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.
