I was having a good week for a change. Thanks to some creative money-wrangling, I'd managed to keep the family alive and well during our monthly mortgage-imposed Two-Week Period of Impossible Austerity.
While the other weeks of the month are financially tough for us, those first two, when our mortgage is due, are especially difficult. Every dollar of our income for that time goes toward paying a mortgage that did not used to be oppressive but which has become, due to higher prices and diminished wages, a bank account-draining monster.
There's no such thing as buying food or gas or kids' shoes or toothpaste during that first half of the month. There simply isn't anything leftover. This week, though, finding ourselves on the other side of the mortgage payment, at least until next month, felt liberating.
I felt better mentally, too. I decided to accept that our current state of affairs was probably the new reality for us. After dealing with the financial fallout from the never-ending Great Recession for so many years without a break in sight, a future without struggle seems unlikely. For my own sanity, it makes sense to make peace with the struggle rather than continue to fling myself at an unmovable wall.
If life was going to be hard, it was going to be that way whether or not I moped or fret or railed on and on about the unfairness of it all. The outcome was beyond my control, so why continue to worry about it?
I thought of my daily To-Do List as I turned on the shower in preparation of the day ahead. Everyone else had already left for work or school so the shower was finally mine.
As I stood under the water, I noticed that it just didn't seem to be warming up. In fact, the longer I stood there, the water grew noticeably colder.
Some days my brain behaves like an obsolete computer, incapable of booting up those neurons with anything resembling speed. It took several moments of enduring the increasingly cold shower before my brain seemed ready to dismiss the To-Do List in favor of solving this current problem.
And then, the terrible realization: we had run out of heating oil.
Indeed, it had been a couple of months since we last purchased it, and even then, we'd only bought the minimum of 125 gallons. We'd had to drain the remainder of our savings account in order to pay for it. At nearly four dollars a gallon, the price of home heating oil equals the cost of a car payment. And that's just to buy the minimum amount. Fill the entire 275 gallon tank and the cost easily exceeds that of our mortgage payment.
These days, we do not have the cash equivalent of a car - or mortgage - payment just lying around.
Although we've run out of oil, we've also run out of the money to buy more of it.
No oil means no hot water and no heat during a cold January in Pennsylvania.
So much for acceptance and going with the flow. Just when I think I've found peace with my situation, and that there may finally be a healthy way of dealing with it, the Universe is there to remind me of exactly how badly we're still screwed.
Facing relentless financial struggles has a way of forcing you to lose all inhibitions. Suddenly, selling off possessions or taking an odd job or asking other people for help isn't nearly as intimidating as it used to be. You do it for survival. You do it for your kids.
When all of the pain and uncertainty and embarrassment is removed, our days of challenge have a way of showing us the best in ourselves and in other people. I know that our family would not have survived this long if it weren't for the small kindnesses of friends, arriving at just the right time, at that exact moment when we needed it most, and for that I am overwhelmingly grateful.
As unlikely as it feels right now, I'm doing my best to believe that things will work themselves out this time, too.
"Everything is alright in the end. If it's not alright? It's not yet the end." - from the movie Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
(originally published on phillyburbs.com on 1/21/2013)
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