered but I hid in the bosom of my surrogate family for a while. I wasn’t nervous, I just felt … surrounded for a minute. I needed quiet.
Then my parents arrived. And my blood pressure went up. My dear older friend who is bossy, domineering, mothering though childless, and knows how worried I was about Mom, came over and introduced herself, took Mom’s arm and I could breathe again. She’s wonderful precisely because she’s all those things. She’s a take charge personality I’ve come to love and trust and she helped with Mom the whole time we were waiting in line at the courthouse so that Dad could just be.
We never have that kind of help and it was a huge boon that morning. Mom was doing particularly well that morning, too, which was amazing. She had trouble remembering names, and faces, but she didn’t have any real outbursts early in the day. She wasn’t overtired or overwrought.
As it turned out, we waited in the wrong line for 20 minutes because it wasn’t clear which one to be in, and I felt a bit of a silly arse because I’d looked them over to check! That made us late for our appointment. As the minutes ticked off, my blood pressure started shooting up. PiC was remarkably calm at that point, saying it was fine, we’d just go elsewhere if they didn’t take us but that made me feel even worse. The thought of dragging our 20 plus group back of beyond because I’d screwed up the lines?? Augh!!
Luckily they had our judge stick around for this last one and made it happen.
Of course, she was in a tearing hurry. She started off, with her poufy hair, looking over her ’70s shaded glasses, “in the middle of someone else’s shift, so we have to do this expeditiously.” So expeditiously it was done. The ceremony could not have lasted more than three minutes. Blink or breathe too hard and you missed it. She wasn’t rude but I think she still upset one of our friends for coming right out with the whole “let’s move along” speech. He felt it really wasn’t necessary. (I was amused.) It was not the worst thing ever, I was worried a long ceremony would have me in tears and I hate crying in front of people but we didn’t realize that at least one of our guests had been downstairs and hadn’t come back in time!
PiC was grinning madly throughout.
The judge granted us about 2.5 seconds to take photos in the room and then sent us out to the front of the courthouse for any pictures we wanted. And those took too long – I was starving! I know, sentimental. I do regret not getting a good photo with my surrogate family in the fuss of everyone bossing everyone else for the photos and then getting antsy for lunch, but I’ll have a do-over.
We had a lovely lunch with the group, sans my parents, lots of photos were taken. The absolute necessity of following the A Practical Wedding’s How to Write a Perfect Toast was underlined. There’s a picture that I’m hoping wasn’t captured on anyone else’s camera that shows my face at a moment that I’ll just call “sentimentality” to anyone else. PiC and I had a talk later about this. I’m not letting the memory fester but it also may not happen again at Round Two.
On a related note, I have no doubt thousands of photos were taken, in fact, which frightens me no end. Living in an age where photos are just … everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Augh!
Traffic to and fro, of course, this having been in LA. But after all was said and done, we got home to visit with family briefly, and then went to feed me again. My lunch salad was sad and I was starving again. Stuffed full of sushi, we made our final guest drop-off and collapsed at our crappy hotel room just before midnight. (I reserved my annoyance for a letter to the Doubletree after we got back.)
We. Were. Married.
You know, it wasn’t perfect. It was full of hustle and bustle and “are you serious with boutonnieres too-big, boutonnieres too-heavy, boutonnieres won’t-stay? Because non-essential stress, kids. NON ESSENTIAL. Skipped it for a reason. Also, you bring it, you fix it.” (I fixed it.)
For all that we crushed this wedding into a time capsule we still caught other people’s expectations, other people’s imposed “necessities”, other people’s baggage. We were also lavished with other people’s love and joy and silliness and loyalty and steadiness. (And cute little tiny baby feet! So many babies.) We still played our roles of fixer upper, mediator, organizer, event planner, picker uppers. Because that’s who we are. That’s what we do. And that’s “who” our wedding was. It was good. It was better than perfect, it was us. Low-key, casual, almost-normal. And PiC was stupid-happy. I really liked that.
