lindentree

I'm sooooooooooo fucking tired of going "uh oh we have $26 to last us until next pay day again" so frequently. Like it's just so exhausting. My partner is making more at his new job than he ever has and it's still not enough. We budget every cent and it's still not enough. We shop almost exclusively at the thrift store and we participate in a food rescue program for low income families and it's still not enough. It's such an unbelievably shitty way to have to raise kids. I'll be able to go back to work full time in a couple of years, but for now, we're stuck in this gap where I can't get a job that pays enough for us to afford child care for two kids. It sucked to leave the workforce during the emergency phase of the Covid pandemic, and it's going to be really tough to re-enter it even when the kids are both in school full-time. It's honestly just as well because I've had to do a whole bunch of other unpaid family care work, anyway? But I'm just so tired, and I'm scared that I've really fucked myself over, because I probably seriously have. I dropped out of university, and I had no career to speak of before I left the workforce; I got lucky and had a union job I happened to love. Which I then left. 💀 I have doubts I can be rehired there. I just don't know what I'm going to do. I have friends who are also struggling, and it just feels so shitty and demoralizing to not even be able to help them because we can barely feed our kids. And it's funny because while I'm technically a SAHM, whenever I say that, I want to be like—but not like that. Not like whatever you're thinking. Not a SAHM like Stanley cups and two new vehicles and a McMansion in the suburbs and Amazon hauls and matching sets and Starbucks and shit. A SAHM like I'm low-key disabled, and we are never caught up on our water bill, and we live on a block with abandoned houses and a bike chop shop, and I cut everybody's hair in the kitchen with bathroom scissors, and I skip meals so we don't need to buy as much food, and every single spare penny goes towards trying to keep our kids from feeling our working poverty situation. That kind of SAHM.