Help is not something I’ve ever been able to ask for. I see it with my kids, too…as they reach toddlerhood and beyond, there’s so many things they want to do on their own. Today, I let my oldest son bake cookies without my help. He’s watched me bake them and helped me with them probably a hundred times, but this time was his first solo outing. He did a great job and had a sense of accomplishment that I could never have given him myself. I think it’s natural to want to do things on your own, to not lean on others for help. And most of the time, we manage that. The last 2 years have been hard. We’ve had help in the form of family buying gifts for the kids at Christmastime and birthdays so we don’t have to spend as much. My mom loves to buy clothes for the kids. We’ve been the recipients of random acts of kindness, sometimes in the form of cash in our hands and sometimes something as simple as a friend inviting us over for dinner or someone picking up the check when we go out. And we’ve taken government assistance in the form of Medicaid and WIC. All of those things have been hard for us, but we’ve learned to smile and say thank you for them.
The hardest thing for me to do was apply for Medicaid and WIC. Bleeding heart that I am, I fully support the existence of those programs but never expected to use them myself. I was raised in a conservative household, and I guess I thought that most of the people who used them were abusing them or that they were for people who would be on them for life. Philosophically, I knew that wasn’t true but everything in my upbringing screamed otherwise at me. We have paid taxes for years and fully intend to do so again some day when things are better. This is a temporary financial hardship for us and we won’t be using these programs forever. We are the reason these programs exist, so why am I ashamed that we need them? I don’t know. I do know that it’s humiliating to stand in line at the grocery store with my WIC coupons and know that the person behind me is passing judgment. Sometimes they make snide remarks. I wish I had the guts to speak up and tell them my story and make them feel like crap for judging me.
The recent glitch in my husband’s unemployment has caught us off guard. Through part-time gigs and various other money-making enterprises, he’s managed to earn enough that his benefits haven’t dried up yet. We’re making less than half what he made before he was laid off, but we’ve learned how to be frugal and make every penny count. But every penny does count. So an entire week without any income is devastating. Two weeks is an entire mortgage payment, and we’ve now been two weeks without any money. We had some in the bank. It dried up fast, though. I went to the grocery store with $35 to feed us for a week. I managed to get enough to keep us from starving, but I won’t promise that it’s very nutritious. (The cookies we made today were from a mix that I got for free months ago, and I had to really weigh whether it was worth using the butter in them or if I needed to save it. I decided to just go for it, since we haven’t had anything to snack on or give the kids as a treat for days now.) There’s a lot of cereal and PB&J being eaten at breakfast and lunch and not much else. Dinners are slightly better, but we’re quickly depleting the freezer stash of meat. And today I ran out of water. Bottled water is a necessity for me due to my kidney stones. Drinking tap water (even filtered, such as with a Brita pitcher) makes them worse. I went to the grocery store tonight and get milk with my last WIC coupon for the month and saw a 3 liter bottle of water for 87 cents. I had to dig for change in my purse, but I found enough to buy it. Talk about humbling! I’ve never, ever had to do anything like that. But going through this, not being able to buy fruit or vegetables and wondering just how far I can stretch a bag of rice or a pound of meat, and not knowing when we might see money again, it’s broken me. We applied for food stamps. I want to throw up as I type that sentence…not because I believe that people who use them are wrong, but because it’s one more thing I need help with. I can no longer afford to feed my family without help. It is humiliating. But we are the people these programs were designed for…the ones who need help on a temporary basis, who will eventually pay much, much more in taxes than they ever received in assistance. Believe it or not, we will probably qualify for much more than the amount of money I’ve been spending on food for the past two years. My food budget is approximately $200 a month…$250 if we have a good month. I don’t know what we’ll do if we have more money to eat on! (Which is a little ridiculous if you ask me, even though I’m firmly in the liberal camp. Teach these people some couponing/money saving skills if you’re going to give them money to buy groceries!)
We have other money issues right now, too. Like the cut-off notice I got from Progress Energy. I have to come up with $150 before July 21 or they’ll send someone to turn it off. The mortgage payment that was due July 1. The gigantic water bill that reflects a) a rate hike and b) a much higher than average amount of water use at my house. Yes, the over-use has been addressed. Apparently the children have been getting bathed more than normal since they’re getting sweatier when they play outside. No more baths unless they smell bad! (I’m kidding…sort of!)
But crazy things keep happening that remind me to trust that we’ll be taken care of. You would think that the past two years of “coincidences” would be enough reminder, but apparently not! For instance, I really wanted to see Eclipse. Definitely a frivolous expense and one that I absolutely couldn’t justify. But two friends offered to pay for me so I could go and have some girl time with them. Though it may have felt like something that wasn’t a big deal to them, it was a huge deal to me. Not just the movie, but the time with two of my favorite girlfriends really boosted my spirits at a time when I desperately needed it.
Then I ran out of disposable diapers yesterday, which isn’t a really a problem because we have cloth diapers…I just prefer sposies at night in case she wets a lot. But then I ran out of detergent and had no way to wash them! Luckily, a friend was making a batch of detergent and gave me enough to get me through and told me there was plenty more where that came from if I ran out and still couldn’t buy any. I’m sure she has no idea just how much it means to me to have that problem solved.
And school supplies. For whatever reason, this has been the thing that weighed heaviest on my mind. My oldest son starts school next week and there is no way we can buy the list of things the school has asked us to get. I don’t know why this is what bothers me most…it’s not like they’ll kick him out of school if he can’t bring them! I guess it’s because it’s something that affects my child in a way that’s very obvious to him. He may not notice that we have no fruit to eat or anything to snack on, but he would definitely notice if we didn’t buy school supplies for him. So I’ve been completely torn up over it, wondering how we were going to get this stuff. But then, after a meeting at church tonight, a friend asked me (quite out of the blue) if we could afford get his school supplies. She knows details about the money situation but didn’t have a clue about this particular concern because I hadn’t voiced it to anyone…not even my husband. This is when I broke down. I started crying in frustration and embarrassment because it is so hard to admit that the $30 or so it would cost me to buy folders and papers and pencils for my 7 year old son is too much for me right now. I remember the days when $30 was an amount of money that I’d spend at a bookstore or on iTunes or on a night at the movies without even thinking twice. And now I can’t even scrounge that up to buy school supplies for my son. But she told me that she’d handle it, that I didn’t have to worry about that. And amazingly, before I even got home, another friend (who was not even there when this convo happened) texted me and said to give her the school supply list and she’d get it all.
Suddenly I’m feeling a lot better. Help is being offered, and I’m taking it for now. Someday I’ll be able to pay it forward. There’s a lesson to be learned in every situation and I’m going to learn this one well. Take help with a smile and a word of thanks. Let go of the pride and get down off your high horse. Help is there if you need it. And, perhaps the most important long term lesson is this: helping people isn’t about the giver…it’s about the person who receives the help. When someday comes, I’ll be able to give selflessly, knowing that it’s not all about me.