It was good.
***
Next spring, we’ll host a food thing of some kind where everyone we care about, including long distance friends who didn’t get the chance to make it and were sad not to have been offered the chance, will be given plenty of warning. I don’t want to miss the opportunity to see them and spend time with them. But it won’t be a pressure cooker of an event. It’s just going to be a gathering of loved ones. And I guess we could get around to having some rings by then, if we wanted to. There’s also going to be the fancy dress, since it got altered already!
But for a bigger thing? I’m asking a couple of my girls to help out. I’m not dealing with any more stupid flower pinning emergencies. 😉
Pardon, you might think you’re at the wrong blog today. But I’ve got to go on another career-related rant. My colleague told me today that someone was “upset” at the organization. When I asked why, I was told that the someone had wanted to apply for a promotion but wasn’t allowed to because of a lack of a specific key qualification. That someone was upset: I’ve been here for years, and I’ve never been given the opportunity to do that!
…….. Really? Really??
Ok. Nerve? Torched. Because honest to Jeopardy, darling, that’s just it, isn’t it? You’ve been here for years and that’s the end of your response? No one took care of you? Did you do anything about it? Or did you sit there like a limp noodle the whole time and then jump at the chance for more money without considering what you needed to do in order to land that peach? [I can answer that. No. Didn’t do nuffin’.]
And now you’re upset at the organization that wronged you. Honestly.
“I wasn’t given an opportunity.”
“I didn’t get a chance to show you what I could do.”
I’ll give you a hint: These are not the phrases to use when you want a job or a promotion and you’ve been told that you’re underqualified because of some missing skill or qualification.
In fact, I will heartily tell you that I am sick of hearing them. Don’t even think it. Imagine your upcoming job or career opportunities. Imagine what the recruiter, hiring manager or resume screener is going to think when he/she/it looks at your resume and compares it to the list of what they want or need. If you find yourself reverting to those up there as your only answer (aka: excuse) when your hiring manager disabuses you of the notion that you’re going to get the job, I want you to Shake Yourself.
Non. Non.
Not only will that not get you the job, it will, in certain eyes, reduce any respect they might have had for you. Like mine.
Tell me, why do you need the opportunities given to you?
Let me tell you what I’ve discovered that phrase and the utterers have in common: a need for spoonfeeding. It says to me, on your behalf: When you hire me, I’m going to ask you basic questions to which I should know the answers or should be able to find myself. And when you don’t have time to feed me, I’m going to do something else without bothering to try to find out the answer myself.
As it turns out, Google is your friend. As it turns out, there are tons of other resources available and when it comes to allocation of resources, do you want to waste our half hour on: “How do I write my review? How does this process work? What should I write?”
Or do you want to spend it talking over which skills you need to set you up for a cool new project and in line for a promotion? Because I will answer the question you ask. But if you want to throw away what I can do for you, then you are throwing away your own opportunity. And frankly, I have too many other people asking for time and attention to mollycoddle anyone who won’t do anything but flip their hair and flap their hands until the next question.
I’m inclined to helping people grow and learn but there’s only so much pushing I can do. I’ve learned my lesson – I’m not going to hire any more people who display that lack of savvy and initiative if I can help it.
Sometimes, it’s valid
Granted, there are certain things you need the support of others to do, you need the authority to do, or you plain cannot have without someone giving something up.
Very true, you must be given some of those things. However. You can show your initiative by learning about the things you want to do even if you cannot whole-cloth have them. You can take classes, you can shadow people who are doing the job, you can ask them to mentor and teach you, you can volunteer elsewhere to pick up the experience you want even if it’s not in the same place or environment.
If it’s an internal promotion you have your sights on, you should, without being obnoxious about it, express your interest clearly in the kind of advancement or experience you would like and why. In general, you should always be doing that anyway!
