Let's Do Some Math!
We need to have a serious chat.
You have this nasty habit of knocking me ten steps back every time I make three steps forward and quite frankly, I'm tired from it.
This cute little waltz that we're doing? It's not really all that cute anymore. We're out of sync with the music, stepping on each other's feet. It's not a very good look.
This latest curveball of having my car totally crap out on me has officially done me in. This is as much as I can take I think.
Life likes to throw us all curveballs from time to time, I know that. I'm constantly finding myself at the plate, watching them come hurtling at me at ninety miles an hour and wondering "What do I do? Where do I go? Do I move, or do I try to take a swing at it? Do I just let it pass me by and wait to see what comes next?"
I've got a few mantras that I live my life by. Some I've collected, some I've developed out of necessity. Take a look, do some thoughtful consideration, and draw some conclusions on what these might mean in regards to my life and how I've lived it.
"This too shall pass"
"Just breathe"
"It's a crazy, messy, beautiful life"
"The Universe doesn't give us more than we can handle"
"Small steps"
"I'll do what I always do, and figure it out"
Honest to god, I'm so fucking sick of having to repeat this shit to myself. I really am. That last one especially. Figuring it out. Making it work. For the most part, I've been figuring things out the past eight years. AND I AM SICK OF IT.
You know what's worse? Its times like this, moments where I find myself wondering how in the hell I'm going to pull a rabbit out of my hat now, that my desire to be in a relationship just absolutely skyrockets.
Finding myself in a pickle reminds me of just how fucking hard it is to be a single mom. Let's do some math here, shall we?
I bring home roughly $2,000 a month. I get paid every other week.
My rent is $905 (which will be $925 this month, since I couldn't pay it on time, and I have to pay a late fee).
Utilities are not included in my rent. I have to pay for gas, lights, and even the water. My heating is gas. It's summer time, we've got two air conditioners running only when we're home and it’s unbearably hot.
This past month my gas bill was $35.
This past month's light bill was $98. (I'm behind on paying both of these bills. Not to the point where things are being threatened to be shut off, but let's just say combined, it's into the hundreds)
The water bill is paid every three months, but if we divide it into cost of a month, I'd say it's probably $100.
Phone bill $96.
Internet bill $40 (You will try to argue this isn't a necessity, but since I do all of my schooling online through a community college, it is a necessity. This is also insanely past due.)
Car Insurance $130
All of the stupid pills/vitamins that I have to take for my shitty heart condition: $40
Gas to get to and from work. $40 every week, just to get to work, not counting running errands etc. x 4 weeks in a month = $160.
In case you need to keep up, now I'm down to $376 left to spend.
I haven't even added in groceries! Oh fuck! What does a normal person usually spend on groceries in a week? A quick google search shows that on average, people spend $150 each week for two people. That's great. I've got myself, a kid, and I just took in my teenage brother. PLUS my non-official couch crashing best friend roommate, who until very recently, didn't have a job, because he wasn't able to due to also having a shitty heart condition. So by this logic above, just counting myself and my kid (since technically the other two should be supplying their own food, and they usually do, for the most part) that's another six hundred dollars. $150 x 4 = $600.
So now I'm $224 in the hole. Somehow. Magically.
Let me be honest here. I don't go grocery shopping every week. That's right. Sometimes I stock pile food up because I know I won’t have the money to buy food. Sometimes, I'll spend $200 in one go, and that's all I buy for the entire month. Some days in our house, we don't have fresh produce. Fresh produce is a luxury that I can't afford. My kid doesn't know what it means to go into the fridge and being able to just pick out a nice fresh apple, or some strawberries. Are you able to walk into your kitchen right now and make a sandwich? Just, grab some deli meat, bread, lettuce, tomatoes, and whatever else you like on your sandwich? We're not. All of that is too expensive and probably won't get eaten quickly enough before it goes bad. Can't take the chances at having it go to waste. We don't just drink a glass of milk because milk is so expensive. So, boxed things, frozen things, the occasional fresh produce here and there. Nothing too extravagant. I'll buy everything fresh if I know that I'm going to have someone over for dinner. Chances are if I've invited you to dinner, I tell you to come late so I can go to the store on my way home from work to grab fresh ingredients. I refuse to feed guests frozen and boxed food.
