From KAR, with love

Okay. So here’s the deal. When you’re a kid in high school, you don’t think about anything past high school. Unless, of course, you happened to have been one of those extremely intelligent people who could see into the murky crystal ball future of adulthood. Or you had parents who rode you like a donkey all the way through college. Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of those kids. I was the invincible kid. The one that thought she could drink and have lots of unprotected sex with her stupid mouth-breathing boyfriend without suffering any consequences.

Hey. Some of us have to learn things the hard way. There just isn’t any way around it if you’re like me and just happen to schedule a lot of free time for ramming your head into brick walls.

So what happened is this: I had a girl with the mouth breather fifteen years ago. She changed my life in a lot of ways. I had to grow up and try to become an adult. It's been a long road and in looking back, I wasn't always as much of an adult as I thought I was. I'm hoping to one day afford therapy when she finally realizes she's been raised by a 12-year-old boy stuck in a sagging woman's body.

Seven years after my oldest, I had a boy with a redneck. This one wasn’t so much a  mouth breather, really more of a sloth. A three toed sloth whose concept of time is not one that moves in traditional linear patterns. Upon hearing someone had recently died, he'd say, “I just saw him a little while ago.” This would lead you to believe that perhaps he saw the deceased just yesterday swilling coffee in a grease joint. But “a little while ago,” it turns out, could mean five minutes ago, yesterday, or that period of time right after they took up all those self-serving cigarette machines out of the Shoney’s and Huddle House restaurants. It’s hard to say with him. It defies all logic. At any point, a little while later, I had another baby with the sloth so then I suddenly had three kids and not enough money in my job to cover business.

I could go on rambling a long time about my life, but I’ll just suffice to say that I’m now a 33 year old single parent raising three children in a trailer park on the wrong side of the county and my grass needs cutting. (That’s not a euphemism for sex or drugs or anything. My yard actually needs to be mowed.) Sometime in the midst of raising all these kids and paying bills, I managed to finagle my way through an English degree right before the economy tanked.

So now I’m a librarian living on about 1000 bucks a month waffling around trying to decide if now is the time to go back for a Master's or if I need to focus on boy scouts, band recitals, dinner plans that are constantly scrapped, and trying to figure out if the remote is behind the damned couch.

This blog isn’t really about the story of my life. Or maybe it is. But right now, this blog is supposed to about about making it on that kind of a paycheck. 

I got this idea from this other freakily insane woman who brags on raising and feeding her three children on less than a thousand dollars a month. Yeah. That woman also believes that dental care is a luxury and that sliced cheese is an actual dairy product. And it’s okay to store babies in Rubbermaid bins. And that swishing shitty diapers around in a bucket full of soapnuts is somehow supposed to effectively clean diapers enough to prevent rashes.  

I'm not saying I'm making more effective use of my money. I'm just saying that forcing your family to do without while you pay your tithes in money given to you by the government is not a type of martyrdom I care for my children to experience. However, I'm not going to spend all my time talking about how she and her husband are batshit crazy for failing to effectively meet some basic needs for their children, but rather offer up an alternative way of attempting to provide.One that doesn't expect my children to do without basic comforts and whatever sort of extracurricular, enrichment type activities I can wrangle up for them.

It's also an opportunity for me to try out new frugal type shit and post inane comments on it. Or I can also take the opportunity to crow about my plumbing prowess and very, very basic carpentry and mechanic skills. Or maybe to just bitch about all the shit that's currently broken that I can't afford to buy replacement parts for until tax refund season.

So here’s my version of living in relative poverty. It's not a lifestyle I consciously chose or endorse as a good way to live. On the other hand, I didn't exactly plan against it, either. Being an undomesticated type of woman, planning has never been one of my strong points.