Category — money honey

When I was a little girl and something in our household displeased me, my father would often say “when you have a house of your own, you can do whatever you want”. This made me very angry, and I soothed myself with daydreams about that house and my grown-up life.

My sweet, handsome husband and I would live in an old Victorian house with spiral staircases and secret trapdoors, and our children would play in my formal gardens.

Unless it was rainy and cold, in which case I would most certainly let them rollerskate on my hardwood floors, because I wasn’t going to be mean to my kids.

No one would ever watch football or shut the windows on a pretty day, and every room would be filled with fresh flowers all the time. I would make pies, and leave them to cool in the windows, and eat them for dinner if I wanted. With ice cream. So there.

That still sounds like a damn sweet deal, in case you were wondering.

On a warm summer night, I sat in front of my budget spreadsheet with fear in my heart and tears on my cheeks. My income was cut  unexpectedly, and in a pattern of despair that spans the last four years, I once again had too many expenses and not near enough revenue.

I considered my options, the best of which was a grant that I only repaid if I sold the house in the next fifteen years. Behind my gently closed and tear-swollen eyes, I saw a lonely old woman in an lonely old house. Even if I got the grant, I still faced some expensive home repairs and the challenges of managing winters alone in an isolated mountain cabin without a reliable vehicle.

My frustration and fear boiled over, and I buried my face in my hands to muffle my sobs.

It just isn’t fair. Why would the universe take away the only thing I have left?

Even in the midst of my anguish, I couldn’t hold back the laughter. In that moment, I knew exactly why I’ve been pouring every ounce of my blood, sweat and tears into this house for the last two years, and I knew I had to leave. Suddenly, I realized why everyone who loves me wants me out of this house.

One of my closest friends levied this in response to my howls about losing my safe harbor:

Do you really feel safe there, or has it become a fortress of emotional victory?

I could take the grant. I could manage the repairs, somehow. I could work around my limitations in the winter. I could win this battle, but it would be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Even my best effort might not be enough, and I needn’t remind you that I am a formidable woman.

Keeping this house already feels like having to hold the roof on and the walls up, every minute spent to prevent it from collapsing. It would be the battle of my life, my personal Bastogne; a cold, hard, lonely night in the frozen forest.

The wasbund and I bought this house in 2006. Our household income was solidly upper-middle class. Years later, in one of countless arguments about his lack of income, he suggested walking away. I adamantly refused.

You love this house more than you love me.

The night I ended my marriage, he asked what we would do about the house. I told him I was keeping it.

You’ll never survive here on your own.

So of course I did survive. My friends helped me with the landscaping and repairs. My parents bought split wood and I used the wheelbarrow to carry it into the basement every few days. I figured out how to use the damper on the woodburner to keep the house warm overnight.

My favorite lumberjack kept me in kindling. The borg allowed me to work from home when the roads were bad. My neighbors picked me up from the truck stop. They trimmed my tree branches, plowed my driveway, and offered me anything I needed that they had to give.

That first winter I came down with the flu right before a snowstorm. As I pushed the wheelbarrow full of wood through the backyard for the tenth time with a 102 degree fever and a runny nose, I wept with fury and pushed a little harder.

Last summer, I hired a landscaper to mow my two acres. He helped me make a list of things I needed to attend to and just showed up and mowed. I didn’t even have to think about it.

Daddy came to visit at least twice a year and left with sore muscles and a tired Lowe’s card.

Last fall, I lost my job. The borg spit me out a week before my sister moved in.  It would be the best shot I would ever get to do my own thing, and my best chance at keeping up with the mortgage without a college degree.

I had a business plan and the support of my friends and family. Between my severance, her rent, and other financing, I figured I had a year to get the business off the ground.

Piece of cake!

(insert maniacal laughter)

The business is doing just what it should be at this point; growing at an excruciating pace.  What it most certainly is not doing currently: replacing the spoils of my corporate career. Perhaps that’s because it typically takes a business three to five years to become reliably profitable.

I fucking hate being typical.

Financial pressure was the catalyst, but this decision is more about the realization that this house is a relic of what might have been. As hard as I’ve tried to thrive, it has taken everything I have just to survive here.

I spackled the hole in the wall from one of the last fights, I painted over the years of bitterness caked on the paneling, but I cannot live my entire life to prove a point.