Back to the point. Back into that hole I've dug myself. Where I'm negative $224.
We haven't even included other basic life things in this calculation.
Soap, shampoo, toilet paper, paper towels (another luxury, not necessarily always stocked in the house), dish soap, laundry soap.
OH MAN! I FORGOT! I don't have a washer and dryer in my house. It's $3 to wash and dry a single load of clothes where I live. I won't go to the local laundry mat since my clothes caught fire there last year. $3 to wash and dry a single load of clothes.
Here's another honest moment: I honestly can't tell you how many loads of clothes I do in my house. Let's base this off of just Nate and myself. Here's how I do laundry in my house. Let laundry pile up. Dig out the necessities for the week. For me, this is scrubs for work, plus undergarments and pajamas. For Nate, he wears a school uniform. So uniforms, plus undergarments, plus pajamas. So you're looking at maybe a load for each of us, if I REALLY shove it in there. Everything else? It gets to just sit there until I've got enough spare quarters to maybe wash it. For Nate's stuff, I'll sometimes send it to his dad's house to get done so he has everything. I'll sacrifice myself. Do you get to wash your sheets every week? What's that like?
Anyway, back to all of those extra things we need to live. Where was I? Laundry soap? Okay...okay. Trash bags, light bulbs, batteries, deodorant, feminine products, razors, a cup of coffee in the morning, Netflix, stuff for school...all of that extra little shit, it REALLY just adds up, ya know?
Here's some other things to take into consideration. $16,000 in student loans.
Medical bills. We're looking at maybe $300 every three months, if everything goes well and I don't get sick. What about Medicaid you say? Medicaid only takes your gross income into consideration, and not how much you pay for all of your bills. According to them, I MAKE TOO MUCH MONEY. CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT SHIT!? So I have to get insurance through my work. If you include my dental, that's roughly $90 each paycheck. My kid is covered through Medicaid by some miracle, so that helps a little.
So now, I'm really hundreds of dollars in the hole. And we haven't even included entertainment yet. I bet your budget has its own little section for eating out, going out and doing things, etc? Mine does too. More or less. Let me break this one down for you.
If you haven't figured it out yet, being a single mom is HARD AS FUCK.
Entertainment is really where it gets extra tricky. You see, I grew up in a poor-as-fuck house. I was hyper-aware of this growing up. Being told we didn't have the money for this, or for that. Hearing discussions of how much this or that is, or how we don't have money for whatever. Let me tell you this: I have made it my mother fucking goal in life for my son to never hear money talk come out of my mouth. It happens sometimes, and I'm blessed to have a kid who says "Oh, okay" when I say he can't have this right now, or we can't go and do that right now. He doesn't know the struggle, and how tight things really are. I refuse to let him know that we don't really have money for stuff.
And here's why: I refuse to believe that I live just to work to pay bill and then die. If you can recall, one of my mottos is that it's a crazy, messy, beautiful life. You don't know how beautiful it is if you don't get to experience it. SO YES, I WILL be shelling out money for entertainment, because that is how you experience LIFE. Yes, we go on vacations and day trips and I pay money I don't have, so that he can SEE THE WORLD, so that he can TRY NEW THINGS, so he can LEARN things. So help me God, I will have a well-rounded kid who can grow up and say he's gone places and done things and seen beautiful places and great pieces of art in museums and historical sites. So yeah, trips, dinner, the movies, whatever, is GOING to happen. Life is too short to not do the little things that make you happy. If all we get when we die is to be dead, well then, the bills are always going to be there.
So. Back to this nonsense. Hundreds of dollars in the negative. (Thousands if you're counting my student loans.)
You're wondering how the hell I do it? Aren't you? I've had people say to me, "Gosh, I don't know how you do it!" It's a balancing act, and I am the Queen of the mother fucking circus.
