Poor! Huh, good god yall, what is it good for?

Absolutely nothin'! Say it again!

Yesterday I paid bills and realized I have $377 dollars left for the rest of the month. J. and I have separate accounts, so it's not like I'm going to have to support the whole family on that for the next 25 days, but it is supremely depressing. Especially since I am also in debt.

A substantial amount of the money we earn goes to three places: house, daycare, and car payment. Then there's are our payments on our debts and the health insurance, which we basically have to pay for since it's taken out of J.'s check.

We both have good, stable jobs. I have a four-year degree; J. has a two-year degree and has worked his way up to a decent position at his job. We have one car, a Saturn Vue; our house needs siding, new windows and carpet; our furniture is almost 100 percent hand-me-down (or handmade, and free, from my father). I honestly cannot remember the last time I bought a brand-new piece of clothing for myself (for Bubba, well, I splurge a little there...if buying stuff at Target is considered a splurge). My point is, we do not live extravagantly at all, but obviously we live beyond our means. The depressing thing is that according to our "means," we should be living in a one-room apartment, driving a 1977 Pacer and sending our kid to Abuse-a-Lot Childcare Center.

J. and I have had money issues ever since we first got married--the main issue being we never have enough. I'm not going to detail all the reasons why we are in the jobs we are and why it would not be advantageous for us to relocate or switch jobs, but trust me that we are kind of stuck in our current position until J. finds a better job in the area or until his grandma dies.

Is there anyone else out there waiting for someone to die so that you can have a little bit of financial freedom? I know this is so crass, but I'm all about being honest, even if it makes me look bad. J.'s parents both died in 2000, and we got a bit of money from their estate which allowed us to put a decent downpayment on our house (which we've since borrowed against) and pay off our credit cards. We said we'd never use them again....and of course we did, and here we are now with a brand new pile of credit card debt. Fucking credit cards!

Because J.'s parents died so young, whatever estate they were going to inherit from J.'s grandma now passes to J. and his two sisters. She's no millionaire, but she's comfortable. Part of her income comes from piece of land that was placed in a living trust for his grandma but was willed to J.'s dad so it is technically now "owned" by J. and his sisters.

J.'s grandma is 97 years old. She lived on her own until last month, when knee replacement surgery and small heart attack forced her to stay with her 70-something daughter.

J. and I both "joke" about how grandma is never going to die, and conversely, try not to worry too much about our debt because once she does kick off, we should be able to pay it off. But it's pretty depressing to think that someone has to die for us to be debt-free.

Obviously, J. doesn't have the closest relationship to his grandma. While always a decent person, she definitely favored J.'s biological sister over J. and his other sister who were both adopted. And, J. and I rationalize, how much fun can it be to be 97 years old? Your husband's dead, one of your two kids is dead, most of your friends are dead, you're in pain a lot, it's hard to move around and do stuff...etc.

I was thinking last night about how every generation wants the next generation to do better than they did. That led me to thinking about Tingle and LilCherie, who are definitely doing better than their parents did. Me, not so much. I don't know if this is due to Tingle's and LilCherie's financial skills or the fact that my parents made substantial money and I know theirs struggled. In any case, I do feel somewhat like a failure in this regard. It occurred to me that "doing better than your parents" is a somewhat arbitrary measure of success, but still it bothers me that two intelligent, responsible and educated adults make less money than my dad did all by himself, even though he never went to college.

Is it more difficult to live these days? Are things more expensive than they used to be? Do we just think we need more stuff than people did back then? What's the deal?

I remember, shortly after getting married, the shock of how much it cost to live. That first year, we were borrowing money from relatives to pay our rent and eat. We looked at Christmas as an opportunity to have a free meal and scam some leftovers that might last us a few days so we wouldn't have to buy groceries. Once, during a week of especially dire straits, I went to the local "cheap" food store. This will say something about my family: I had never been in one before. My mother had never bought a generic-brand anything.

I walked in and looked at the exposed ceiling, the cement floors, and the huge sign over the door that said "CASH ONLY!!!!" I looked around at the shoppers, and I'm ashamed to say I judged them, who mostly looked disheveled and...."poor." I turned right around and never went back. Not even to this day.

To walk into that store would have been admitting that I was poor, and "poor" wasn't--and still isn't--a label I could live with. Even though it's probably closer to the truth than any other I could come up with. There's such shame in this country about not having a lot of money. You can exchange stories about sex or intimate medical stuff or your sexual orientation but don't you dare talk about how much money you make--or owe!

I don't know I'm just elitist or if my attitude is just a leftover from my fairly pampered upbringing, but I know that I never want to be perceived as poor. And that's probably why I use my credit cards and rack up debt and end up waiting for an elderly relative to die so that I can get out from underneath it all. At times like this I often think of the wise LilCherie, who told me recently: "Your childhood just needed to be shittier, then things wouldn't seem so bad now. It worked for me."

When I was about 13, we had a gift exchange in our Girl Scout troop. My partner, Angela, was a fringe-dweller of my social group and was what you would call a "sad sack." I went to her and asked her what she wanted for Christmas. "A friend," she said pathetically. Thrown off by the answer, I thought for a moment and then said, "Well, I can't buy one for five dollars, so what else do you want?"

"Some leg warmers, I guess," she answered.

Nope, you can't buy friends--or a lot of other things that I am truly thankful for.