Getting A Life

Various and sundry or, An Update

I apologize profusely that I have not been writing regularly. I’ve been feeling very blocked lately and it’s been something of an effort to even write in my personal blog and I’m not doing very well with that either. This represents me making a conscious effort to put something here today that is more substantive than bragging about my Google ranking or reporting how much I weigh. Hopefully the logjam will be removed soon.

Site design and content issues
I really, really need to work on these. The logo looks amateurish and the pages are outdated and the latter don’t really say what I want them to say at this point, either. I am not sure when I will be able to concentrate on working on this stuff so if the appearance of this blog annoys you, your patience will be greatly appreciated. I haven’t gotten any complaints yet, including links from other blogs saying stuff like “Wow, get a load of how much this blog sucks,” but maybe my readers are just polite.

Health issues
I still have no self-control about what I eat. OK, that’s not entirely true. I have some control, but not enough. Some days I keep my eating fairly low-carb, and others I don’t. It doesn’t help that I feel like I’m being sort of swept along with someone else’s day, like I live only to wait until they get off work and then according to their dictates. Even my grocery shopping hinges entirely on them and I’m kind of sick of it. But this is one of those aggravations I just have to live with for now, and I don’t think it entirely explains why I can’t seem to stay on plan, even a half-assed plan.

Housing issues
Still sort of apartment-hunting, although I feel as blocked about that as I do about blogging. I’m afraid I won’t be able to get a place, which makes it really dumb that I’m not trying hard enough, which guarantees I won’t get a place. However, rumors that landlords are tightening their standards around here are not helping my mood any. Yet one more reason to roll my eyes every time I hear someone complaining because they bought too much house and now they have to rent because the bank foreclosed. You’re taking my potential home, dude–I can’t buy a house at all. Cry me a river.

Money issues
I have at least caught up my cell phone bill and still have $300 in the account of the $400 I got last Wednesday, and most of the $100 decrease was due to catching up the cell phone*. I need to plow through and catch up as much else as I possibly can today, and somehow manage it without spending all my laundry money. Sigh.

I just checked out a whole bunch of library books about starting and running a home-based business. I remarked to my little girl’s dad that I don’t know why anyone buys chintzy e-books off the Internet that tell them maybe one-millionth of what they need to know for a tenth of their rent money when they can just go to the library for free. He reminded me that our library system probably ranks in the top ten of United States public libraries and maybe even in the top five. Still, there’s interlibrary loan. And of course, just because we check out books doesn’t mean we’ll learn from them. It’ll be interesting to see if I find the time to glean anything useful from these books before I have to return them.

Meanwhile I also job-hunt but… yeah. Still hung up about putting my daughter in preschool. I think at this point that if I do it, it’ll be Waldorf because at least they won’t treat her like a miniature computer on legs. And the only reason I’d do it is at least she could be around kids and get a lot of playtime in, and not be hung up on the TV all day. It wouldn’t be because I thought it was her only option for getting an education, like so many parents seem to think. But it’s my absolute last option, and I’ll hold out as long as I can. I’m also hung up about not being employable. It doesn’t really matter at this point whose fault it is; I’d be just as unemployable after four years’ unemployment due to disability as I am after four years opting to stay out after years of job-hopping and impulsive behavior. (I.e., quitting at the drop of a hat because I didn’t like working somewhere.) What matters is whether I’d be able to pick up the slack if something happened to my little girl’s dad. Yes, she’d be entitled to Social Security**, but it wouldn’t kick in immediately and we could be evicted in the meantime.

There’s also the point that I still need to pay off my debt and start working feverishly to ensure that I’m not destitute in retirement. Hello? McFly? *knocks own head*

Relationship issues
Something… interesting is happening. I do not wish to label it for fear that all is not as it seems, but there’s also the point that the last time I was this mistrustful about this particular person, I lost him for thirteen and a half years. So I’m trying to be patient and hang loose and just wait to see what happens. I’m better at this than I was even five years ago, so I suppose there is something to be said for extreme relationship adversity when it forges you and makes you stronger. But I’m still not totally OK with the way things are going. We’ll just have to see how they play out.

I do know that he called a week or two ago and my little girl’s dad was here and didn’t even tell me the phone rang (it was one call out of many, so ultimately it didn’t hurt anything, but still), and my little girl’s dad has said a few other things that make me wonder what his take is on this whole situation. So I may get to deal with ugliness soon. On top of that I had a mean jealous streak about five miles wide in the immediate aftermath of his and my breakup, exacerbated by post-partum depression and worry that he was going to abandon our daughter like he abandoned me. It meant that every time I saw a woman being friendly to him online, I got snarly at him about it. I’m pretty sure I’m going to hear about this any day now, even though the situation is different. (And it really is. That’s the sad part.)

It makes me think there is some wisdom after all to setting up a certain distance between unmarried parents so that each can have their own life. Although if things had gone sanely and smoothly during the pregnancy and after, even if they had still resulted in him and me not being together, I think I would feel a lot better about the traditional visitation routine. But my daughter was too young for that kind of thing anyway. Babies and toddlers need to be with their mothers, assuming no abuse or neglect is going on. They’re not ready to visit with an absent dad for more than a few hours here and there until they’re at least three years old. Still, she’s three now.