It's a matter of, "Okay, how long can I put this off? Do I buy groceries? Do I pay that light bill? When was the last time that I paid the internet bill? Jesus, I really need a haircut. When was the last time that I got a haircut (fun fact, more than four months ago)? It's okay to wear the same scrub top twice in a week, right? I need new sneakers for work. When was the last time I bought new sneakers? (Fun fact, a year ago maybe more) Well, if I don't pay _____ this month, I might be able to swing that before I have to go to work naked, or shoeless. Hey ___ utility company, can we work out some kind of deal? No, not really? Okay, I'll pay you what I can when I can, and hopefully the next person I talk to, I can sweet talk into keeping whatever on for another month. Oh, hey car insurance company! I haven't paid my insurance the last two months and you're going to cut it off? But I had to make sure my kid had food in his belly! I had to make sure we have water to wash our bodies with! You don't care? Oh, okay, let me figure something out. Internet bill is due again? You always get paid off last. You're probably the least important. Yes, I need you for school, but it's more important that we don't freeze to death this winter. I can always bring my computer and my kid to a place with Wi-Fi and see if I can manage there. Or maybe I can do some of my school work on my lunch break."
It's all an internal monologue of just trying to keep a balance with things. I haven't had anything shut off in over a year. I've managed. I've gotten some help here and there, but I've managed. I've got my saving graces when I really need it. And let me be clear here, I DO NOT enjoy accepting help from other people. I don't like it. I appreciate it, but it's not how I would choose to live my life. I'm used to doing things on my own, so other people coming into the picture isn't my cup of tea. I always feel guilty, like "Jeez, shouldn't I have my shit together right now?"
So universe. My car. You totally fucking up my car beyond belief, is just the absolute worst things you could have done in this moment.
Don't even suggest "What about what you have in your savings? Can't you ask your parents?" Have you not been listening? That's not an option. I don't have that privilege. As far as a savings account goes, it's "Hey, let me put this money aside for the moment, so I can transfer it back later to pay for something else."
This time, I'm really not sure what I can do. I'll figure something out eventually. This ties back into the original point. I got slightly off topic here.
When the struggle gets real, that's when I crave a relationship the most. Sure, I want to be in a relationship most of the time now a days - seriously EVERYONE I know is with someone or getting married, or having babies or buying houses and that internal desire to keep up with the Joneses really eats away at me sometimes.
Sometimes it'd be nice to be able to come home and know that I've got someone to come home to. I really desire that ability to come home and hug someone and feel like "Yeah, it'll be okay. It's me and ____ against the world." I'm tired of it being me, alone, against the world. Yes, I want all of the other relationship stuff. All of that good and the occasional bad that comes with that. What I really want most is to stop feeling all alone in the struggle.
Truth: I've been stressing out about this car bullshit. It's been on my mind all day. Work fucking sucked. It was a long day. I knew when I got home there'd be a sink full of dishes from dinner last night still. The trash still has to go out. The bathroom still needs to be cleaned. But I am just too stressed out and too exhausted. So I came home, and my kid went outside to play with his friends. While he did that, I laid on the couch and took the kind of nap that only a mom could understand. Where you're lying there, and your eyes are closed, but you can't really sleep, because you're a single mom and you've still got to listen out for your kid, regardless of how exhausted you are. So you take the power nap of all power naps, and the dishes are all still there. And I cooked mac and cheese for dinner. And wondered how the hell I'm going to get to my school's book store to buy the seven books that I need for my classes this semester. Then I wondered if I can even handle four more classes again on top of my full time job, and taking care of my kid. Am I a crazy person? Will I have enough money left in financial aid to even cover all seven books? How will I pay for them if I don't? God damn I could really use a hug, and for someone to be here. To just be able to rely on someone for some support in the wee hours of the night when I can't sleep because my mind is always going a million miles a minute. It's not even that I want to be in a relationship for the money aspect of it, you know? I want that support. I would like the option to come home after a long, stressful day, and hear someone go, "You take a nap, you look like you need it (I do). I'll watch the kid and cook some dinner. Go and rest." Or to just roll over in the middle of the night and feel another person there next to me, to get that reassurance that yes, it's hard, but I've always got that one shoulder to lean on. That's what I want the most out of everything.
I truly envy the people that I know who don't have to go it alone.
Damn you car for making me so damn vulnerable and incompetent.
