worth

I’ve never made much money. The first nonprofit I founded got me about 10K over two years. The second one made me about 5 thousand in the first year and then barely covered operating expenses the rest of the time. I pastored a church and made around 30K/year for two years. I’ve done a lot of so-called “good in the world” professionally, but I haven’t ever made a living at it. I would be destitute if it weren’t for the fact that my husband draws a modest income as a pastor. It’s been 9 years since I’ve earned any “real” money. It’s been so long since I had a full time job with a salary that it’s hard to envision myself ever earning any money again either. I feel like I’m just a drain on the economy. Which is depressing. I have a very expensive masters degree, but it is paid for. So even though I would love to go back to school, I really can’t afford to go into debt to do it. I would love to go back to work, in one of any number of fields, but at this point I have now created even more of a drain on the economy by birthing two children. Child care is so expensive – up to 12K per year per child – that I am screwed if I tried to put both children in some kind of full time care situation and hope to make anything more than just the costs of their care. I have squandered the pre-child years of my life where I could have made lots of money in order to be better able to support myself and my family now. I wish I had known this back in college. I would have put off some of my dreams and gotten a more lucrative degree and done better economically.

it’s going to be a long day when …

It’s 6:58am on a Saturday morning, and every last one of us is awake and up (some of us for more than two hours now). This sucks.

homesick

I just uploaded some photos from earlier in the summer, back before we moved. Seeing the children in their old backyard and in the other house made me catch my breath and caused my heart to hurt. That carpet isn’t even there any more. Those memories are now only in our minds and in our photos. We can’t just step outside our home and see where we used to play. It breaks my heart that I won’t be able to give my children the stability of growing up in one place.