And yet I hate it when she’s not here. I feel completely wrong and lost and don’t know what to do with myself. I mean, I do find things to do, like clean house, but the place is empty and I feel empty too. And I’m hardly going to send her off just so I can date or whatever. So it’ll be interesting figuring this out.

OK, I guess I had more to say than I thought. Let’s hope it is not another week before I post again.

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*My cell phone is my primary phone and I have no landline. In fact I had my original landline number ported to my cell phone and completely switched over back in 2006. It would be a better deal to have a bare-bones landline and DSL rather than a cell phone and cable Internet–assuming I didn’t use much long distance. These days, unfortunately, I have to use long distance if I want to talk to anyone besides my little girl’s dad, because most of my loved ones and some of my best friends are not online regularly or don’t write well. So as long as most of my conversations take place on nights and weekends, I think I’m still saving money.

**Oh, but Social Security is just a failed retirement program and we should replace it with the stock market. Whatevs. *eyeroll*

Homesteading: urban or rural?

This post got me to thinking again about some options I have been considering for a while, and even more now that I am inching closer to the end of my lease. I have been wanting to move more in the direction of homesteading for a while but it has been very difficult to even get started, given my life circumstances since I left my husband in ‘99.

The bottom line is that whether or not we are in a recession, whether or not food prices are climbing faster than usual, I’m very discontent with the mainstream way of doing things. It has already taken its toll on my psyche and threatens to do the same to my daughter. I know that we can do so much better for ourselves and derive so much more real satisfaction out of life than we do, and of course as a mother I want what’s best for my child. While I will not say that the usual 9-to-5 work grind for me and the 40-hour-a-week daycare for her are the worst options we could have (not that we are utilizing them now, but they’re the option most people seem to choose in the United States at one time or another), they certainly aren’t optimal. And if we can do optimal, why settle for less?

Although I am low-income with my assets eaten up in debt, I have one advantage that people with better financial lives than mine often do not yet have: access to a decent home and a piece of land out in the country, zoned agricultural, in a state with very liberal homeschooling laws. And I have been thinking very, very hard about whether it might not be a good idea to take advantage of those resources. Not to mention the fact that a good chunk of my extended family on both sides lives nearby.

Now, there are many good reasons to stay in the city. One, I like the climate here better; the rural homestead to which I referred in the previous paragraph is in southwestern Louisiana, and it gets pretty dry (ground) and humid (weather) down there. Not to mention the bigger bugs, which gross me out, so I won’t. Two, the library system here is excellent, which would be a big help to my daughter especially if I homeschool her. Three, gas prices won’t affect us as much if we can walk to most of the places we need to go.

But there are good reasons to go to the country. One, the growing season is much extended down in zone 9, and we get citrus during the winter, and I’d have lots of gardening space. Two, when I was growing up, I was more likely to read the books in my house than check them out from the school library, and it isn’t like Louisiana doesn’t have a library system. (They do. I just have no idea how good, but a bad library can be improved.) Three, I wouldn’t need to Take My Child To A Place in order for her to be able to play and get her wiggle out; she can just run outside. Four, I wouldn’t have the state breathing down my neck to make sure my daughter goes through the same educational cookie cutter as everyone else. And of course, Five, the family bit, and Six, being able to have things most people take for granted in the U.S., like easy access to a washer and dryer without turning it into a $20+ afternoon excursion that leaves me exhausted and crabby at the end, or a free excursion that leaves me covered in cat hair with the smell of cat yuck in my nostrils and dragging my and my daughter’s behinds home in the wee hours of the morning, similarly exhausted and crabby. Oh, I’ve got another one. Seven: a severe reduction in the number of wacked-out neighbors!

And there are lots of other reasons to move, and there seem to be more of those than reasons NOT to move. I mean, I also have financial considerations. It’s easier to start your own business down in Louisiana; a sales tax certificate, for instance, is free. I’d already be on land zoned agricultural, so I wouldn’t be stepping on any toes. And I wouldn’t be paying rent, so paying off debt would be far easier.

So I really don’t know what I am debating with myself about. But I do anyway, because as always I am afraid of making the wrong choice and making myself and others suffer unnecessarily for it later.

Quick update

1. I have started using a little widget called Joe’s Goals. It’s over there in the far-right sidebar. At the moment I am only tracking whether I take my vitamins every day. Every little bit helps.

2. I have signed up with PayPerPost. I have no idea what sorts of assignments I’ll be doing but they’ll always be as clearly marked as I’m allowed to mark ‘em so you’ll know I’m being paid to write them. Nobody gets to tell me what to put on this blog otherwise, so if the ad-type blog posts bother you, just skip over them.

3. Thea’s speech therapy appointment time has changed to 3:30 every Tuesday. We have the car again today, however. (I’m up late, not up early.)

