The holidays are here

Its the Monday after Thanksgiving, and I do have a lot to be thankful for.  We've managed another year in poverty. With medical insurance from my job I manage to control the pain in my knee a little better. The kids are still fed and we still have water and electricity. We have a vehicle that fits us well enough to get us around town and one that I can use for work.

Our lives are still so very small.  I suppose they will be from now on, and I have accepted that.  No more trips to see family or friends. No improvements to the house, no improvements to the vehicles, or anything else.  We live small and are thankful that nothing big has come up to make things worse.

Christmas is approaching and this year I managed to buy a used Christmas tree ahead of time so we could put one up. I also borrowed a ladder and tested the strength of my knees by hanging the lights on the front of the house. My intention was to be prepared for one last Christmas in the house.

The paperwork sits in the counter waiting for us to fill it out. It will prove that once again we can't afford to continue to live here, but this time we won't have the luxury of the hardship forbearance to help us stay in our home. I make enough money to pay most of the bills with the forbearance but I don't make enough to pay the full payment. From the paperwork its clear that we will lose the house, unless a miracle happens.

So I've decorated.  I don't want the weight of reality to completely destroy the magic of the season. And yet the reality is there will be no gifts for the kids this year, and we will walk through the motions to preserve certain traditions.  The frantic fear of last year is replaced with sad acceptance that we continue to fail.

Reprieve

The surgery on my knee helped relieve enough of the pain that I could reduce my use of crutches and get by with a walking stick for the most part. Two weeks ago, I had a cortisone shot to help with the pain that still plagues me. After the initial reaction to the shot in which I felt terrible, I found significant relief. I started sleeping through the night. I was finally warm, something that I have struggled with since I got hurt. I was able to walk, and it was as though a fog had lifted and I could do more than just get by. 

We went out on a date.  I went to the grocery store. I cooked. I went for walks. I walked up stairs. I could do so many of the things that I hadn't been able to do. Life reawakened for me. I started to make plans for the future.

So imagine the disappointment of the shot wearing off quickly. I followed through with my plans to cook and bake over the weekend, but the price was high. I miss being able to enjoy life so much.

I'd like to adapt my home, yard and life to better accommodate what I now know is going to be a lifetime problem. The short break from the pain made me realize that if I'm going to have any sort of quality of life I need to change things. 

So how do I do that? How do I make everything more accessible when I teeter on the brink of losing everything? How do I afford the supplies to make my yard and garden more workable and productive, when I can't afford household supplies? How do I make things change when I can't physically do as much?

I don't know the answers. I don't know how to make everything better. 

1929

I once asked my grandmother what her family thought when they heard about the stock market crash of 1929, and how the Great Depression affected her. She told me that it didn't really seem to matter because when you are poor, things like that just don't matter as much. 

I waver on what the meaning of Trump's presidential victory will mean for my family. We are just so poor, I wonder how much it will really matter.  The system of checks and balances has fallen out of alignment and will swing to the right now, too.  The Affordable Care Act will most likely be repealed. There won't be any relief for those in the Medicaid gap, but since we fell into that gap it won't really matter to my family.  We may not qualify for the minimal food stamps we get now. Then again, the Health and Welfare office aggressively argues that we should be making more money then we do. I agree.  I think we should be making more money, but that doesn't mean we do. Health and Welfare cut the amount of food stamps we receive because they didn't think our family could survive on what we make, so we must have other income. We don't. I can't make people pay me more, just like I can't make people actually honor their contracts to pay my husband and his partner for the work they do.

We live day to day, not paycheck to paycheck. I worry that once the forbearance has run its course for our house we won't be able to afford to refinance via modification.  Homelessness is a very scary, real concern for us. The government can't guarantee that my family has a home, but it never has. My grandmother's family had that going for them -- they owned their farm.

So we continue to struggle. We look at the upcoming holidays with chagrin knowing that this year we can't even afford the food to put on the table. But we aren't the only family and we won't be the last.