This rant is a complete manifestation of self pity and a slight “hm, that’s interesting” thought stream that I found myself on while trying to fall asleep, so please bare with me. Or don’t, I suppose I won’t know the difference.My husband and I are broke. Like flat out, if my parents weren’t well enough off to pay our mortgage for us, we would be homeless broke. It would be mildly comedic if it weren’t for the fact that we have a perfect little girl relying upon us to keep her alive too. One of those throw your hands up in the air and laugh until you cry because if you didn’t you would just scream until you burst a blood vessel in your head kind of situations.My wonderful, hardworking and loving husband has been laid off twice this year. Absolutely no fault of his own. He gave a year and a half of soul-sucking work to a company, just to walk in one Friday this past January to them telling him that they didn’t need his position anymore, to clean out his desk and not come back.He looked tirelessly and found a new job in a month. Seemed perfect. He was able to work from home on a reasonably flexible schedule which allowed me to pick up more hours at my part time retail job. We thought we were back on track. Just about the time we got caught back up on all our bills, his new employer decided they really couldn’t afford to continue paying him full time, and wanted to transition him from a salaried, fully benefited employee to a part time independent contractor. That was in May. He is still unable to find full time work.Yes, we are collecting unemployment for him. However, it’s not even half of what he was making before. And now we have to pay health insurance premiums out of pocket. Our savings is gone. Has been gone.And now, after that respectably long backstory, we come to the semi-clickbait title of this post. I’ve been contemplating all the things my husband and I have gone without so that our daughter has what she needs to grow and blossom.She eats all of the meats and veggies and fruits that we can afford to buy. Her father and I are living on pasta, anemic sandwiches and ground chuck. Of course, in typical toddler style, she would much rather eat whatever it is that we’re having than the heathy food I found on manager’s special.I have ppd and while I was able to get double my happy pill dosage at a 90 day supply (aka breaking the pills in half so I have the correct dosage for 180 days) right after he lost his job the first time, I’ve been shirking the therapy. I just can’t bring myself to exchange a weeks worth of groceries for an hour of sitting and talking about my feelings. But you bet your bottom dollar that my daughter is going to her two year old check-up tomorrow. One of the first things I did when we got my husbands first paycheck from the second employer of the year was catch up on her doctors bills so that they would continue allowing her to come to them.Now, I know that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there that are worse off than we are. I work with a single mother of three who is currently living with her mother. She was so excited because next month she’s going to have enough money saved to pay the security deposit on a mobile home so that the four of them can finally have a place of their own.I suppose I miss the person that I was when I thought spending $100 on a nice date night was splurging. Now, splurging consists of spending $5 to take our daughter to an indoor playground because when it finally stopped raining, it was too bloody hot outside.And I’m angry. I’m so unspeakably angry. I just cannot wrap my mind around how two hardworking people, who haven’t been living above their means, can go from a happy, financially comfortable family of three to only keeping their heads above the proverbial water through help from extended family in less than six months. I want to know how the people who make these employment decisions sleep at night. Do they know that they’ve condemned a family with a very young child to financial insecurity for, potentially, years to come? Do they know that I now cannot afford to put my child into any sort of early education program until she is eligible for public preschool in another three years? How is that going to set her up compared to all the other children who have been exposed to structured education in some form?Do they have any idea of how fcking scared I am? If it was just my husband and me, I’d say screw it. Ditch the nice starter home in the super family friendly neighborhood and great school district for a cheap apartment in the ass crack of the city. But it’s not just us. We have this tiny little human who is starting the years that could shape the rest of her life, and I can’t even afford swim lessons. I don’t know how to teach her the things she needs to learn. Never in my life have I been so mad and so scared over someone else’s missed opportunities than I am for what my daughter is now not going to be able to do until we figure out how to get our feet back under us again. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2YsLKmi
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