If you’re going for a new job and it wasn’t your job to do the work in question but you’ve gone and learned it anyway, you bet your boot nails I will rate you more highly than a person who did have the work and was not distinguished in any way by how they did it.
Think about it: who looks better? The one with fire in the belly, clearly has special interest and has done something about it? Or the one who has been flapping hands around in a puddle looking like doing a job? I’m no idiot – I want the fire-eater, every time.
That’s not to say that someone who already does the job always gets trumped by an up and comer, I’m just saying that there are clearly mediocre lifer-type candidates who barely do their job. We know they shouldn’t get promoted over someone with real potential because they aren’t capable. But — you can’t be that newcomer if you don’t realize your own potential. No one can do that but YOU.
Potential is just resting, potential is possibilities. Don’t tell me you have potential. Show me what that potential can be. Get out there and show what you’re capable of with every possible tool at your disposal. Ask for support and learn new things. Don’t just sit there waiting for opportunity to present itself. You’re just kicking opportunity in the face.
Show me your will, that is the way.
Ironically, as I write this, I clicked through an email notifying me that Erica.biz has posted on her blog, writing about her journey of the past ten years. I keep an eye on people who have the same drive to succeed that I do, even if my path is nowhere near like hers. And you know what? The essence of her message is very much the same:
This world does not hand you success. It certainly doesn’t hand you a job. I’ve had to fight for everything I’ve had in this life. I’ve taught myself what I need to know to be successful. And, if you see yourself in any of this, my message to you is: You can do it, too. Just don’t expect it to be easy.
[For the record: I passed along a message to my colleague. If that someone did something like take initiative, I’d do a solid in return and recommend that a future application be considered. I may have learned my lesson but that someone should learn one too.]
There were so many great and interesting comments left on my post about whether or not to have children that I had trouble responding to enough of them in the comments. I appreciated everyone’s thoughts on their personal situations and decision-making.
I also had second, third and several other thoughts about whether or not to discuss one particular theme of the comments further, partly because there was a reason I left out some important, relevant information out: I didn’t necessarily want that to be the center of the post and I tend to leave that subject under wraps.
But it was an underlying theme of the comments because I left it out and it is relevant to the conversation because it’s a huge part of my life even if I do try to pretend that it’s not. Like it or no, the physical limitation aspect of my life is a factor in every decision I make, every minute of every day. And it’s not like I haven’t mentioned it once or twicebefore, so I’m not sure why I still instinctively try to sweep it under the rug like it’s not a big deal.
@thecelt, you made me laugh out loud. PRECISELY. There IS no “kinda-kid” out there. So I want to know for sure. If I’m doing this, I’m committing!
@Sense: From the Mixed up Files was an absolute favorite. Definitely fed the runaway fantasies. 😉
@MovingEast: I actually think through those cliches without feeling like they’re cliches… they are true. I see new parents experiencing the wonder of new kids in their lives and I love it. And I see the decisions they have to make and learn from that too. It’s not that I don’t think they’re worth it once you choose it, in the abstract.
@nicoleandmaggie: He will have to be more than half the parent, I think, and that’s what I worry about. It’s got to be something we’re both willing to sacrifice for because I suspect (see below) it’s going to be excruciating in the beginning for me and then a huge commitment with most of the burden shifting to him. Emotionally, I may have a lot of trouble with that. For me. (Selfishly. Whatever. Again, see below.)
@oilandgarlic: No judgement on anyone else but I definitely want to know now because I don’t want to start in my mid-30’s. For me, I feel like that would be waiting too long because of how my health has progressed.
*****
On the point where PiC and I have to talk this out: we do, when it comes to making the final decision.
I do only speak for myself on this blog and frequently leave his thoughts out of it because he doesn’t have any desire to be present here. (I’ve asked.) But that’s not to say he doesn’t know my concerns and worries, and he understands them. The evolution of my feelings on the subject hasn’t been a secret to him.