4. I’ve redone my NetWorthIQ widget, which is also in the far-right sidebar. Hopefully this is the last time I have to restart it. I think I’ve covered every debt now. *sigh*

5. I have been picking at my finances and trying to figure out a sensible repayment plan on my debts as well as a monthly budget. And I’m annoyed at myself because I had gotten up to $40 in the savings account this month and now a good chunk of it’s been spent out again. If I can’t even manage to get $500 into the stupid thing and not touch it then how am I going to tackle the rest of my money issues? Part of the problem, I feel, is that my little girl’s dad frequently runs out of money before he’s halfway through his pay period (which is two weeks), so guess who picks up the slack from the already small amount of pocket change I have. It’s ridiculous; as I said to him during an unrelated conversation, I really despise seeing someone better off than me resource-wise who chooses to squander it all. Sheesh, if you don’t want it, send it my way!

Erm, but meanwhile, yeah. Working on it still. Going to be a nice interesting uphill climb.

Other stuff on me old mind but I’m sleepy.

What’s been going on lately

Spring is here and my daughter’s trying to figure out her sleep schedule with the days getting longer and the sun coming up earlier than it has all winter. For my part, I’ve been falling asleep a lot with her lately and I can’t decide if it’s stress, bad nutrition, or some other factor, but the result is that I don’t get in a lot of writing time when I do it. Even when I stay up late I generally spend a lot of time reading various and sundry websites, but can’t seem to get my head together to write my own stuff. It’s been really frustrating.

I am trying to figure out my living situation, because I really don’t want to be in this neighborhood another year. OK, if I had either enough money to fix up this apartment (not only for my own sake but for whoever comes after) or enough money and income to buy a house on this part of the street, I would do it, because either way it would be an improvement on the current situation. Actually, I would love to get a house here, because even with the housing market doing what it’s doing this neighborhood is in transition and I’d make some serious equity at the end of it. Plus, y’know, the emotional attachment involved in the fact that this is the only home my daughter’s ever known, and it’s the first time I’ve had my own place since 2000, and so on. But we are not in a position to anchor down here right now, unfortunately.

Our options seem to be (1) move down to Louisiana, (2) move to a different area of town by ourselves, or (3) move in with her dad, and I have many reasons to not want to do the latter. But I have some good reasons to do any of the three options, as well, which makes this wonderfully confusing. For all values of “wonderful” equivalent to “OMFG.”

And I need to increase income and I’m afraid to try anything, expend the little bit of money I’d need to expend, and then fall on my face and lose it at the end. I have a decentish idea about becoming a direct sales rep again for this candle company I absolutely love (ironically, after I quit them over a year ago I burned through my candle supply and discovered how awesome their products really were!), and even have a notion what I’d call the business, but I’m afraid of failing in the current economic climate. Ditto for putting my energy into making things and selling them online, even though I used to love making things. Some days I want to just write for a living, and other days my hands swell up and my bones and joints get achy and then I think all the typing will kill my hands and that’s the last thing I want. They get swollen just washing dishes, no matter what the weather or the rest of my body is doing.

The job market… *shakes head* I had a pretty good idea about doing call center work from home but part of me still doesn’t want my child in daycare or preschool. At the same time she really loves being around kids and I’m kind of burnt out on the idea of socializing for myself, so I’m not sure how I’d do with a playgroup, especially having no car. On the other hand we have days like we had today where I just want to sell her to the next peddler who wanders by (OK, not really, but…), and I think how great it would be if we could get regular breaks from one another. And then I feel like crap for thinking something like that about my daughter. OK, I don’t think my universe should revolve around her, nor hers around mine so much, although I would not object to a somewhat close mother-daughter relationship, and I don’t think it is unhealthy for extended families to stay together even if that is not the American norm. But this thing we’ve got going on now, we both need to be around other people, and her need is more immediate than mine, I think.

I don’t knoooooowww…

However, I’m doing a better job keeping up with my finances, even if I am not always happy afterwards with what I do with them. I played around with a bare-bones copy of Quicken I won off somebody’s blog, and all I can say about it is that it’s very easy to split transactions; otherwise it’s not an improvement on GnuCash. I may turn around and give it away on my own blog; poor little CD-ROM’s gonna get a complex if it doesn’t find a home soon! (I can’t sell it, because it’s marked “not for resale.”)

I sent off a form to get my student loan rehab started. No word back on whether they will accept it, and I mailed the form to a local address. (It’s interesting living in the same town as at least two collection agencies who want money from me…) Great Lakes (the original lender) called me recently but I didn’t recognize the number. Now I have to get up the nerve to call them back, hahaha. Avoidance is exactly why I’ve gotten into so much trouble, and it’s a hard habit to kick. You thought I was going to say another word there, didn’t you, you closet Chicago fan?

One Children’s Hospital debt is now retired, thanks for nothing, Little Girl’s Dad. Now I figure out the other two. Hm. I may take the next four months and pay them in halves if I can swing it in the budget. If not, I’ll just have to pay them off in small chunks and they will just have to deal. The only reason I’m tackling them this early in the game in the first place is that as far as I know, they are not listed on my credit report yet and I’d like to keep it that way. Otherwise I’d be tackling everything except the student loan smallest amounts first, on up to largest. Can’t do that with the student loan, unfortunately; it’s still charging me interest!