Back to the drawing board.
You have this nasty habit of knocking me ten steps back every time I make three steps forward and quite frankly, I'm tired from it.
This cute little waltz that we're doing? It's not really all that cute anymore. We're out of sync with the music, stepping on each other's feet. It's not a very good look.
This latest curveball of having my car totally crap out on me has officially done me in. This is as much as I can take I think.
Life likes to throw us all curveballs from time to time, I know that. I'm constantly finding myself at the plate, watching them come hurtling at me at ninety miles an hour and wondering "What do I do? Where do I go? Do I move, or do I try to take a swing at it? Do I just let it pass me by and wait to see what comes next?"
I've got a few mantras that I live my life by. Some I've collected, some I've developed out of necessity. Take a look, do some thoughtful consideration, and draw some conclusions on what these might mean in regards to my life and how I've lived it.
"This too shall pass"
"Just breathe"
"It's a crazy, messy, beautiful life"
"The Universe doesn't give us more than we can handle"
"Small steps"
"I'll do what I always do, and figure it out"
Honest to god, I'm so fucking sick of having to repeat this shit to myself. I really am. That last one especially. Figuring it out. Making it work. For the most part, I've been figuring things out the past eight years. AND I AM SICK OF IT.
You know what's worse? Its times like this, moments where I find myself wondering how in the hell I'm going to pull a rabbit out of my hat now, that my desire to be in a relationship just absolutely skyrockets.
Finding myself in a pickle reminds me of just how fucking hard it is to be a single mom. Let's do some math here, shall we?
I bring home roughly $2,000 a month. I get paid every other week.
My rent is $905 (which will be $925 this month, since I couldn't pay it on time, and I have to pay a late fee).
Utilities are not included in my rent. I have to pay for gas, lights, and even the water. My heating is gas. It's summer time, we've got two air conditioners running only when we're home and it’s unbearably hot.
This past month my gas bill was $35.
This past month's light bill was $98. (I'm behind on paying both of these bills. Not to the point where things are being threatened to be shut off, but let's just say combined, it's into the hundreds)
The water bill is paid every three months, but if we divide it into cost of a month, I'd say it's probably $100.
Phone bill $96.
Internet bill $40 (You will try to argue this isn't a necessity, but since I do all of my schooling online through a community college, it is a necessity. This is also insanely past due.)
Car Insurance $130
All of the stupid pills/vitamins that I have to take for my shitty heart condition: $40
Gas to get to and from work. $40 every week, just to get to work, not counting running errands etc. x 4 weeks in a month = $160.
In case you need to keep up, now I'm down to $376 left to spend.
I haven't even added in groceries! Oh fuck! What does a normal person usually spend on groceries in a week? A quick google search shows that on average, people spend $150 each week for two people. That's great. I've got myself, a kid, and I just took in my teenage brother. PLUS my non-official couch crashing best friend roommate, who until very recently, didn't have a job, because he wasn't able to due to also having a shitty heart condition. So by this logic above, just counting myself and my kid (since technically the other two should be supplying their own food, and they usually do, for the most part) that's another six hundred dollars. $150 x 4 = $600.
So now I'm $224 in the hole. Somehow. Magically.
Let me be honest here. I don't go grocery shopping every week. That's right. Sometimes I stock pile food up because I know I won’t have the money to buy food. Sometimes, I'll spend $200 in one go, and that's all I buy for the entire month. Some days in our house, we don't have fresh produce. Fresh produce is a luxury that I can't afford. My kid doesn't know what it means to go into the fridge and being able to just pick out a nice fresh apple, or some strawberries. Are you able to walk into your kitchen right now and make a sandwich? Just, grab some deli meat, bread, lettuce, tomatoes, and whatever else you like on your sandwich? We're not. All of that is too expensive and probably won't get eaten quickly enough before it goes bad. Can't take the chances at having it go to waste. We don't just drink a glass of milk because milk is so expensive. So, boxed things, frozen things, the occasional fresh produce here and there. Nothing too extravagant. I'll buy everything fresh if I know that I'm going to have someone over for dinner. Chances are if I've invited you to dinner, I tell you to come late so I can go to the store on my way home from work to grab fresh ingredients. I refuse to feed guests frozen and boxed food.
