Okay, not exactly. His last payment to the debt consolidation folks for the joint debt from his previous marriage was this month. He's still paying off the debt for the time-share (plus the idiotic monthly maintenance fee), so our next project is to start on the legal paperwork to get rid of that white elephant. And of course, I'm still paying off my student loans. But still, it's a huge weight off. I actually had a bit of a breakdown last night, for the first time crying about money because I felt good about our financial situation. I'd spent much of the afternoon daydreaming about someday being able to build a Tumbleweed Tiny House, and looking at the cost and realizing that, yes, it actually is in the realm of possibility to someday be able to do that. Not for a good five to ten years, but the way things are going right now... I might actually be a homeowner by the time I'm forty. The thought boggles the mind. I know the American Dream/Promise/Lie is that everyone can get a great job and become a homeowner with a little suburban spot with a yard and a white picket fence, but that's never been my goal and part of me never really believed that I would ever get there. (When you grow up wanting to be a poet, you kind of reconcile yourself to poverty and obscurity right from the start.)
The suburban home is not my dream now, either, but what is my dream is to have a small cottage (like, if we took our current apartment and squished it to make it two floors instead of one, but with the same basic square footage) with an outdoor deck and small garden (with maybe a fire pit and small stone circle) and, beyond that, some forested land that is part of a larger green belt or park. I imagine myself sitting in that cottage with the windows open, drinking tea and working on my writing while listening to the sounds of the natural world outside, or going out onto the deck at dawn to do some yoga in the fresh morning air, or taking a walk in the forest in the late afternoon... And I'm noticing that not many of these daydreams involve Jeff, so I guess he'd still be going in to the office to work! Or, another thing we talked about, was having a kind of "community" of tiny houses, so that he could work from home but still go out to his "office," a separate little shed furnished as a study and/or library. Because, you know, I still need my solitude, and I think I'd get restless always having him hanging around the house... (Also, having a separate office space would be better for tax purposes, since then you could count that as a business expense; we can't do that now, even though I work from home, because all the rooms I use for my work are technically "multi-purpose".) And maybe I could have my own little "study" too, and they could then serve as guest rooms for when we have family visiting, so the kids have somewhere to stay and, once they're grown up, could even come and bring their partners. That way, we could reduce our carbon footprint by only heating those spaces when they're in use, or only using them during warmer weather when we don't need heat, instead of having a sprawling house with all the rooms always being heated whether or not we're using them. Since it never gets all that cold out here, we wouldn't even have to worry about pipes freezing or anything, like Melanie does with the farmhouse up in New Hampshire when it's not in use during the winter. The point is, we could start small and then slowly add on one tiny house/shed at a time -- and when we're older and retired, if we don't need them anymore, we could even end up renting them out like B&B rooms (or like that yurt that we stayed in this past summer).
But all of that is way down the road. The point is, there is a road and we're on it. We're not pulled over stuck in a ditch anymore. And if we save money and get a little bit of land where I can garden and a little house that we own, then no matter how old and poor we get, at least we'll have a roof over our heads and a place to grow some food.
Because I do get a little worried about what it will be like to be old. I plan on living a long time, and so does Jeff, but he is ten years older than I am to begin with and women tend to live longer than men in any case. And as much as his kids are awesome, it's not like I expect them to take care of me when I'm old once he's gone. And I don't really think my own family, like my brother or cousins, would feel like it was their responsibility to do that, either. And in any case, I'd feel a bit bad about being a burden on them. (The one exception being if Dan goes on to be a millionaire fancy-pants and never does end up having kids, in which case, hello, Mr. Millionaire, it's your big sis, who always loved and supported you... ;)
Speaking of Dan, he emailed me this morning to brag about this really cool course he's taking this coming semester, the Sociology of Consumerism. It looks fascinating! In his email, he said, "You'd be proud," and damn it, I am. Super proud! When he was little, he always wanted to be rich and he was always fascinated with money.... but as he's grown up, that part of him has really matured into a thoughtful, conscientious person who wants to understand other people and their aspirations and how they define and conceive of wealth and success... I get a little bit teary-eyed at how awesome he is, and how much I admire him for leaving a crazy-well-paying job to go back to grad school to study this stuff.
And of course, I'm also jealous. I would love to go back to school. But I think during those seven long years of always being broke, something in me got broken. I feel such resistance against and disdain for academia and how they fleece people, even though I love the atmosphere of those kinds of centers of learning and the opportunity to devote my time to reading and discussing with other people who are also there to learn and think. Every time I think about going back to school, I immediately shut that idea down because it would be insane to take out more loans to finance my education, especially when I'm mostly just interested in learning, not necessarily how a higher degree could help me get a better paying job. Case in point: there's an amazing ecological and wilderness awareness program at a school only about forty minutes away; the program is a year-long study of various aspects of wilderness survival training, hands-on naturalist training and a study of the philosophy and spirituality of nature-centered indigenous and modern cultures. It's pretty much perfect (and the school is accredited, unlike some of these Pagan-based programs). But my immediate reaction is: well, I could never do that, because I can't afford it.