I’m also squirreling away little bits of this and that for my savings account. Insert objection here that “you shouldn’t do that when you still have debts, they charge more interest than a savings account pays you,” blah-blah. This savings account pays more in interest than a regular passbook account at your average bank, one-point-something percent rather than less than one percent, but that’s really not even the point. Savings accounts are for emergency funds; they are not investment vehicles. I’m not doing this to get rich, I’m doing it so I have something to fall back on when my last grandparent dies, if I am not down there already. No more of having to go to my little girl’s dad with my hand out, or him having to ask ex-girlfriends or old high school buddies for loans.

But speaking of getting rich, I got The Millionaire Next Door yesterday at Barnes & Noble. They had the hardcover on clearance. Yes, I appreciate the irony. However, this was something I thought I might like to keep as a reference book and as an object lesson for my daughter later, and I was not disappointed. I’m not done with the book yet but I’m really enjoying it. I could do without their apparent assertions that certain ethnic groups in the U.S. do better than others in the becoming-a-millionaire department because of genetics, but it’s a small flaw and I’ll overlook it. (I was interested to discover that Native Americans come in at number ten in terms of percentage of ethnic group who become millionaires. I have no idea how that happens considering that two of the poorest counties in the United States are on Lakota reservations, but I’m sure there is a very good explanation.)

Speaking of millionaires, I found another book at the library about a guy who became a millionaire by the time he was thirty. I’m thinking about reviewing it here.

Well, my little girl’s home and nature calls. ‘Later.

Restless

My camera is acting really weird. I have a serious beef with Kodak digicams anyway; they used to make good cameras, but they seem to have lost their touch. Both my digital Kodaks have been gifts and the first one broke in a very stupid way which required me to tape the battery door shut, while the second one’s automatic lens cover went on the fritz after my daughter touched the lens and I cleaned it. (Hint: Never apply lens cleaner straight to the lens of a digicam with an automatic lens cover. @#$%ing modern electronics…) Things went downhill from there. First the motor in the zoom lens started acting up, and now the beast is draining batteries well before their time–and it isn’t the preview screen either, I’ve always used that in exactly the same way and I’ve been using my camera lately less than usual.

I wasn’t happy with the way the camera rendered some colors anyhow even though I could get around some of the problems by adjusting the white balance, but these latest issues are going to sink it for me because it’s already been refurbished once and if they didn’t get it quite right that time, they won’t this time either.

The camera is a creativity outlet, poor as my creativity is, and a possible source of income. At minimum I don’t want to have to miss anything cute my daughter does because the stupid camera has died, and I have enough old dead rolls of film around this apartment that I need to see if I can salvage in some way. Plus digital cameras imprint the date taken in the photo file so that I can go back later and make sure everything’s organized where it’s supposed to go.

So I am doing something I should not be doing, and acquiring a new camera if possible. This is better than expecting my little girl’s dad to get it for me, which will make me feel like I owe him, which is somehow worse than owing a faceless entity. Plus it’s a possible credit-score boost later.

Meanwhile I am contemplating just not bothering with this town anymore and going down to live with my mother if that is still a viable option, once the lease is up in July. I have all kinds of reasons to do that, all kinds of reasons not to do that, and so I feel sort of paralyzed. There have been times I’ve made the leap and taken the chance and all that rot, only to find my reach had exceeded my grasp and if I trot out one more cliché I think you all are going to reach through your intarwebs connections and strangle me. Sorry. Point is I’m afraid of falling on my face again. Oops.

If nothing else we would have more people around us, we would have real nights again, my little girl could play outside relatively safely, and I wouldn’t hear random weird people knocking on the downstairs apartment door at 3am, like I just did. And I wouldn’t have to overextend myself financially to make it happen (well, except the move, but I have a free place to stay at the end of it–in a house I may be inheriting, no less), so that’s a plus too.

I just wish it were easier to decide what to do. We’ll see.

The story of my son, RDCV*

Someone dropped by on my About page to remark upon my statement that I have lost a child to adoption. Some of the things she said got me thinking that perhaps telling the story might interest some of my other readers as well. I guess this is going to come across as dry or something, but it’s been a long time and it’s late right now and I’m kind of tired. (I am about ready to swear off coffee because once again, having a second cup made me sick.)

I married in March 1995 to a guy I’d known for about a month and a half. Sean was born a year later. So it was not a shotgun wedding, but we still started our family pretty quickly. At the time it didn’t seem like that big of a deal, as he and I both worked full-time (my maternity leave lasted six weeks, mostly because of understaffing at work) and we were pretty much on top of our bills. We had a great little guy and we were crazy about each other.

Then we moved.

I am not the most internally motivated person. Even when I manage motivation it takes me a while to build up steam and get going. This has always been true; it’s rare that I’ll jump right up and do something. (The one exception being getting involved with someone new, but I consider that a problem, not an asset. Hopefully it’s a problem I’ve outgrown. We’ll see.) On top of that, North Carolina was a completely different job market and I could not seem to find any 8am to 5pm file clerk jobs like I had had in Georgia. This made finding daycare very difficult. I thought I had found a provider at one point but apparently she had misunderstood my son’s age somehow and she called me at work one day a couple of weeks into my new job to tell me that she couldn’t continue watching him. She was a military daycare provider and they were very strict about adhering to numbers and age mixes and that kind of thing.

