We talk about failure being important. We also are warned to not make failure okay, in and of itself, because what we want for our children is to see that failure is part of success. The most successful people fail a lot! I know failure. I’ve failed a lot, at a lot of things. I try things with my students that often don’t work. I reflect, regroup and come back ready to try again. In the end I think I succeed more than I fail. At home though, I’m not feeling that way.
Growing up in the 70’s my family did okay financially. We lived in Miami, FL, so the fact that my parents didn’t speak any English was not a problem. You see, where we lived, called Little Havana, was filled with Spanish-speaking Cubans so no matter where we went people spoke Spanish so my parents didn’t really need to learn much English. My dad was a ship welder so he needed to know a bit more English but you couldn’t tell because at home he didn’t let on that he knew any English. Back then a ship welder brought home about $200 to $300 per week, which was plenty. We were renters but we rented half a house. Since we never needed to interact with the owners of the house until rent time it felt like I grew up in a house with my own room and everything. My dad was a drinker (polite way of saying he was an alcoholic) and that explains why we never became home owners. My mother had to make sure to get enough money for groceries and rent out of his pay each week before he went to his favorite bar to, um, celebrate.
We lived like that until I was about 14. My mother had had enough and decided to break free. She moved me to Glendale, CA, all the way across the country, half way through my 9th grade year. It was devastating. I had to leave my friends, our house, my own room, my cat, and our dog. In CA we stayed with a family friend while my mom looked for work. Her skill set was limited so she went to work in a factory sewing clothing. How cliche, a Hispanic woman sewing in a factory. She didn’t make enough for us to get a place of our own so in order for us to rent a one bedroom apartment my mother accepted welfare support. That meant she had enough money to pay rent and food stamps.You know, the amount of money they gave a woman and her teenage son to live for a month wasn’t enough. Every month we would do well grocery shopping the first two weeks or so of the month. We usually ended up buying a big bag of potatoes and that would make it so that we could have dinner every night for the rest of the month. My mother got very creative at making potatoes in different ways. Thanks for free lunch programs I was able to have breakfast and lunch everyday at school.
if sewing clothes in a factory wasn’t cliche enough my mother found a job that paid more, enough to get us out of welfare, cleaning house for an upper middle class family. More than that, my mother also became their children’s nanny. I never participated in the finances. My mother was too proud. According to her, it was her job to shelter me from that. Luckily for me I received a Pell Grant back in 1985 to attend UCLA. I worked a part time job, as most kids do, to eat and I commuted from home to save money on rent or dorms. So yeah, I spoke Spanish at home and my parents never went to high school. Sounds like a typical Latino situation. I got through school on my own pretty much and did okay. I’m not writing this blog to get pity or sympathy. I’m thinking through a problem in my life the way I process, through writing. I wasn’t even going to publish this but the reason I blog, besides processing, is to share. I get so much from reading other teacher’s blogs if only to know that I am not alone. That, and to learn. So I’m publishing this in the hopes that someone can learn from my mistakes and maybe steer clear of the problems I got into. Maybe someone has already gone through this and will have some insight into what I can do. Either way, as embarrassing as this is, it’s worth publishing. I live a fully transparent life and I’m okay with that.
I reflect on my past because I wonder if it has any bearing on the predicament I’ve put my family into. For a while things were going well financially for us. Then seven years ago the WA state economy tanked quite a bit and teachers took a pay cut. We took pay cuts for six years straight. For me that meant that every year for six years straight I made around $100 less per month than the year before. Yeah, fast forward six years and I was making $600/month, every month, less than I used to. The economy is starting to pick up and even though our cost of living has not been replaced I should start to see a little more money coming in. Dare I say that it is too darn late.
See, let’s add a few huge mistakes to making less every year for six years straight plus a little bit of life happening. My wife grew up differently than I did. She was middle class, I’d say upper middle class but they didn’t have a maid and nanny, so I’ll stick with middle class. She is way smarter than me at finances. The huge mistakes I made all those years of pay cuts was that I didn’t reduce our spending. I was either too proud or too delusional. I thought I would use the dreaded credit card and pay it back when I made a little extra money. Of course, life happens, right. It’s really nice to build your first home. We purchased a nice almost one acre plot of land and had an 1100 sq ft house built there. Small but just what we needed for our small family. What I never planned for is that when you get all new appliances all at once, they run the risk of all breaking down at the same time. Oh yeah. Withing months of each other, during the time of pay cuts, we had to replace the oven, the dishwasher, the microwave, the fridge, the propane stove (for heating the whole house), the washing machine, the dryer, and then the water heater too. That debt was more than I could pay back and the interest was pretty high.
I thought I was so smart. I took out a loan to pay all that off in five years. You know, that alone would have solved the problem. But I wasn’t pulling in enough to make it through each month and we had no savings and my wife couldn’t get any more hours at work. Eventually I filled another high interest credit card and rolled that over into another five year loan now owing and paying twice as much as before. You see where this is going. All the extra jobs I’m working, getting my National Board stipend, my wife working as much as she could, still not enough to make it through each month. But instead of cutting back, I’m still using credit cards to put food on my family’s table. To keep my family clothed. I’m still living the American Dream and pretending everything is okay even though I’m using credit that I can’t pay back.
So what to do now? Do we sell the house? My wife has been looking into tiny house living to see if that can save us money but that would mean our house would have to sell for a good price even though it needs fixing (which we can’t, of course, afford). Even though we’ve been paying our mortgage on time for almost 20 years, after refinancing, and saving very little doing so, we still owe most of what we originally owed!
If we can’t sell and buy a smaller home do we sell and become renters? Rent is still high enough that I’m not sure it would solve the problem. It’s sad and embarrassing that I can feel so successful at my job, at grant writing, at being innovative, yet I can’t make ends meet outside of my career, at home.
