Pennies Under The Rug

Last night I had a short, intense exchange with Sam on the issue of finances. Mine, not his. The dialogue was prompted by my asking him his financial status, as Sam's dad had just asked me to contribute more to Sam's monthly expenses. Sam immediately asked why we were even having that discussion without his involvement.

Good point, Sam. And thank you for making it.

Emails about money from my ex-spouse, no matter how well meant, always cause my stress level to jump way into the red. Because of the long and often difficult history between us, including major struggles on financial issues, I cannot read any inquiry from him as neutral. This one was no exception.

To reply to his email required much agonizing over words. As I labored through a draft, I cried out "I can hear Doug [my brilliant therapist of yore] talking to me!" Warren, who was providing moral support and a listening ear, asked me what Doug was saying.

"Stop thinking that telling your story means it is heard."

Doug was right. My long, labored explanation added nothing to the discussion and only made me feel worse. I trimmed my reply considerably, reined in my feelings, wrote that I was already doing all I could do, and would stretch more when I could. Then I hit "send."

But not before Sam and I had our quick exchange. And not before I assured Sam that he was not the source of financial stress in my life.

I grew up in a hardworking, blue collar family where my parents made it clear from grade school on that they would support and provide for my brothers and me until we graduated from high school. After that, we were on our own and either had to join the military, get a job, or go to college. If you chose college, good for you, but it was on your own dime. After my parents drove me to Chicago in the fall of 1974 and unloaded my suitcases, their obligation ended. It was my scholarships, my loans, and my meager savings that got me through that first year and the years to follow.

Having gone to college on the sink or swim financial plan, I have always felt strongly about helping my children through college. What I hadn't planned on was Life, in the form of a major illness and an extreme and permanent reduction in income, messing up my plans.

I struggled my way through the responses and the guilt last night. I did not want to turn my back on Sam, and while I "knew" I wasn't doing that, I didn't accept that I was not. I "know" I am doing what I can to help him achieve his education. Is it all I want or hoped it would be? No. But I have to accept that my means are far more limited than in "the old days" and I am doing what I can. I can only shave pennies so thin, no matter what my desires for my children. And at this point, all my pennies are pretty thinly shaved. (Confession: I did just start a "getting away" account, but with my opening deposit being a whopping $96.33 and a third of that being spare change and another half being rebates and coupon savings, I don't think I am being selfish at the expense of a college education.)

For me, the big issue is changing my mindset that spending money equals love and that the only way I can prove myself as a good and loving parent is to overextend myself financially. As I told Warren, I could move this amount from here to there (because I also pay some other bills for Sam), but I was really just playing a shell game. Spread the dollars as I might over my budget, there are still only a given number of dollars.  Like resolving to buy the gift I can afford versus the splashier, pricier gift I can't, I have to work through my feelings and accept that it is okay to say "I can't do that amount, but I can do this amount."

I have to accept that about myself: that I am doing all I can. I have to give myself permission that "all I can" is a loving response.  

My friend Arlene recently shared her memory of her mother helping her with her college education: How well I remember my mother's jar of dimes. I still have tears when I think of the morning she rolled back the worn rug and removed enough nickels, dimes, and pennies to pay my first quarter tuition at OSU.

It is a beautiful story and one I thought about last night as I struggled with my desire and my inability to provide everything I would like for my children.

Sam will be home in four weeks for a visit and a brief respite from school. He'll have a chance to talk; I'll have a chance to listen. We are both looking forward to cooking together and recently talked about some of the dishes we want to try. And perhaps we'll have a chance to roll back the rug and find treasures underneath.

Penny Dreams, Quarter Wishes

As 2010 started, Blogville abounded with posts about goals and wishes. Christine over at Monkey Funk posted one on making dreams come true. After I commented on it, she commented back: And what dreams are you going to fuel, April?

Her words reminded me of the lines from a Thomas Beddoes poem, "Dream-Pedlary:"

If there were dreams to sell,

Merry and sad to tell,

And the crier rung the bell,

What would you buy?

I never answered Christine. (Sorry, Christine!) I didn't have an easy answer at the time; I'm not sure I do yet. If the crier rung the bell, I'd be sitting on the bench, watching everyone buy a dream, then shrugging, "I dunno."

About the same time Christine was pressing us on our dreams, Sharon at Musings of a Midlife Mom wrote about breaking her budget into penny increments; she only needed so many pennies to make up the loss of the income from her part-time job.

A penny for my thoughts? I can't begin to price them.

Sharon's post made me smile. Then last week I am the Working Poor wrote about saving change, something I do too.

So many of my dreams are intangible. I am like Whistler in the movie "Sneakers," who, when given the chance to name any sum of money as payment for turning over a decryption chip, says "I want peace on earth and goodwill toward men." That's a good start. Well, maybe that and universal health care coverage in this country. (Of course, the response line in the movie fits with that last request of mine: "We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.")

So many of my desires come without a price tag. A good book to read. Time in which to write. Hearing Warren's marimba playing float up from the basement in the evening. Seeing smiles on the faces of Legal Clinic clients when they eat my baked goods. Talking about cheese making with Sam. An email from a girlfriend. A letter in the mailbox. Guests at the supper table. Running into friends downtown. Flopping on the couch alongside Warren at the end of a way too long day and knowing I don't have to say a word, quietly grateful for his nearness. Telegraphing that gratitude instantaneously by a touch to his hand.

