Faux-lates

Me: it's because my body is producing more muscle relaxing endorphins.
Him: Babe...you were clumsy before pregnancy.
Me: You are about to win the worst husband of the year award.
Him: Gasp! I'm so honored! I would like to thank my clumsy wife...

Evelyn. Evelyn. Evelyn.

Who are you? You exist only in mine and God's existence. In me and in Him. And from another him - and in his heart.
I am so afraid to lose you and so afraid to meet you.
I am clumsy, restless, fat and grumpy.
I hope I'm not rubbing off on you.

Working While Pregnant

The day after I lost my job, I found out I was pregnant.

So, I am three months pregnant and I have two options. I can work more or I can quit.

Tax Returns

Well the loans have proven themselves useful for once!

Since beginning to pay the loans in 2010, he has paid over $8000 in interest alone on only his Sallie Mae loans. That means that we thankfully qualify for a nice little return on that interest in our refund even though we are filing jointly.

It's like being the prettiest ugly girl in the room.

We are taking our entire return and putting it toward our smallest loan.

In two or three days when the latest payment posts, this loan will have been reduced to

$126.97 ! !!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Take that debt snowball. And criminal student loan services! I wonder how we shall celebrate.

I think I make people uncomfortable. I ask them to guess how much in interest has been paid. I laugh harshly at the $1300 a month that goes to Sallie Mae alone. I throw number like $100,000 around glibly. And I make impossible declarations of us paying it off in five years.

But it helps me cope. I don't tell them to gain sympathy or pity. I tell them because it is a fact and an enormous presence in my life. Maybe I don't have any guile. We hide the poor so well in America. My parents were shocked in Mexico at the amount of people begging on the streets. Wait until they travel to Italy. Poverty makes us squirm, we think we are so removed from it. Really we are surrounded by it. We are just more embarrassed and hide it better. I mean I drive a BMW. Why would anyone listen to our story?

I Just Want to Stay With You in this Moment Forever

There are some things in life that I am always grateful that I will never have to do again.

High school dances.

This is the story of how a boy ruined Aerosmith's greatest song of all time for me. At a dance.

He was good looking in terms of high school. He had very pretty features, gelled hair, and was absolutely full of energy. I didn't realize until much later that almost none of his looks translated into masculine adulthood. He would never look like a man and maybe for that reason he has always acted like a child. All of the girls were interested in him.

When I first entered high school I was straight of the homeschool boat. That awkward denim vessel of bliss that sailed me through the first fourteen years of my life. It immediately crashed into one billion splintered pieces when I arrived on the shore of my first day of high school. I was not hailed as a bright new comer or worshiped like the returning Montezuma. I was painfully, piercingly different.

By junior year I had almost completed my transformation. Every piece of me had been broken and then healed over and over until I "fit in". He was off and on dating a small mousy girl who was considered "hott". When I think about it now I wonder if we were all blind the entire time?

At this particular dance they were fighting. Their "song" was Aerosmith "Don't Want to Miss a Thing." Vomit activated and induced. When that song came on, he asked me to dance. For almost five minutes we swayed uncomfortably together, his hands on my waist, as he looked pointedly over my shoulder and grinned at her. He was making her jealous and he was using me.

Of course they ended up making up later and she ended up hating me. As if I was the monster. This memory and that song still have the power to make my breathing quicken and my nostrils flare. The embarrassment.

It is a quick dagger that slips in neatly to bring back so many memories from high school and college. Memories that grow and intertwine and expand into the dim corners of my mind until a smoking, broken factory fills my mind and pushes its way down into my gut. The sky is a fiery pimple colored red. The air is thick and hot. I am trapped on a conveyor rushing toward the factory as I relive moment after moment of insecurity, wasted time, wasted gifts, and stomped hopes. Until blackness.

I don't know how I can remember it so well and yet not better. There have been so many sunny days, so many excruciatingly bright moments in my life and yet these memories are corrupted. Vines grow up my throat and around the good memories, choking us and pulling us toward darkness.

But that is today or the day when I hear that damn Aerosmith song. On another day I can see the angel that flies throughout every moment of my life and guides and protects me. The angel that lead me to the most perfect dance of my life.

 

Did You Know?

"Did you know you would be poor when you married him?" His Mom asked me.

I stuttered and stumbled over my words. "We aren't poor. We have a very easy life. We are...cozy."

Are you allowed to point out to someone that they are poor? But we aren't. Well we are. We are worth more dead than alive. In college I always told people that I was poor but Dad isn't. We won't starve because our family will take care of us.

That isn't actual poverty right? I don't worry about being considered poor because we are young. We don't need much. It is a strain to pay into the loan every month but it is helping us to live simply. I complain about it more than I should because I enjoy the challenge.

What worries me is if we have children. We plan on having children young which means we will still be poor. I'm hoping that we can knock out enough debt to just live simply. It isn't really poverty to go without luxury.

Oh! our life is beautiful! How could we ever consider ourselves unlucky?

We Have Gone

I promise you. I promise you all the raindrops that have fallen endlessly these past two weeks that if I hear one more middle aged person declare that they worked their way through college and escaped with no student loans that I will eat seven thousand chocolate chips. And scream.

Thank-you. Thank-you for your condescension, your pretty confusion. The small uncomfortable thought that makes your eyebrows pinch together and your head tilt to the side. How in the world could twenty year old kids be in such debt? I worked for a grant, a scholarship, I worked a waitress job and lived at home during the summer. I graduated without debt. Young adults are stupid. A small puff in your chest assures you that you have correctly assessed the situation.

You ass.

For sharters, your education cost less than half of what ours did. We have worked through college, he worked all four years to cover his room and board as well as food. We have applied for scholarships and grants and have been denied. Our employers have asked us to get a bachelors at the minimum, a masters a phd on our own time with the money we have not even begun to earn from you.

You have locked us out of profession after profession by making the requirements more stringent, less flexible, and at our expense as opposed to an investment on your part. You hold the key and yet you have encouraged us since we were enrolled in preschool to go to college. You ask for us to work at unpaid internships and refuse us apprenticeship even though that was how you learned. Not on your time. You want the best for your kid. You need to make enough to pay off their college and them moving back in with you.

The higher education system is flooded. Tuition rises and doubles with inflation. There is no part time job in the world that will pay the $30,000 it takes for one year of a private education.

So it's a bad decision to send a 18 year old to college. But who encouraged him from the start. Who has stressed the importance of a higher education: now a glorious expression for extended adolescence? Did a guidance counselor speak up? Did the bank professional speak up? Did the university say "you cannot afford this"? What I heard was "you will never make it without this". "There is no price for an education." "Everyone is going to college." We are groomed for it. It was your dream to send us and we have gone.

Suffering

There are always two sides to a story. When I said that I was at community college taking two art classes, calculus and working two jobs it sounded impressive. Packaged like that it sounds very neat. What I didn't say was that during that semester I lost almost 20lbs from being too busy to eat. I drank more, lied to my parents more, and engulfed myself in a useless relationship to the point of later self destruction. It was anything but neat.

And when I look at other times in my life when I have accomplished great things, I can see the same darkness entwined in these stories. When I finished architectural undergrad in three years. Don't worry it only included one suicide attempt. When I went to high school at age 14 after being home schooled my entire life: depression, cutting, and drinking.

I wonder if I will look back on raising children or overcoming this debt in the same way. I have no doubt that I will accomplish it but how bleak will those memories be?

The thing I am most proud of in my life is my marriage. He has shown me how to consecutively live in the light. I think he will show me how to excel in the light as well.