Thursday, March 16, 2006

single parenthood - the part you don't prepare for

I'm poor. Did you know I'm poor? Not just poor, but POOR. I can pay my bills week-to-week, month-to-month, ... mostly, but I only save a few hundred dollars per YEAR and am always late paying daycare.

Meet Henry. You see, when you're poor, he's all you can afford. When I first got Henry in November of 2003, he was replacing a 1991 Jetta and was a blessing. But I immediately started having problems and his $3300 price tag increased by $1000 to work out the kinks.

Since then, maintenance been pretty uneventful in our lives. The usual stuff, of course, oil changes, tires, tune-ups, etc... but last month, Henry's axel's started going. In the last 3 weeks, I have spent $1200 fixing him!! $1200 DOLLARS!! U.S. DOLLARS!! 1200 of them!

That's a lot, people. That's the equivalent of 12 weeks of state-aided daycare payments. That's 15 weeks of groceries, just under 2 months of rent, 7.5 mild winter months of oil... We won't even go into what portion of my salary that is, but let's just say that I barely earned in 3 weeks what it took to cover those 3 weeks worth of work.

The most depressing part of all of this, is that I had to use my tax refund to pay for it. (Obviously, because my income has to go to the paying (or not being able to pay) of bills.) I was saving that for a vacation. I guess that's not going to happen.

Milan is furious at me for having bad credit because he wants me to lease a new car. But, HELLO??, I don't have $200/mo. for that either!

Sigh...

I guess I'm just really upset that every moment of my life seems to re-affirm what a bad decision it was to become a single parent. I knew at the time that I was in over my head and I knew at the time that it would be hard... but I guess I just didn't clue into the fact that it was also going to completely suck.