I wound up bouncing around to one or two more jobs and getting frustrated and giving up, which was a horrible thing to do as we had bought a house when we moved, and we also had a credit card to pay off. Long story short, between that and other stresses to the marriage, we were on the brink of divorce by the time my husband got in trouble right after the New Year in 1999. He had broken into a building on Fort Bragg that New Year’s Eve and stolen a bunch of computer equipment. Yours truly had to turn him in. Much mayhem ensued.

At the end of it I was staying in a weekly-rate motel north of Memphis and wrote to his mom asking her to come get Sean and keep him for me til I could get on my feet. She’d already offered, and I finally caved in when I realized that if I had had trouble coordinating daycare and weird work hours with a husband around, it was going to be that much harder with nothing but weed-smoking relatives nearby who had their own problems and didn’t really want to help me. My mother-in-law came to get Sean on my ex’s birthday. I’m sure it was complete coincidence.

Right after she got him back home I got a nasty letter from her stating that he was six months to a year behind in his verbal skills and she was sure I’d done something to him and she and her husband (not Sean’s biological grandfather) were going to sue for custody (I had given them an in loco parentis) and a few other choice things about my character and fitness as a wife and so on.

I was gobsmacked. I guess I had felt there was something weird about my son, but as his father and I were not paragons of normalcy ourselves and as no one, not even his daycare providers, had ever mentioned to me that there might be a problem, I hadn’t thought much about it. He was my first child and I didn’t know much about little kids. I knew, also, that I had been slow in learning to talk.

Unfortunately, I also knew that I barely had enough money to keep myself in an apartment and my car insured. I certainly didn’t have the money to pay a lawyer, and I wasn’t sure about legal aid. I was, however, pretty sure that even if I could manage to get their help, the judge would take one look at the state Sean was in and immediately blame me and I would not have a chance in hell. And I’m pretty sure my MIL knew that too. So they got him with no legal battle from me.

Next up, a year or so down the road, was the prospect of divorce. I still didn’t have the money for a lawyer, and now they were telling me that in the state of Florida (where they lived by then), if neither of the birth parents were custodial they would both owe child support. My ex had just gotten out of prison and was a convicted felon; his job prospects were not what you’d call the brightest. My car had died by then and I was getting by on the charity of friends to get back and forth to work. Neither of us was in a position to have chunks of our pay sent to his parents.

So… They suggested being allowed to adopt him. Again, having no lawyer to fight it, I caved in.

The adoption was finalized Halloween of 2000. Sean sat singing to himself at the table while the grandparents and the judge talked it over and he looked at Sean and then at them and said, “Are you sure you want to do this?” She told me about it afterward and I wanted to slap the officious bastard. Maybe it was easier than yelling at her.

In 2002 the MIL left a message on my then-homepage’s guestbook offering an apology “for all the things I have said to you about this child.” It turned out they had a family friend who worked in speech therapy, and he happened to play with Sean one day. He took them aside afterward and said, “Have you had him evaluated for this?” It turned out Sean has a disorder called a central auditory processing deficit, in which his hearing worked just fine but his brain had trouble processing about fifty percent of the new words he heard. This explained why he was so slow in learning to talk; he couldn’t parse what he was hearing!

I found out later that very young children develop what is called receptive language before they ever really learn to speak; basically, your infant understands your words before she can repeat them. Sean had missed this important milestone to some extent, so he couldn’t learn to express what he didn’t know.

In retrospect I do remember that interacting with him was… odd. I could tell he was a smart little boy, and I did sometimes seem to get through to him, but mostly he seemed impenetrable. About the only thing we did together verbally was count things, in the last year or so that I had him. He had learned what counting was before he was even two years old, and by the time he left me, when he was almost three, he could count to twelve and muddle through the teens and say, “Twenty!” He also recognized some letters. We just weren’t really communicating with one another.

Talking with him is still weird because he had a late start and because he also tested as having a genius IQ (the MIL initially told me he tested at 160, and now she says she thinks the person who tested him let him off easy, which I think is hooey but I’m prejudiced), so he doesn’t think like most of the rest of us do–his mind goes places you would not expect. But the point is I can talk with him now, at least sometimes.

It’s just… It would have been nice to not automatically have had the worst assumed about me. It would have been nice to have had more choices when I was faced with adversity.

I’m afraid I am not someone to consult about the virtues of adoption. My situation with my son was not the only time I had intimate acquaintance with the issue. I went through an extremely bad patch with the father of my daughter during my pregnancy with her, which ultimately killed the relationship. Although my children are almost nine years apart in age, I caught a former so-called friend talking about me on LiveJournal intimating that my unfit little self was dropping them like kittens while she had to take fertility drugs and suffer, even though she had a job and a house and a husband. (I was a full-time college student when I got pregnant with my daughter.) I had another so-called friend offer to take my daughter when I was contemplating giving her up, until my MIL told me she wanted to keep the siblings together if that would be possible, and then the friend guilt-tripped me for changing my mind. I’ve heard stories of Americans adopting babies from third-world countries only to wonder later if they might have been guilty of child theft, but they don’t seem to be losing much sleep over it. Poor women, and especially poor white mothers of white babies, or poor ethnic women of cute ethnic babies, seem to be viewed as brood mares for the infertile middle class and rich. It’s disgusting, and I won’t condone it.