He’s not terribly concerned about our different feelings on the matter, we’ll figure it out together, he’s always known that we’ve been coming at this from different personal experiences.
*****
I live with something that’s long mimicked rheumatoid arthritis (or lupus) and fibromyalgia. It’s neither of the first two so far as tests are concerned, but most of the symptoms match up. It started out affecting just a few areas, umpteen years ago, but now it’s everywhere, and any combination of joints and muscles are usually at some level of pain akin to holding an open flame against that muscle or joint every single day.
I spent over fifteen years trying to get a diagnosis and the conclusion is only that I have chronic pain, which isn’t a diagnosis. It’s only a conclusion and defines my experience: pain that doesn’t stop, that has lasted over six months, and doesn’t necessarily have a definitive origin. Stress, being tired, lack of sleep all exacerbate the pain and pain causes all three in a feedback loop. Awesome. That was still better than the many years of idiot doctors telling me that it wasn’t possible for me to be feeling the kind of pain that I was feeling.
When it flares, I can be out of commission for hours, days, or weeks at a time. At the beginning of any flare, I won’t know what the damage will be or how long it’ll last. Stress of the emotional or physical sort can start a flare. Energy is severely limited. There are days typing on a keyboard, lifting a pen, or using a knife and a fork requires too much effort. I have to be incredibly selective about how much activity I commit to because if I push myself too hard these days? Too much of anything can cause fatigue and pain that effectively destroys my ability to functions for days thereafter.
So you might better understand my reluctance to head right into motherhood on the basis of physical limitations. It’s more than just an age thing, it’s more than just a “normal” reluctance. I’m starting from the knowledge that not only do I not have my once-vaunted capacity to power through any and all challenges anymore, I have to be very careful that I don’t step into, essentially, a lifelong landmine. Bringing life into this world is a serious business and the last thing I want to do is make a hash of it because I don’t have it in me to carry through.
******
One way to make this work is to be financially stable enough to afford child care. A lot of it. I don’t feel right about not raising my own children, but I’m not foolish enough to think that I could do a lot of the physical stuff on my own anymore. If we were earning enough that one of us could stay home with the kids, and also had some help with the kids to make up for my part, that could be one way to handle the situation.
Alternatively, I don’t have to bear our children. Instead, we could do what I’ve always wanted to do: adopt. That comes with its own risks, challenges and expenses but that’s an option I’ve always loved and saves at least the physical burden of pregnancy.
I’ve been concerned about that because, though childless, I help others with their kids a lot, and it wipes me out. Every. Single. Time. That tells me that I’m not prepared for the physical challenges of pregnancy. And as recounted by many many friends in stark honesty? The fatigue, the internal upheaval, the damage to the body? I am not prepared for that.
This brings down the total final cost of his/Doggle’s chariot to just about $3000. (Give or take, I was … not listening to the registration cost update…. for some reason. “Husband/wife frequencies” have set in. For those not familiar with the phrase, I’m jokingly referring to the supposed phenomenon that people stop listening to their partners after marriage. We really do fail to listen/hear each other because we’re not really paying attention but we just repeat later. Don’t worry, it’s just a running joke.)
It occurred to me, as I was walking the laundry to the bedroom and half listening to the whole sale process update, that I’ve become remarkably hands off with certain things. Then I wondered if I’m leaving those things that are typically left to the menfolk.
Thinking back a year or so to the back-home household, I did everything that I had time for no matter whose domain it might fall in: Searching for grocery bargains/couponing, debt payoff, savings, investing, planning for the future, deciding when to buy, sell, fix and maintain the household vehicles, repairs around the house or arranging for them to happen: all the money, all the time, all my area. There were certain tasks I delegated when I ran out of time, but nothing’s out of my territory.
But time is finite, things have to fall out to others and I had to start trusting that someone else could take the reins. Sharing a household up north, I’ve stepped back to let PiC set the pace rather than just jumping in and doing everything. There was no reason, and certainly it wouldn’t be sane, with another able-bodied and fully capable adult, to take on a second household’s responsibilities solo.