There are a lot of things that I have that reaction to, and I wonder when I started to respond to life that way. I know that living below the poverty line for so long was, in many ways, very good for me and helped me to ground in who I really am beneath all the "stuff" of modern consumerist culture, helped me to ground in simplicity and see the beauty of the world just as it was. I lived a very happy but monkish life for quite a while (that should qualify me for something or give me some street cred, shouldn't it?). But at the same time, I look at my brother and I see how he's getting to pursue his dreams because he put money first when it mattered, and now he has the luxury and resources to do what he wants with it. (Granted, as a grad student who is now deeper in debt than I ever was, I have a feeling he'll be getting a good dose of the simple, monkish life himself.) But I'm not even talking about the money, so much as the attitude. There's an attitude that anything is possible, that you can take risks and it won't be that bad, because you'll always have a support system, something to fall back on. Except, I've never had that. (Moving back into an abusive home where people treat you as a burden and a failure even if you're just visiting for more than a few days... that's a no.)
Maybe it also has to do with the fact that I don't drive, so I never had this sense of freedom that, no matter how bad things got, I could just break away from it all and go do something else, even if only for a little while. I never got to go to any parks or "escape into wilderness" all those years when I was poor, even though it would have only cost me a tank of gas to get into the mountains. Instead, I had to take every opportunity to go when others would be willing to take me along -- like family vacations -- and hope that I would get a chance to spend some alone time in nature. So in some ways, I guess I trained myself to put other people's needs ahead of mine, or at least to put their dreams ahead of my own and be practical about what I could or couldn't do. I got used to being treated like I couldn't really take care of myself or be independent if I didn't drive or didn't have a lot of money. There was no point in trying to make plans for myself, beyond very modest plans, because I didn't have the means to act on them in any case.
The more I think about it, the more it seems like the choice not to drive -- which was largely because I couldn't afford a car or the insurance, and my parents weren't willing to give me a car and pay for my insurance like they did with my brother -- played a very large role in whether or not other people saw me as an "adult"... And the only time that wasn't true was when I was waitressing, since a lot of the people I worked with either used public transportation or couldn't afford a car. But then, a requirement of being promoted to a management position was having a car, and I was once offered a promotion only to have it taken back because I didn't.
And this brings me back to those thoughts I've had before about living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in a settled, consumer culture. Between waitressing for tips and having to rely on the chance opportunities that came my way, I very much had to learn how to see bounty and prosperity where others might have seen scarcity or restriction, and to find ways to embody generosity precisely because I knew how much I relied on the generosity of others. But I also got used to seeing restrictions where other people saw potential because I couldn't afford to plant seeds and sit and wait for them to grow so I could harvest them later... because in the meantime, I'd starve. (This is a convoluted metaphor.)
I wonder to what extent our online lives are pushing us in this direction, too. It seems like the people who do manage to make a living being "online content creators" do it in a kind of hunter-gatherer fashion, relying on viral memes and the chance that people will buy their t-shirts or donate on their webpage or share their links to earn them ad-sense royalties... It's a much different model than someone who goes into the office everyday, works normal hours and gets a reliable paycheck as a result. Sometimes I feel like a hunter-gatherer who married into an agricultural family — Jeff with his 9-to-5 and the kids he has to support whether he has a job or not — and so I find myself sometimes feeling oddly restless and wanting to just move and do whatever inspiration urges me to do, and other times feeling somewhat panicked because I don't know how to settle down, focus on regular consistent work and trust the harvest to come in, because part of me doesn't think I'm very good at it.
Maybe I should find a harvest goddess or god to help me out with these issues. Maybe this is why my relationship with Brigid has been weird over the past few years (because I think she is much more a settled, harvest kind of goddess than a wild goddess like Artemis). While I trust in the fecundity of the earth to provide me what I need, I don't necessarily trust the other people I'm in community with to portion out something that is fair, because I've almost never been in a familial relationship where that was the case. I've always been the runt who gets the leftovers, and while as a kid I could get used to it and make do on what little I did have, as an adult who is now supposed to take those leftovers and hand them over to the stepkids because, you know, children are the future or whatever... It's the worst of both societies, in which scarcity is forced on some so that others may prosper, but with no expectation that those who are prosperous will also be generous in their turn.
So, I think a goal for 2013 for me should be: re-learn how to drive. I'm on Jeff's insurance already, anyway, and during the week his car just sits in the garage while he bikes or takes the bus to work. I'm not a huge fan of driving for lots of reason (many of them ecological), but maybe as a symbol of independence and freedom within this particular society I need to prove to myself and to others that I don't always have to put everyone else's plans and needs before my own, that I can go after the things that I want in my life and I have the means to get there. (And that goes for biking more around the city, too, though I was starting to do that a lot more last fall anyway and now I'm just waiting for the weather to get a bit better again so I'm not driving around in the dark and/or cold.)
Okay then.
Problem solved, writer's block? Can we get back to work now?
ETA: Obviously this whole "feeling good about money" thing wasn't meant to last... Figures today we'd get a bunch of bat-shit-crazy emails from the EW stamping her foot and demanding impotently that Jeff spend his money according to her whims. ::eyeroll::