My daughter recognized my voice shortly after birth when they brought her into my room. She was crying, and I called her name and she immediately calmed down. I can’t believe that children taken from their mothers in infancy don’t know what is going on, and I can’t believe they don’t suffer for it. God only knows the mothers do. Adoption is fine for children who absolutely can never go back to their parents again, but all too often, that is not how adoption is used.

My mother-in-law told me later that even if she had known I didn’t cause my son’s speech problems, I still wasn’t fit to keep him with me. I want to know where this committee is that weighs every mother’s fitness. So I can beat them all to a bloody pulp, the same way they did me, only emotionally.

edit: Speaking of my issues with adoption, here’s another one. They “need” babies, they are “entitled” to have children–more so than us nasty poor sluts!–but when the child is not “normal”, they can’t handle it.

The former friend who guilt-tripped me about my wanting to keep my children together also guilt-tripped me because I don’t like the way adoptive parents turn down disabled children. My logic is that when you give birth to your own, you get the luck of the draw, and that even when your child is so-called “normal” at birth, bad things can happen later. About the best she could do was, “Don’t I have a right to a child that my husband and I can handle?” This is the kind of mentality of the people who go around splitting up families so they can have their own. Nuh-uh.

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*Reader’s Digest Condensed Version.

Stress and worry re: current life situation; braindump

Things are kind of a jumble right now, so I will do my best to impart what is going on in my head without coming off as a complete lunatic–but bear with me, because I might not succeed. (Sorry.)

I have this thing about going along in a fog for a while and not really paying attention to where stuff is falling down in my life. This explains how I got over fifteen grand in debt in the first place and it explains a lot of other things too. Occasionally I go through a phase where the fallout from my past screwups* is staring me in the face. This is one of those times.

So, several things are staring at me all at once.

• I have finally gotten around to doing research on German cockroaches and it turns out that is exactly what I have in my apartment, mostly in the kitchen. They are the main indoor-only roach in most of the world. Many factors seem to contribute to them being here: water leakage from the pipes, gaps around the drainpipes where they go into the wall, other holes and gaps in various walls especially in the bathroom, food bits that get left out overnight and sometimes for days because I hate doing dishes and I put it off, the kitchen wall by the stove being food-spattered but hard to clean because the paint is also blistered and I’m afraid to disturb it because this building’s over thirty years old and I don’t know if it was ever lead-abated, and lots of clutter everywhere, and various cracks and crevices elsewhere not being sealed properly. Oh, it’s a mess. I can only fix some of it, and judging by the condition this place was in when I moved here, the landlords will never do their part.
• Thus I am worried about my daughter’s health in the long run. I actually have considered staying here at least another year because the rent is cheap and when you’re low-income, you are left making these kinds of compromises. She can live with a goopy kitchen sink. She can’t live with, potentially, bugs leaving crap in the bed (I wash the sheets regularly, but still) and carrying in viruses we haven’t encountered before, and some that make people really sick.
• I need a job, even a part-time one, if we are going to get out of here. I have an idea where we can go and we only need a little more income per month to get in there and to possibly have somewhat of a rent reduction from what I’m paying now. We’re already on the Section 8 list but if I were making more money, I wouldn’t need Section 8 and they could go ahead and lease to us.
• I need shoes, I need a work wardrobe (if there won’t be uniforms or casual dress code), I need a haircut, and I need dependable transportation if I am even going to interview, much less have a job by July.
• Alternately I could try to get work from home with West At Home Agent but I hear they are buggers to work for, I would have to work late at night when my daughter is sleeping (because other people might not be reliable to watch her), and the first time a customer on the phone heard her yelling or I had to end my call early, my job would be in jeopardy. She’s three, also, and not quite to the point that she groks “stay in bed and be quiet if you wake up in the night.” To say nothing of if she gets sick.
• I am having little nagging issues here and there with my health, aside from the overweight and the apparent metabolic syndrome, that I would really like to have looked at in the next six months. This includes an issue with my lower left quadrant (abdominal area) being vaguely achy off and on for years now. It’s gotten worse since Thea was born, and seems to intensify when it’s that time of the month, which makes me think I now have adhesions as well as whatever else was going on. Whatever it is, it worries me. I also get edema in odd places at inappropriate times, such as my fingers swelling after I do a load of dishes and then food prep. I would also like to get to a dentist sometime soon, which is slightly more feasible.
• My daughter’s not potty-trained yet. I worry that if I introduce a bunch of changes at once, she will take forever to toilet-train and possibly regress in other ways. We have her in speech therapy as it is for a speech delay. She is also unaccustomed to being around other children on a regular basis. I actually don’t care as much about this as some people might think I should because I believe children should be around people of a wide range of ages, not just shut up with a bunch of children their own age all day, but I know she enjoys playing with other little ones, and I would like to see her do it more often.
• My apartment, aside from the bug and maintenance issues, is a craphole. I swear I do not use over half the items I possess in these five rooms. Stuff has got to go. I keep thinking, “oh, I’ll sell it all,” and that never happens. I need to get this stuff gone on FreeCycle Real Soon Now. And then I need to turn this place upside down with a mop, a broom, lots of rags, a bucket, and copious amounts of all-purpose cleaner. And then the vacuum, and then the shampooer, and then some spot treatments in the big bedroom, and then more shampooer. Bleh.

