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  The Affordable Care Act will most likely be repealed.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.