This weekend, the people who helped me find the strength to let go of my past for an unknown future are helping me move into the room I’m renting from one of my best friends.

It’s terrifying and heartbreaking, but it is without question the best thing for me.

There are no words to express my eternal gratitude to the family and friends that pull me out of hot water when I haven’t the sense or the strength to get out on my own, and still love me just as much the next morning.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m the wealthiest girl in Crabtree Asheville.

happiness hit her
like a train on a track
coming towards her
stuck still, no turning back

she hid around corners
and she hid under beds
she killed it with kisses
and from it she fled

with every bubble
she sank with a drink
and washed it away
down the kitchen sink

the dogs days are over
the dog days are all done
the horse are comin’
so you better run

run fast for your mother
run fast for your father
run for your children
for your sisters and brothers

leave all your love and your longing behind
you can’t carry it with you if you want to survive

and i never wanted anything from you
except everything you had
and what was left after that too

  – “the dog days are over” florence + the machine

My life has been a continual exercise in making a silk purse from a pig’s ear. Being among the best of my peers served as my starting line. In some unknown ratio, my fierce drive consists of personality and cruelty I faced in grade school and middle school. If I couldn’t be accepted, I could be superior. That particular flavor of isolation is at least a little pleasing. Still, the drive to succeed and surpass is nestled deep in my marrow.

Unending hunger for proving myself beyond all expectation has served me very well. It’s how an agoraphobic high-school dropout with an algebra allergy, the oldest daughter of a middle-class family, came to hold a key financial position in a sizable organization and earn half a bachelor’s degree by her late twenties- in two inch heels and a wedding ring.

It’s also what held me together through the darkness of that life’s unraveling and the emptiness it left behind.

As one would imagine, a desire for vindication is compelling motivation to survive divorce and a diverging of paths with a corporate conglomerate. My limited research reveals its endurance at roughly eighteen months, just in case you were curious.

The best and worst thing about both divorce and entrepreneurship, simply:

There is no one left to argue with.

Going out into the business or dating world in search of a worthy opponent is generally counterproductive, though it certainly is an all-too-popular approach to either endeavor. The alternative is to internalize the competition- every mistake or miscalculation becomes evidence against your worthiness and success is just the midpoint in a constant cycle of proving your worth again and again and again.

Others sense this preoccupation and rightfully withhold investments of value, lest they lose your attention and favor to some shiny object that promises redemption.

My first attempt to combat this weakness was self-control and lack of expression. I learned how to hide my desire, but the best I’ve ever managed is an vague seething that unseats people more than transparency.

Powerless against its force, I made it my scapegoat and tried to eliminate it. This is what led me to my fondness for the works of Buddhist monks; desire is suffering, and my suffering sure as hell felt proportional to my desire. I found untold comfort and wisdom in their logic, but the seeds of doubt and fear were sown in that soil.

If I ever manage to conquer my desire, who will I become?

Whether you love or hate it, my intensity is an integral part of who I am as a person, a woman, and a writer. Most of the time, I love my passion and drive. Except, you know, when it makes me miserable.

A dear friend and sage advised me not to “taste the carrot”. He was speaking of the tendency we have to place more importance on any particular goal than the effort of striving and the value of desire in the creative process. In contemplating that concept, an unrelated mention of the devil as a symbolic representation of ego fit perfectly as the last piece in the puzzle.

Ego tricks us into thinking we know the inner workings of the universe, that we are capable of divining which friendships will endure, the right place for us in the lives of others, or the role of others in our own lives, which business opportunities will seal our success, or even that we are meant to prevail in an endeavor.

Those failures touch that aching, ancient pain all of us carry in some measure- they prove our worst fears about ourselves. Victory carries its own danger, as I am beginning to understand. Walk on water a few times, and every damn fish pond starts to look like a dance floor.

When determination is fueled by a need to prove superiority in the face of rejection, one starts to see any trace of doubt as a direct challenge. Without consideration for what is healthy, realistic, or even possible; the more impossible it is, the more determined I am to make it happen.

Drive and intensity are my gifts, and they bear some of the sweetest fruit I’ve tasted. Love, success, joy, fulfillment, and contentment- these universal desires motivate us to pursue rich and full lives.

Misery only sets in when my ego attempts to dictate how I receive these things, creating objects of desire and perpetuating the illusion that those broad yearnings rely on any one outcome.

The devil really is in the details, y’all.