Shit Happens Fund

As I said in the last post, things do get more complicated even with great planning. Our relationship eventually graduated from a long-distance romance dreaming to my husband moving here when my kids and I came down with a nasty case of double-pneumonia (as in two different strains at once). At the time I was a single mother, working in non-profit and benefiting from public assistance, and still not able to sustain health insurance (prior to Obamacare) or anything beyond bare survival. I was very grateful for the dream cottage of 750 square feet at the foot of the mountains, but when we were all so very sick, and my then boyfriend stopped work, and came in to help with everything from medical bills to getting the children to school, my heart sank deeply into our future. His thinking, as a conservative man, was that if we were to share our lives, then it was his job to see that things would be taken care of when it was needed and that nothing would stop him from making us his sole goal. Wow. It was just so different from the way I'd been raised in my liberal background that I was to be independent and take care of things myself, or at the most have the help of the state.

Wait. That seems all switched around. I struggled with it. As a liberal, feminist woman I was raised to believe that I had to live as the leader of my life at all times, and that a helpful man was somehow pulling the rug out from under my feet. Yet, I was also raised to believe that the community, the government should help poor women like me so that we could remain independent of the help of men like my now husband. So, it was far better to have my life determined by the rules of a government bureaucracy than by the assistance of those who put me first.

Hoping to sell a house in the city he left behind, he started working here, in Colorado, right away, and we found out within weeks that we were violating the rules of my housing situation by taking a breath to find the next stop along the way. In a rush-rush move along you don't qualify for assistance anymore if you're going to go fall in love, we had to move out of the town where my kids were at school in order to afford his mortgage and our rent. Fine, whatever it takes to move into the future. Shit happens. Deal with it.

You wouldn't believe how much shit happened in the next four years! I will unravel it a little at a time, but I have to say that this is indicative of our success in facing challenges rather than our failures. This is something I would love to see in our local, state and national governments. All the whining and inability to keep moving the country along in spite of all sorts of challenges have us on the verge of divorce, if only we weren't so truly blended together. There is a load of circumstances that makes this country this way. It is everyone's fault. Yeah, I admit that I contributed to the la-la-land attitude that we road on because I did not want to assess how backed up to the wall we've become by the drive of our own sense of what is valuable.

Back to my husband and me, even when we had a decent budgetary plan put together, building up revenue and paying down debt, shit happened. What were we going to do? What if I cannot pay off debt due to illness (of the economy or the body)? Does that mean he stops bringing in revenue? NO. What if revenue flattens out due to  job changes, mergers and acquisitions, tax changes? Does that mean you stop paying down the debt? NO! Everything has to be constantly readjusted at this level, and so why would we assume that wouldn't be true at the national or international level. Putting our heads in our hands and pointing at the other person is never going to work.

Honestly. Shit happens and you juggle. My husband, the conservative guy, had to let go of some of his expectations on debt pay down. Honestly, when you have a wife with two major surgeries in three years and you love her in spite of it, it is a noble thing to let go of these things. Wait I'm getting ahead of myself. All you need to know here is that shit really did happen to undo his careful, noble plan. And, if you look at the big picture the same thing is true. If we love our country we are not going to starve her out because she is sick as  a dog, and she is sick as a dog. Really, we need to think of the cost of healing her productivity as investing in a sick mom of two growing kids, and a lifetime companion.

Meanwhile, I had to let go of the idea of quickly climbing out of the "whatever it takes" to keep things just as they were, and I had to move away from the center of my kids' and my own lifestyle. This is how people with opposing views about priorities and outcomes do it. Some would say, "flexibility" is it, but what I call it is "the shit happens fund." Essentially, we do not expect circumstances to unravel a good plan. Sure a bad plan can be undone easily, but a noble plan gets rewarded, right? Har.

Until we meet again, I recommend at least mentally creating "a shit happens fund" so that when it does happen you can dig into something other than panic. It may only consist of a bag of laughter, but when you've got that, you can move on.

Debt is Neutral

When we met, my husband and I were seemingly at the opposite ends of the political spectrum. Still I did not expect him to oppose me, and this pointed out how deeply my own racism and political expectations were truly buried. I can't speak for him, but I'm quite sure he never in a million years guessed that he'd fall in love with a bleeding heart liberal who believed that paying taxes is a blessing and supporting the arts should be a bottom-line issue. Ewe! How do we live with each other's odd world view??

It occurred to me that exploring our differences and how we put up with each other's point of view and manage forward with our values intact, if adjusted, is something the country needs to explore, too. So that's why I'm writing this blog. The title is after one of my husband's favorite things to say to me about policy decisions made far, far away, an apt commentary on the both-side delusions and responsibilities for the fine mess we find ourselves in.

What drew such different people together besides out right physical attraction? We actually spent hours talking to each other on the phone in a long distance relationship for a year and a half before we spent lots of face time together, and so it was indeed an attraction of mind, and yet finding what we agreed upon was not obvious. Our approach to life itself was formed by very different life experiences. Our expectation for immediate confirmation from the other was never going to work for us. In fact, we are each deeply entrenched in our own political ideologies and unswayed on certain issues. So what we did was to accept difference and we circled around the many issues delicately and perhaps out right avoided them at times in favor of finding agreements because we wanted to serve the concept of love over expectations.

What we could agree upon was responsibility to deal with our current load of debt sensibly. Sensibly turned out to be a loaded word, of course, but we have not strayed from the essence that there are unpleasant things from our separate pasts that we have to take care of, and that we are not punishing ourselves by dealing with them step-by-step, even if it looks that way to others. We imagined that we could do this fairly quickly with two incomes. One of us would support the needs of today, while the other one of us would work to pay down the debts. We took the problem as a sum total, not as separate things that came from former decisions made by other people. The debt was neutral from the start - not one person's fault or the other's person's fault. It was a great big piece of baggage on both of our shoulders and that affected both of our present and future tenses. We ARE in this TOGETHER, and we do not blame each other for mistakes made long before we met, even when people around us think that we might be a little too forgiving.

I think this would be a great place for our nation to start dealing with our debt crisis. Let's stop blaming other side for making this problem. It is entirely useless to blame as the debt is now on all of our laps. It is time for Liberals to stop stroking their egos with congratulations for a budget surplus that existed over a decade ago because even with that surplus WE WERE IN DEBT. It is time for Conservatives to stop stroking their egos on how austere we're willing to be to get over that debt because it is not true as we have never witnessed any true, across-the-board austerity. The fact is both sides racked up some heavy mistakes and now the best thing to do is back up and look at it and recognize it for our own because we are in this together. We ARE in this TOGETHER.

The debt of our family weighs in every single decision we make until we are finished with paying it off. We understand that faster growth would require more leverage, and we don't drink that Kool-Aid. And, YES, it does get more complicated than that almost right away...but that will be the next entry. For now, just imagine not blaming the other side for the mess we are all in right now.

What To Do In A Divided House

This blog is going to be about a Democrat and a Republican in love, living under one roof, and making peace with it.