GETTING FREE OF DEBT / HELP / MENTORS

It Took Me Three Years To Do The Impossible

I had a lot of help along the way

It’s one of those black, sleepless nights. There’s a restlessness in me as I get out of bed. I’ve been awake all night; I can see in the dark.

While Tom lay sleeping, I found his pants, his front pocket, his keys. I slipped down the stairs, out the front door to the street, to his car, where he keeps his briefcase. Back in the house, I went through it.

Behind the business documents, order forms, mail, memos, I found what I hoped to find, yet hoped not to find:

Receipts for dinners out, flower deliveries, motel rooms. Notes from his lover. And a receipt for a post office box and two credit cards, in his name alone, months of statements, records of his cheating, all maxed out, overdue. A bank statement with a long list of NSF checks.

Outside the sky goes from black to grey. I am numb. Leveled.

It’s been over for a long time. I was 19 when we married and now nearly 30. I realized that one day I’d be 40 and the only thing that would be different was that the hole we were in would be even deeper.

But until this, I didn’t have the wherewithal to file for divorce. It took me years of back and forth to get there, to be ready.

Now there would be no going back.

What frightened me was the debt. Tom was an addict, his medium: money. He’d been in school for six of the years we were together, and since graduation, he’d worked sporadically. His mother said he wasn’t lazy exactly.

“He just won’t do anything he doesn’t like doing,” Bernice said.

Tom was warm, funny, charming, well spoken. People liked him. He was a natural salesman, but he felt that sales was beneath him. Finally, though, after six years getting his bachelors degree — in economics! — he found a sales job and had been at it for a few months.

For years, I went along — cosigned figuratively or literally, the financial imprudence. When I stopped going along, he went behind my back. We’d purchased a home and unbeknownst to me, he took out a second mortgage at 19% interest, which was the going rate for a few years in the 1980s. It increased the house payment by 40%. He used it to buy cashmere clothes and record albums.

In addition to the first and second mortgages on our home, we had purchased a rental that he managed. I’d learned it was three years in arrears on property tax. The sellers had carried a contract and if they’d wanted to, they could have foreclosed because of the tax situation. The county could also have foreclosed.

In addition, we owed $24,000 — back when that would buy a house — to family. We’d drained my sisters’ trust funds to buy the rental property, to fix it up, to sell it and repay them with the proceeds. But because of high interest rates, the real estate market was not moving. That huge debt had hung over me for years. Bankruptcy wasn’t an option. It would have been unconscionable to go bankrupt on that.

I knew that I wouldn’t get child support for our two daughters, much less any help with the debt. I knew that Tom was incapable.

So I took it on.

“That’s impossible,” Tom told me. No doubt, for him it would have been.

When we set an intention to do something, the universe shows up to provide all that’s needed to fulfill the intention.

Ted

Signs of the universe lining up were apparent from the beginning. Though I expected a fight, Tom quitclaimed on the properties, which I would sell once the real estate market turned around.

Immediately, I contacted the sellers of the rental house and told them that I had every intention to bring the property taxes current. I asked them for forbearance until I could do so. They agreed.

Since I knew that I’d be sole support for my daughters, I went back to college. I had one year down, three to go.

I had been waiting tables for the past three years, which job I kept because I could make it work around my class schedule. If I was really careful, I made just enough to cover the essentials: house payment, utilities, gas, power, food.

Since my daughters were six and nine, I’d need childcare after school and on weekends when I worked. Sharon, a friend who just lived a few blocks away, was in the same situation: she needed childcare for her son as she was returning to school for her masters degree. So we worked out a schedule.

Tom agreed to weekend duty with our daughters when I was working.

It was a challenge. And a big part of the challenge was the conflict between being a decent mother and being a good role model. A decent mother has time for her kids but with work and school, there really wasn’t that much time. I guess I was fulfilling the role model part.

At my job, I met Ted, a tax attorney, 30 years my senior, who became my friend and mentor. He came in two or three times a week for dinner. He was outgoing, never afraid to start a conversation with anybody. Clerks, wait staff, people in line at the grocery store. Me.

Ted became my Yoda.

If I felt sorry for myself because it was midterms and the girls had contracted twin scourges: head lice and scabies, at the same time, he wouldn’t let me run with it. Or from it.

When I parked next to the tire store for my shift at work, one of the salesmen, Dan, a “habitual” at the restaurant where I worked, noticed that my tires were bald — the steel belts were showing.

“They need to be replaced. Now.”

I hesitated. The cost.

“They’re unsafe,” he said. “Could you afford a fatal accident? Involving your kids?”

He told me he wouldn’t let me drive off without a new set.

I was embarrassed and stressed to be so stretched financially. During those times, I’d curse Tom.

Ted didn’t come to Tom’s rescue, but he did point me toward the lesson from whatever life presented.

“You’re lucky Dan saw that you needed new tires,” he said. “And that he gave you a pretty good deal on them. Count your blessings.

“Life is always right,” he would say. “It will always give you what you need. But what you need may or may not be to your liking.”

It broke me to see my youngest, dressed as we all were in layers, climb up on a chair to turn the thermostat up. Layers or not, she was cold. We all were.

I’ve never been great with numbers but I got a lot sharper at the grocery store, adding prices up in my head. I feared getting to checkout and not having enough to pay for what was in my cart.

When I’d get overwhelmed, Ted urged me to stay in the present, which is the point of power, he said.

It was true, when I thought at all about the future, I was terrified. And when I thought about the past, I was consumed with regret. My only safe place was in the here and now.

“Keep practicing,” was his best advice. “Something that helps to stay in the present is to put your awareness on say, your feet. Just be aware of your feet. Or your breathing. It will help to calm you. It’s just a matter of giving the mind something to do.

“Your mind is not your friend,” Ted said.

When I was challenged over something, I could present it all to him. He’d examine the pieces and give me his thoughts, which were usually something along the lines of acceptance and surrender. And a few action steps now and then.

He was big on the idea that we go to a lot of trouble to set up the situations in our lives that are “wonderful opportunities often brilliantly disguised as catastrophes.”

Accept every situation as if you’d prayed for it.

We aren’t victims unless we see ourselves as such. There’s no power or solution in victimhood.

It was three long years of waiting tables, classes, homework, papers, exams.

And all at once, it was over.

In June 1986, coincidental with college graduation, interest rates came down and real estate markets turned. I sold both properties that month and paid off the entire debt.

Which left $2,000 and a nine-year-old car with which to start over.

After it was finished, I settled in another town. I found a job at a small local newspaper, which I liked — reporter, feature writer, copy editor. But it didn’t pay well. My daughters told me they were tired of poverty and begged me to get a job that paid something.

Again, I’d complained about Tom to Ted.

Ted was all heart. “You should get on your knees and thank that man.”

Completely dumbfounded, I asked, “How do you figure?”

Ted looked at me squarely. “He showed you what you were made of.”

And that was the beginning of my healing toward Tom.

And I found another job that paid better.

Please enjoy this brilliant and powerful piece from Nathan Chen:

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