This is all the stuff of a rich life. It is the stuff of my rich life.

Yet the question posed by Christine was "And what dreams are you going to fuel, April?"

Sometimes I read back over my own blog and wonder whether I even have any dreams beyond the life I am already living. It is already full to overflowing. It is marked by tomatoes and peppers - both their growth and their harvest, by symphony concerts and the Legal Clinic, by books and baking. Almost all of my dreams are already woven into the fabric of my life. If I had one dream more, one maybe-just-slightly-out-of-reach dream for the year, it might be for us to take the train to Montana this summer. Even assuming we put our hands on the pennies with which to do so, there are still all those schedules to juggle, including that of the tomatoes.

Beyond that, though, I can't say. I feel I have enough, more than enough. That's a problem I can afford to have.

I recently wrote about the novels of E. L. Konigsburg and a scene in which runaway children find coins visitors have tossed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art fountain. Jamie speculates that a very rich person must have tossed a quarter into the fountain. His older sister disagrees.

"Someone very poor," Claudia corrected. "Rich people have only penny wishes."

I don't know about Claudia's statement. Penny dreams or quarter wishes, it's still up to us how we spend them. Rich or poor, it's all the same loose change in our hands and hearts at the end of the day.

The Pig Has Landed

Last Christmas, I received a stone pig. Cast from volcanic material (so it says), it was from a courthouse colleague who was leaving after a year and a half of starting a new court program that I had helped design.

Why a pig?

Early on in our relationship, she told me that her husband was a deputy at the Franklin County jail, a large urban system. Inmates would often complain to him about being in jail, adding "it's not fair," and he would respond "Fair? Fair? Isn't that where people show pigs?"

When I heard that story, I told her about the pig showmanship class I had seen many years before at a county fair.

A showmanship class is one in which the handlers, in this case all 4-Hers, demonstrate how well they can show off their pig's fine points. It usually consists of walking the pig around a ring with other handlers and pigs while a judge watches both the pig and the ease of the showman. In a pig showmanship class, the kids often carry canes. They use them to tap the pig from time to time to keep it walking in the right the direction. In extreme moments, they might one to correct the pig in case it had any thoughts of getting pugnacious with its neighbors. A pig's nose is especially sensitive and sometimes a quick tap there will catch its attention.

This particular class took place on a very hot and humid Ohio summer day. Contrary to the saying about "sweating like a pig," pigs don't sweat. That is why they wallow in mud: to stay cool. Obviously, there are no mud wallows in a fair ring as the pigs are well groomed and clean.

It was a very, very hot day.

Early on in the class, the pigs started to become irritable. There were some porcine mutterings, some deliberate bumping (pig to pig), while the 4-Hers looked concerned and briskly tapped their charges. The ring announcer asked parents to bring sprinkling cans to the ring and help water the pigs to cool them down.

It didn't help. The pigs became more and more irritated. They didn't want to be paraded around a ring. They didn't want to be tapped. Bumps became nips, grunts became squeals. The 4-Hers, most of whom looked to be about 12, look worried, then distressed.

Finally, the pigs began fighting. Three or four bunched into a corner, catching their handlers with them, even pinning one to a fence, and began tussling. There were yells, there were squeals. The ring was dry and the dust rose. Pretty soon you could not see much of anything in the corner except a cloud of dust, an occasional pig rump, then a lone cane rising high up in the air and descending over and over.

Whack! Squeal! Whack! Squeal! Whack! Squeal!

At that point, several pig farmers jumped in the ring and helped shove the fighting pigs apart. The cane turned out to be wielded by a small boy who I had noticed originally because he was wearing a vest over his shirt. Now his hair was disheveled, his face was dirty, and his vest was askew. His pig, though, was once again walking docilely in front of him.

I told that story to my colleague and she laughed to the point of tears. After that, pigs became our touchstone as to the ups and downs of starting a new program. Sometimes we had to whack something - a rule, a procedure - to get it to settle down and behave. And sometimes things weren't fair and one of us would remind the other, "Fair? Fair? Isn't that where people show pigs?"

The pig was sitting on my doorstep, a bow around its neck, when I arrived home one day last December. It sat under the Christmas tree throughout the holidays, then sat in the former family room (currently the construction staging area and overflow shop storage until Warren moves materials into the newly finished shed) until yesterday.

Last night, I looked at the pig, I looked at the garden, and I plopped it down in front of the tomatoes. I imagine the pig will migrate as the summer wears on; with a grin like that, I see it in the pumpkins come the fall.

For now, though, the pig has landed.

John Steinbeck's motto was ad astra per alia porci - to the stars on the wings of a pig - "not enough wingspread, but plenty of intention." He even had a stamp made up with a small winged pig, "Pigasus." In the early days of our start-up program, we certainly had plenty of intention even if we were occasionally short on wingspread. It's not a bad motto for my sod garden either.

Come to think of it, it's not a bad motto for life in general.

To infinity, and beyond, on the wings of a pig!