Weirdly, now that I’ve come out and dumped all of that, it doesn’t look as bad as it felt. And it should feel bad, maybe, because I’m falling so short everywhere in my life. But there is surely some path I can take that would resolve these issues in a way that I could live with. I just wish I could figure out what it was.

Procrastination is a huge part of the problem. Thea being clingy and needing my attention because I’m the only other human being here is another part of the problem.

Hm. Thinking out loud… Maybe if I were to get her enrolled in the Waldorf preschool, because I’ve already looked at the rates there, and because they wouldn’t rush her into pottytraining if she regressed… If I could get the West At Home gig… I could work during the day when she wasn’t here? On top of that, the fact that I was employed and making an income, I could show that to the apartment community I mentioned previously and say, “Look, I have a job, here’s my income now,” and they would only count the income, not what I was spending it on, and maybe they would say “Oh yeah! Sure, we’ll lease to you,” problem solved?

But I would have to bust mah bee-hind. One of the debts I owe is an old phone bill. Get that paid off, call the phone company, get the landline set up (I could probably port my old phone number back), and try to get on with West in the next month or so… then if that falls through, at least I’d be spending less per month on phone service, since I would have had to get the most basic service anyway? Yeah… that doesn’t sound too egregious. I should also be able to get childcare assistance which would be a huge help. I don’t know what it will be worth, but I’ll apply for it.

The cool part is that if I pulled this off, right? I would be living just north of where the preschool’s located–a lot closer than I am to it now. Either way we could get there by bus, but a shorter ride’s better than a longer one.

…Yeah. It feels like gambling, but in order to pull this off, I would have to do it in steps anyway, so if one step didn’t go through, then I wouldn’t have to worry about it all falling down around my head. No biggie. I still have time.

Right, then. I have the money right now to go ahead and make that debt go away. That’s the first step. There will be a delay for the second step as I figure out when my cell contract ends; I believe it is in April, but that’s not long from now. After that, who knows? I could also contact the preschool while this is all going on, to see if they will have any openings this summer.

As for the health thing, I should still qualify for Healthy Families, Ohio’s health insurance program. I have misgivings about how good the care will actually be, but maybe I might get a doctor to listen to me about the lower-abdominal thing if not about the other weirdness. One can only hope.

…Yeah. Yeah, I feel better. It’s always worse when this stuff goes swirling around in my head and I can’t catch hold of it and take a good look at it. Sheesh.

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*I’m not sure I would call them “mistakes.” A mistake is spelling someone’s name with two Ls when you are supposed to spell it with one. A screwup is when you make the wrong choice entirely and you go boom on your face as a result.

Friday Roundup

Interesting links:

The Honest Dollar tells us about price discrimination and why coupons exist. I would guess that grocery stores sell store-brand and name-brand products right next to one another for the same reason; in many cases, it’s the same product with a different label. (Not always, so you should read your labels before picking one over the other.)

No Credit Needed shares with us five questions you should ask when making debt reduction payments.

Trent at Get Rich Slowly tells us why luck is no accident. I could really use this one right now.

And this isn’t on a blog, but MSN has a series out about teaching your kids about money. I thought the lead-in to one of the articles was kind of shallow–teaching your kids to be rich isn’t about making them slaver for a Porsche, for crying out loud!–but the article itself was really good.

More non-bloggy goodness: Hack Yourself.

Top five referrers (from an actual website not my own, and not a general service site)

Although referrals are frequently through my comments, nonetheless, they were not deleted. Thanks to:

1. Working For Rachel
2. The Simple Dollar
3. Get Rich Slowly
4. brip blap
5. And last but not least, syfr on LiveJournal. I have no idea how she manages to be a referral, but I’ll take it!

Miscellany

Fun with PayPal

Soon after PayPal reinstated my full account access, I got a survey invitation from them about my account limitation experience. Rather like handing a flamethrower to a pyromaniac. The best part was where they asked me whether my questions had been handled courteously. On a planet where the proper response to an email is utter silence, I suppose they did. This, however, is Earth. I leave the rest of it to your no doubt amused imagination.

More pages?

Although I am focusing a lot on personal finance right now, this is not a personal finance blog. It is more a chronicle of my efforts to get my life back on track. (First I have to find the track, but never mind.) As such, I should probably put up a couple more pages about other areas in my life I feel need work. Look for that soon, if you’re interested and if I get around to it. (Another area to work on: Procrastination!)

Weigh-in

Is going to be late. I forgot to do it both Saturday and yesterday. Not that I think it will impress anyone, least of all me.