But we never really discussed who would do what, formally or directly. We just did what needed to be done, day to day and month to month. I started thinking about why it was that I left the car stuff to PiC. Was I just ceding the car stuff because it was a “guy thing”?
How do we divide our labor?
We’ve trended toward the things we like best or doing the things that achieve the goals that are most important to us.
I enjoy cooking, cleaning as I go, and serving meals. It’s a thing my dad and I enjoy doing but he always took the lion’s share of the responsibility since I worked more than 60 hour weeks. Now with just the two of us, feeding ourselves isn’t really a choice and I’ve lucked out that PiC’s got an easy palate to please to boot. It also takes less out of me than vacuuming or washing floors if I’m not overly ambitious.
I love finances enough to overcome my reluctance to talk to people after a long day at work, but it’s really important to correct any financial charges or fees, and get the lowest plans so I do all the financial negotiations.
PiC loves Craigslist – I hate it. I don’t like browsing or using it. He loves Craigslisting, doesn’t mind dealing with people at all, and looooves looking at cars, specifically, and furniture. So he’s our resident used things buyer. He also really loves a clean house, or needs it more than I need one in comparison to, say, rest, so he’s the vacuum and floors master.
He’s a great sous chef but he hates new recipes while I get bored with making the same food over and over so we try new things together occasionally but oftentimes I just take over the kitchen entirely.
Physical limitations come into play so that affects the division: I’m not hauling all the heaviest stuff upstairs, but I’m the fastest errand runner/grocery shopper and laundry folder ever. And of course I’m the CFO-consultant (ahem, control freak) before any major decisions are made. (Hi, Chariot.)
We split the laundry and the Doggle duties. I really enjoy laundry duty but we have different ideas on when it should be done. He prefers to do less frequent washing but it all comes out to the same amount of washing. He catches just about all the Doggle walking, we share the Doggle bathing, but I do almost all the Doggle doctoring. Fair? Sort of. Each to their own strengths on that point – it’s because Doggle pulls like he’s in the freaking Iditarod much of the time and that’s rough. Doesn’t mean I don’t do it, just that I do it less often.
At the end of the day, I can’t say that we don’t observe some gender biases. I doubt they are specifically because of our sexes. We weren’t taught to do certain things because we were born male or female, though my parents did decline to teach me how to play a guitar because I was too little to hold one. We tend to play to our strengths and preferences according to our values.
I grew up on a steady diet of books like Margeret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (available free on Project Gutenberg!), Gertrude Chandler Warner’s The Boxcar Children, and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. (Also all the sci fi and fantasy I could get my hands on, but that’s irrelevant to this conversation.) I wondered if I’d romanticize the notion of families and raising children under less than rosy circumstances as a result of that early brainwashing.
I do think families should pull together and do whatever needs to be done to get through tough times, and I do think families should take care of each other. Obviously. But econo-philosophically, I developed in my teenage years a much more “I will never be poor again!” determination a la Gone With the Wind than any willingness to try to lead the loving but impoverished lifestyle.
That’s not to say that I think money is the answer to a good childhood or a happy home life. I grew up poor, as a first generation immigrant kid. My parents arrived on these shores with nothing but the clothes on their back and a babe in their arms. But we were, in my opinion, still relatively well off: we didn’t have to beg, dig through bins for leavings to put food on the table. Mom and Dad found just enough opportunity to work incredibly hard, and we kids pitched in as well, we used hand me downs and didn’t shop new until I was a teenager so our basic needs were always filled. But we did live on the edge of poor, spiral-dancing that line between not having much and poverty.
And we can’t deny that money is one of the major factors that may have significant impact on the outcomes of a child’s life. While I suspect that much of my sibling’s manipulative and attentive seeking behaviors were natural, I did also see that he was quite affected by having less than others, and not having our parents around enough during those formative years to instill the sense of confidence and gratitude for what we did have certainly didn’t help. If I’m having kids and there’s any external factor that I can influence to prevent the development of risky behaviors, it’ll be my job to do it.