Back to the point. Back into that hole I've dug myself. Where I'm negative $224.
We haven't even included other basic life things in this calculation.
Soap, shampoo, toilet paper, paper towels (another luxury, not necessarily always stocked in the house), dish soap, laundry soap.
OH MAN! I FORGOT! I don't have a washer and dryer in my house. It's $3 to wash and dry a single load of clothes where I live. I won't go to the local laundry mat since my clothes caught fire there last year. $3 to wash and dry a single load of clothes.
Here's another honest moment: I honestly can't tell you how many loads of clothes I do in my house. Let's base this off of just Nate and myself. Here's how I do laundry in my house. Let laundry pile up. Dig out the necessities for the week. For me, this is scrubs for work, plus undergarments and pajamas. For Nate, he wears a school uniform. So uniforms, plus undergarments, plus pajamas. So you're looking at maybe a load for each of us, if I REALLY shove it in there. Everything else? It gets to just sit there until I've got enough spare quarters to maybe wash it. For Nate's stuff, I'll sometimes send it to his dad's house to get done so he has everything. I'll sacrifice myself. Do you get to wash your sheets every week? What's that like?
Anyway, back to all of those extra things we need to live. Where was I? Laundry soap? Okay...okay. Trash bags, light bulbs, batteries, deodorant, feminine products, razors, a cup of coffee in the morning, Netflix, stuff for school...all of that extra little shit, it REALLY just adds up, ya know?
Here's some other things to take into consideration. $16,000 in student loans.
Medical bills. We're looking at maybe $300 every three months, if everything goes well and I don't get sick. What about Medicaid you say? Medicaid only takes your gross income into consideration, and not how much you pay for all of your bills. According to them, I MAKE TOO MUCH MONEY. CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT SHIT!? So I have to get insurance through my work. If you include my dental, that's roughly $90 each paycheck. My kid is covered through Medicaid by some miracle, so that helps a little.
So now, I'm really hundreds of dollars in the hole. And we haven't even included entertainment yet. I bet your budget has its own little section for eating out, going out and doing things, etc? Mine does too. More or less. Let me break this one down for you.
If you haven't figured it out yet, being a single mom is HARD AS FUCK.
Entertainment is really where it gets extra tricky. You see, I grew up in a poor-as-fuck house. I was hyper-aware of this growing up. Being told we didn't have the money for this, or for that. Hearing discussions of how much this or that is, or how we don't have money for whatever. Let me tell you this: I have made it my mother fucking goal in life for my son to never hear money talk come out of my mouth. It happens sometimes, and I'm blessed to have a kid who says "Oh, okay" when I say he can't have this right now, or we can't go and do that right now. He doesn't know the struggle, and how tight things really are. I refuse to let him know that we don't really have money for stuff.
And here's why: I refuse to believe that I live just to work to pay bill and then die. If you can recall, one of my mottos is that it's a crazy, messy, beautiful life. You don't know how beautiful it is if you don't get to experience it. SO YES, I WILL be shelling out money for entertainment, because that is how you experience LIFE. Yes, we go on vacations and day trips and I pay money I don't have, so that he can SEE THE WORLD, so that he can TRY NEW THINGS, so he can LEARN things. So help me God, I will have a well-rounded kid who can grow up and say he's gone places and done things and seen beautiful places and great pieces of art in museums and historical sites. So yeah, trips, dinner, the movies, whatever, is GOING to happen. Life is too short to not do the little things that make you happy. If all we get when we die is to be dead, well then, the bills are always going to be there.
So. Back to this nonsense. Hundreds of dollars in the negative. (Thousands if you're counting my student loans.)
You're wondering how the hell I do it? Aren't you? I've had people say to me, "Gosh, I don't know how you do it!" It's a balancing act, and I am the Queen of the mother fucking circus.