Major changes?

I have been looking at the job ads a bit more lately. Still debating fiercely with myself whether I want to go back to work (if I even can go back to work) and, if so, what that’s going to mean for myself and my daughter in the long run. The financial benefit is obvious. I’m kind of emotionally a mess about it, though. I wanted to raise her myself, and I wanted to homeschool her eventually; looking back, I can see serious gaps in my education that I would like to head off at the pass with her, and I don’t think public school’s version of “socialization” is very good for kids. So if I can avoid having to put her in a preschool, I will endeavor to do so. But it’s going to be interesting trying to figure that out.

Old friends

I figured out where one old friend from junior high is living now, although I’m extremely iffy about contacting him because we did not part on a good note and I don’t want him to feel stalked. I guess at this point I just kind of feel happy that I found him at all, and I wish him well.

Another old friend, this time from my days in the Army, has tried to look me up. Unfortunately, he looked on Reunion.com and I was not yet listed there. When I set up an account there a couple days ago, the site told me one person had looked for me. Yesterday, I got an email with some hints as to his identity. I plugged in his last name and the town and state they gave me and bingo.

I left a message on his Classmates profile, as I got a great deal on the Gold Member account for one year, and I hope to hear back from him. I’m kind of excited, actually. He’s in New York state, so a visit would not be out of the question, although he would have to come here, at least at first.

And that is pretty much what’s going on, in a nutshell.

I get by with a little help from my ‘rents

Making Do With Help From Mom and Dad is an interesting article over at Wise Bread about the financial advantages of getting help from your parents when you are just starting out. Even if they just babysit for you when you have kids, or pay part or all of your college tuition, it can make a huge difference in your net worth later on.

It was interesting seeing what one of the commenters had to say that with the way things are now, how expensive everything is compared to how little young people are paid when they’re just starting out, it is foolish for parents to just let their kids sink or swim if they want them to do well in the long run. This is a decent rebuttal to the trend of accusing baby boomers of spoiling their kids just because they help them out or let them live at home a bit longer.

My experience was a little bit different. I went straight from a young adult just a few weeks out from my high school graduation, to entering active duty in the Army. Of course if you leave out the grueling training and the fact you’re being paid to be able to kill people on a moment’s notice, being in the military is rather like staying home with your parents only with a paycheck and uniforms. You have free lodging, someone cooks for you, and someone tells you where to be and how to act. So, contrary to the stereotype that the military helps people grow up, my experience was that the Army kept me somewhat in the nest when I should have been testing my wings and flying on my own. Nevertheless, it was life as an adult and in many ways I was officially “independent” from eighteen onwards.

I did eventually move back in with my parents–one at a time, as they were divorced–but it was an on-again, off-again affair as I tried to figure out how to make it on my own post-marital-breakup. I was 25 when I left my husband, 26 when I moved in with my father the first time, and 31 going on 32 when I moved in with him the second time. At no time did I stay with him for longer than six or seven months. It just didn’t feel right to me.

I have also had financial help from my ex-mother-in-law, who still somewhat considers me part of her family. In fact, that’s one of the personal loans I now owe, because she paid tuition for at-home medical transcriptionist training that I never finished. The school was fine; that wasn’t the problem. The problem was twofold: (1) My little girl’s dad kept promising and then failing to help me get my studies done when, even as young as she was at the time, my daughter needed my utmost attention and I couldn’t be constantly interrupted by a young infant needing to be held or whatever. (2) I was not at a place emotionally where I could deal with the workload. He and I had had a very nasty breakup while I was pregnant with my daughter and I was depressed about 99 percent of the time, and the last thing I really cared about was school. I had taken it on largely out of desperation that I would not be able to support myself if he kept abandoning me, and even though my concerns were valid, that’s not a good reason to go to school. You have to want to be there for its own sake or you won’t do well. Or, at least that is true for me.

Nevertheless, that’s one more debt racked up and nothing to show for it.

The other way my ex-MIL helped was during the pregnancy itself; even though her son had nothing to do with it, the baby was to be my older child’s sibling, so was still important to her (ex-MIL). Without her I would have had to figure out survival on $500 a month with a rent of $350. I was showing by the time my little girl’s dad kicked me out, and although pregnancy discrimination is not supposed to be legal, it’s impossible to prove in an employment-at-will state. I also wasn’t completely sure I wouldn’t have more health problems; I had already suffered a bout of severe inflammation and joint pain early in the pregnancy and had had to undergo three glucose tolerance tests because my initial blood sugar lab had come back slightly high. It was a fairly precarious time for me, all in all. Without her I would have wound up on welfare or worse.

So while I would not say parental or in-law-parental help improved my net worth any, it certainly improved my quality of life at a time I really needed that. The experience has left me with an understanding that should either of my children ever need me in their adult lives, I would gladly do what I could to keep them safe and off the street (barring them taking undue advantage of me in some way) because to me, that is what parents are supposed to do. Americans are almost unique in expecting children to live completely independently of their parents at adulthood, and I’m not sure why we’re so convinced that’s how all people should be, but I am willing to put my children’s welfare above social opinion.