From a purely practical standpoint, there’s no question that having financial freedom does make life more manageable these days. Leaving aside the luxuries, being able to easily make ends meet and still have time to spend with your little ones are core requirements of having them to begin with, to my thinking.
The thing that was missing from my childhood, though, was a chance to spend real time with my parents. Time “with” Mom and Dad was helping them at work, or doing chores with them at home. Or the talks at night after dinner if they weren’t too busy or tired. While I didn’t precisely resent it at the time, I was always sad we rarely did much as a family. I definitely do regret it now that I’ve lost the chance to truly enjoy their later years with them.
***
When I envisioned that stage of my life, I simply could not see choosing to start a family at a low-earning point in my career knowing that I would have to miss key years of my childrens’ lives while fighting an uphill climb of long hours and probably political battles to advance. Looking forward, it was just unlikely that our generation was going to be settled into a single and easy career straight out of college. So far, that’s definitely been the case.
***
Now that I prepare to move into that stage of my life, it seems like whether or not I’ll be having a family of my own is a question I should have an answer for. But I don’t.
I don’t know if I want children.
That’s basically blasphemy around some of these parts. I’ve caught the lecture that “children are the reason you get married.” Because you couldn’t possibly want to have a partner without procreation following quickly thereafter. That was a disconcerting moment, coming from someone nearly ten years younger than me. I expect it from the (specifically judgy individuals of the) older generation: we’re selfish, we’re lazy, and we’re [fill in the blank] if we don’t have kids. But it’s weird when a youngun judges you for maybe not wanting kids.
I don’t know if I don’t want children, either.
As a teen, I was certain that they weren’t in my future. Other people’s children were adorable, but every child has obnoxious mode. I babysat them all the time and most of them were cute some of the time but they invariably turned into Gremlins and they did not wait for a predictable trigger like feeding after midnight or being splashed with water so it just wasn’t worth the effort. And I mean: childbirth. Ugh.
More than ten years later, it’s not the idea of children that is shudderingly bad but rather the concern about motherhood that looms. My health issues aren’t getting any better so how could I be a fully present, fully capable mother? And I worried enough about my sibling, could I take on the challenge if I had a kid like my sibling? With no intentions of projecting that expectation on my spawn, I still have to be aware that there is a chance that one or more children might inherit whatever combination of whatever led to that mess, and do my best to guide him or her out of it before it became a real disaster.
To further complicate things, I can’t be certain that I’m capable of working full time and managing a pregnancy or raising a child. The responsibilities of taking care of Doggle alone, who is fairly low-key, are enough to take up my limited reserves. And I can’t count on getting better. It hasn’t happened yet.
Adoption was always my go-to option but again, children deserve time, attention and require energy.
I wanted this to be my decision, and the right decision for me and my spouse. But it’s one of those I’ve not felt strongly for or against, other than not making a mistake. When do you know you’re ready for kids? How do you know that you know, if you were never completely certain from the very beginning that you wanted to have them?
Once in a while, I find myself second-guessing my decisions. Should I really have waited this long, even though I’ve never felt that driving urge to have children? PiC really wants a family and perhaps I could have physically handled it earlier? I certainly thought I was making the wisest choices at the time, but was it really?
Once upon a time, I swatted away the cautionary notes, the “there won’t ever be a good time”s, the “if you don’t now, then when?”s like annoying gnats. But I’m finally there. On the cusp of my thirties, I’m at the point where I have to admit that for childbearing, I’m not getting any younger. It’s time to make some real decisions, even if not yet time to commit.
I’ve never paid more than $50 to adopt a pet, and rarely even that much, in the past, so this adoption was quite a bit unusual in a number of ways.