It's a matter of, "Okay, how long can I put this off? Do I buy groceries? Do I pay that light bill? When was the last time that I paid the internet bill? Jesus, I really need a haircut. When was the last time that I got a haircut (fun fact, more than four months ago)? It's okay to wear the same scrub top twice in a week, right? I need new sneakers for work. When was the last time I bought new sneakers? (Fun fact, a year ago maybe more) Well, if I don't pay _____ this month, I might be able to swing that before I have to go to work naked, or shoeless. Hey ___ utility company, can we work out some kind of deal? No, not really? Okay, I'll pay you what I can when I can, and hopefully the next person I talk to, I can sweet talk into keeping whatever on for another month. Oh, hey car insurance company! I haven't paid my insurance the last two months and you're going to cut it off? But I had to make sure my kid had food in his belly! I had to make sure we have water to wash our bodies with! You don't care? Oh, okay, let me figure something out. Internet bill is due again? You always get paid off last. You're probably the least important. Yes, I need you for school, but it's more important that we don't freeze to death this winter. I can always bring my computer and my kid to a place with Wi-Fi and see if I can manage there. Or maybe I can do some of my school work on my lunch break."
It's all an internal monologue of just trying to keep a balance with things. I haven't had anything shut off in over a year. I've managed. I've gotten some help here and there, but I've managed. I've got my saving graces when I really need it. And let me be clear here, I DO NOT enjoy accepting help from other people. I don't like it. I appreciate it, but it's not how I would choose to live my life. I'm used to doing things on my own, so other people coming into the picture isn't my cup of tea. I always feel guilty, like "Jeez, shouldn't I have my shit together right now?"
So universe. My car. You totally fucking up my car beyond belief, is just the absolute worst things you could have done in this moment.
Don't even suggest "What about what you have in your savings? Can't you ask your parents?" Have you not been listening? That's not an option. I don't have that privilege. As far as a savings account goes, it's "Hey, let me put this money aside for the moment, so I can transfer it back later to pay for something else."
This time, I'm really not sure what I can do. I'll figure something out eventually. This ties back into the original point. I got slightly off topic here.
When the struggle gets real, that's when I crave a relationship the most. Sure, I want to be in a relationship most of the time now a days - seriously EVERYONE I know is with someone or getting married, or having babies or buying houses and that internal desire to keep up with the Joneses really eats away at me sometimes.
Sometimes it'd be nice to be able to come home and know that I've got someone to come home to. I really desire that ability to come home and hug someone and feel like "Yeah, it'll be okay. It's me and ____ against the world." I'm tired of it being me, alone, against the world. Yes, I want all of the other relationship stuff. All of that good and the occasional bad that comes with that. What I really want most is to stop feeling all alone in the struggle.
Truth: I've been stressing out about this car bullshit. It's been on my mind all day. Work fucking sucked. It was a long day. I knew when I got home there'd be a sink full of dishes from dinner last night still. The trash still has to go out. The bathroom still needs to be cleaned. But I am just too stressed out and too exhausted. So I came home, and my kid went outside to play with his friends. While he did that, I laid on the couch and took the kind of nap that only a mom could understand. Where you're lying there, and your eyes are closed, but you can't really sleep, because you're a single mom and you've still got to listen out for your kid, regardless of how exhausted you are. So you take the power nap of all power naps, and the dishes are all still there. And I cooked mac and cheese for dinner. And wondered how the hell I'm going to get to my school's book store to buy the seven books that I need for my classes this semester. Then I wondered if I can even handle four more classes again on top of my full time job, and taking care of my kid. Am I a crazy person? Will I have enough money left in financial aid to even cover all seven books? How will I pay for them if I don't? God damn I could really use a hug, and for someone to be here. To just be able to rely on someone for some support in the wee hours of the night when I can't sleep because my mind is always going a million miles a minute. It's not even that I want to be in a relationship for the money aspect of it, you know? I want that support. I would like the option to come home after a long, stressful day, and hear someone go, "You take a nap, you look like you need it (I do). I'll watch the kid and cook some dinner. Go and rest." Or to just roll over in the middle of the night and feel another person there next to me, to get that reassurance that yes, it's hard, but I've always got that one shoulder to lean on. That's what I want the most out of everything.
I truly envy the people that I know who don't have to go it alone.
Damn you car for making me so damn vulnerable and incompetent.
Back to the drawing board.