You Didn't Imagine It

"We did everything right, and yet it all went wrong anyway." This observation, given by my cousin in the middle of a conversation about how hard life is now, hit me like a ton of bricks. We did do everything right! We got good grades, we finished school, we started families ... But here I am at 50, alone. A single mom - divorced after 15 years so my ex could pursue his new plan for life, one that didn’t include his original family. The house we poured tens of thousands of dollars into? The house that would be worth at least double what we paid for it now and would solve all of my money issues? That’s gone - a casualty of the divorce. So I’m working full-time while being a full-time single parent and renting, with the reality that I’ll never own anything of my own and the terror that I’ll end up fully destitute someday staring me down every night when I try to sleep. But I did everything right. I left college and put all my plans on hold to be a stay-at-home mom. I spent ...

  "Don't worry, karma will take care of it."  "Just be patient - your time is coming." "Working hard will pay off." Hi. I'm the recipient of all of the above advice. I have persevered through over ten years of single momhood, and I've worked so damn hard. I've gone to therapy and really put in the work to heal from many years of abuse: emotional, physical, and sexual. I survived. I overcame. I put my children first when their father spent years treating them as an afterthought because - after all - they weren't the progeny of his mistress.  Now that the kids are all grown up/mostly grown up, I had a serious wake-up call about my future: I needed something to do that is more than "medical office front desk" after they have all moved on to their own lives and futures. And I also needed to find a way to make enough money to live without the very little child support that I do get - the legal bare minimum after he lowered his inco...