I have never considered purchasing from a breeder or a pet store – my philosophy against that is clear. Those future pets will eventually find homes because they were bred with the intent to be sold and someone has a vested interest in placing them elsewhere; animals in shelters and rescues are only a step away from euthanasia. I am an adopter, always. I was that kid hauling home strays trying to figure out who they belonged to and how to get them home if they had a home. Once in a rare while, we would become the new home. My parents were sympathetic but they weren’t crazy or wealthy so it was a meal and a roof until the dog could be placed somehow.
It was a lot easier, back in the day down south, when we had a yard. Someone was sort of always around to keep an eye on the pups running around or keep them separated if you had a new stray in. Surrounded by friends and family nearby, you could even easily phone someone for a quick drop in if you really had to on an extra busy day to feed the dog(s). We never did that but you always knew the safety net was there.
Now, though, PiC and I wanting to bring home a dog is a very different story. The simple lack of a yard alone changes the game entirely. Add in the frequently inclement weather, our working hours and commute times, all of these spelled out a need for a completely different approach.
Suddenly, we had to satisfy a profile if this was to work. We couldn’t just pick a nice looking friendly pup and call it a day. We especially couldn’t have a puppy: they need attention, socialization, training, access to the outdoors/potty pads every few hours while they’re learning bladder control since neither of us wants to have to unteach bad habits we helped instill.
I’d been wanting an older dog; PiC prefers larger dogs. We knew we needed a dog that enjoyed going for walks but could tolerate being indoors for long periods of time. This dog had to be dog-friendly and kid-friendly because there are loads of both running around here, and not a barker by nature. We’ve been living with a barker below us and it’s driving us batty but we tolerate it. I guarantee you, however, that the neighbors would not be so tolerant in return. There are some incredibly petty people in this HOA.
Looking at shelters alone didn’t quite cut it. While they were great starting points because they had all kinds of lovely dogs we were limited from the outset against adopting specific breeds, and the local shelter is heavily stocked with those specific breeds. My favorites were cut straightaway, the jerks! They don’t allow Rottweilers, Pit Bulls, Dobermanns, etc. Breedists. I despise blanket restrictions like that. I love dogs of just about any breed and pit bulls especially because they can be so very good-tempered, intelligent and trainable, and the local shelters prescribe mandatory training classes when they adopt out pit bulls which is absolutely smart, so it’s a great set-up for their lives, but noooo…. *still bitter about this*
We stumbled across a specific breed rescue that pulls northern breeds from shelters and puts them into foster homes directly, and while Doggle’s actually not really a pinpointable member of any of the breeds they cater to, he’s close enough that they couldn’t resist him.
He’d been with them a year, had a surgical procedure and follow-up, vaccinations, a microchip placed, and was mellow the whole time. Reviewing that year with him, his foster mom was able to give us his history of behavior, preferences, reactions to people, other dogs, changes, diet, toys, length of time he was happy to be left alone – all of this practically before we ever came to see him. When we met him, he was this chubby cheeked cheerful fellow that just radiated curiosity and goodwill. He’s been that way ever since. It would have been tough to get that consistent and detailed a perspective from most shelters.
While our local shelter does do fostering and would have been half the price, they didn’t have anyone that fit enough of the profile that wasn’t a Pit. (I love our Doggle and wouldn’t trade him but I’m still annoyed on behalf of the Pits who won’t get placed because of places like ours.) I truly look forward to moving into a home where the only rules are our own: a dog that is in need of a home, trainable and gets along with other dogs and people.
The high(er) cost for his adoption, then, was because of the rescue organization that we went with. They are non-profit, yes, and it also costs a lot to rescue, care for and maintain the dogs for the length of time it takes to get them to their permanent homes. All the volunteers, going all the way up to the top of the organization, work for free. (I checked.) While I’m not one to pay a higher price for perceived value, this was a higher price for something we put a high premium on: knowledge that we could rely on and the availability of a pet that was the right fit.
Also, let’s not kid ourselves about the cute factor.
