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.

Stress explained

I enjoy my job but its just shy of enough money to support my family on. But tell that to the government that continuously tries to tell me that we make more money than we do and therefore they want to take away any small help we ask for.

This year, we will make $19,000 and a little change. Health and Welfare has decided that this is a fantastic amount of income to support a family of 5 with, and that we really don't need nearly as much help as before so they generously cut the food stamps we use in half.  But that was only after I called them and told them that they needed to stop assuming that we were magically earning $16,000 more than we were.  Somewhere along the way, someone decided that we should be making more so *poof* we were.  If only life worked that way.  Instead, someone altered our income in the paperwork, and *poof* we lost our food stamps. It wasn't us.  We have done everything to be honest and truthful in what we report. 

So again, the fight to just survive increases. Just when we were getting to the point where we weren't terrified of losing everything, we take a step back.  A step back to lying awake at night in fear that our children will be homeless. A step back to wondering how we're going to afford enough food to get through the month. A step back to cutting expenses... but what expenses are left to be cut?

Technically, its not my birthday

Its well into the small hours of the 19th so my birthday is over. I can't say it was all that much better than last year. Just like I can't say things are all that much better than last year.

I'm not sure where it went wrong. I suppose it was the evening as tasks piled up at work. Or maybe it went wrong before that. Maybe it was over the weekend or even before then. I spent so much time trying to make it good for everyone else. I wished I could take them all away to the city where we could eat German food and do all sorts of fun things together. Lately, I've realized even more how much they miss out on because of me. If I couldn't take them off on an adventure, maybe I could at least bring a little adventure to them.

I started planning a week ago. I wanted a black forest cake. From there, I planned out a dinner of schnitzel, potatoes, red cabbage and bread rolls. I wanted homemade food. I wanted a nice birthday breakfast as well, so cinnamon rolls were planned. It was all the things I would have loved for someone to do for me.

So I cooked my own birthday dinner. The family kept up on dishes, which I was grateful for but it came with the price of listening to people as they told me over and over how many times they loaded the dishwasher. I would have been happy to do my own dishes and did a fair share of them, just to getaway from the complaining that I was using so many dishes. I baked my cake with some help from my oldest. The price of the ingredients suffocating my conscience.

Twinges of annoyance abound. Constant reminders of how I fail, and reminders of how little I matter otherwise.
The phone call when I've gone to work, "I couldn't remember if you went to work at 2:30 or 3:30."
"Oh, well, its 4:30 now, so I can't really talk."
The passive-aggressive remark from someone I didn't post a birthday message to earlier in the year, but they were posting one to me. I actually don't post birthday messages.

Finding out halfway through the night that my work load doubled.

It builds, you know. Those small grievances build to where I want to burst into tears. So, as the sounds of snoring rumble through the room, I get up.  Angry because I have to be the one to leave, and although its technically not my birthday, it still is because I haven't gone to sleep yet. Angry because we live in a culture that builds up your birth into some sort of frantic day to prove you are loved and worthy enough to take up space on the earth. And angry because I obviously have failed at something so simple as that.

Where are the bootstraps?

All of this is conflicting: the daily lifestyle of pain that never actually ends, the struggle to pay bills on a wage that isn't designed to support a family and the growing pains of continual change versus stagnancy.  Some days I really don't think that we will rise out of this and be better people for it.  

Isn't that the rub?  Isn't that the goal? To learn some great truth in life and be better for the struggle?  That ties into the feel good, sweep-it-away mantras of people who don't actually get it. The platitude that this too shall pass.  I want to ask when.  When people who live in giant homes and consider their stock options tell me that they understand, they had car troubles once, I want to ask exactly how did they remedy car troubles if they never made enough money to buy food and pay for housing. I don't ask.  I say thank and move on. How do you leave if you are stranded?

This is the thing: there is no money for that second opinion, or even the first one if we are responsible.  We aren't, and so in addition to the crippling pain, we have crippling bills. With "birthday month" upon us and Christmas barreling down on us, we grasp at straws to pull things together. 

I'm in a stupor of disbelief, wondering just why on earth we haven't been able to find the bootstraps to pull ourselves out of this disaster of a life.

Day 452

When you spend over a year depending on crutches or a walking stick to support you, rehabilitation isn't easy. Every time I arrive home from physical therapy shaking and exhausted, needing ice to soothe my knee and coffee for my nerves, I wonder if I can do this.

Every block in the neighborhood or sometimes every sidewalk square walked is either a challenge or a victory.

The physical therapist assures me that I'm doing better than I think, but I only see what I lost 452 days ago. If I push for that extra sidewalk square before turning around, its only a 3 foot square. Its not the mile.  If I push to conquer walking a block, its only a block not a 5k. If I push to walk across the room, or building, its not enough -- its not grocery shopping, or being able to walk across the parking lot, into the church and through the sanctuary. If I push to balance for 15 seconds, its still not cooking, or to stand waiting.

I'm left wondering, how long will my life be on hold because of this?

There are too many sides to the question. As working poor, I wouldn't be in this position if we had insurance coverage when I got hurt. I wouldn't have given up so much life to this injury simply if I had been able to treat it when it happened. We wouldn't be facing an increasing debt load that we won't be able to handle.

The burden this has placed on my children has taken its toll and it will continue to.

The burden on my husband is huge.  Without him, everything would have collapsed a long time ago.  He does all of those tasks I can't. Forty is so young to become a caretaker for your spouse.  It was the time we planned to enjoy our lives together, instead of him looking after me knowing that simple things aren't simple because I'm physically broken.

So day 452 finds me struggling to rebuild and rehabilitate something that has gotten so weak and worn that I my only hope is in getting strong enough to replace what is broken.