July 26th Shower Thoughts: Damn, I Miss Money

I will never stop wallowing.

This isn’t a fancy article for a publication. This won’t be proofread. There are loads of typos. It’s just a raw dump of what’s been in my brain for sanity’s sake. Maybe the content will eventually fuel a formal submission, but for now…this isn’t it.

Dear Diary…

I’ve wallowed plenty about money post-divorce. Specifically, my lack of money.

I knew it would be tough. I just didn’t think it would be this tough. My expenses are the same. I just lost almost $170k/year in additional income. That’s a pretty big slap in the face and my bank account.

My thinking was: I don’t need to buy anything. I can make a few hundred here or there to pay for Botox (I need to let the filler dissolve anyway) and one monthly pedicure.

Buying isn’t the problem. It’s the lack of freedom that’s the problem.

I live in a place that people save up just to visit for family vacations. Here, everything is an excursion and nothing is free.

Theme parks cost an arm and a leg. I have Universal Studios Hollywood passes (it was only $20 more to get the season pass) and I’m supposed to take my daughter in a few weeks because she was invited by a friend. The passes are paid for. But parking will cost a boatload. The cost of gas right now is a boatload (it’s over $100 to fill my SUV and I drive it on Eco mode). Food will cost a ton.

And then I’ll be the asshole mom because I refuse to buy shit from souvenir shops.

Making memories costs money.

I want to take my kids paddleboating. Cha-ching $$. That’s out.

I want to take my kids to visit my parents. That’s jaw-dropping cha-ching $$. That’s out.

I want to do a small weekend in San Diego to take the kids to the zoo. Hotels are out of my budget. Cha ching $$.

Heck, I want to take my kids to the zoo (I got the passes a while back at a discount) but the cost of gas makes it out of my budget. Cha-ching $.

I wanted to take my son to see Jim Gaffigan when he came to town. Once you add the fees and services charges…you guessed it. Cha-ching $. Out of my budget.

There was a monster truck show that looked fun but again, service charges and fees. Cha-ching $. Not happening.

So we end up staying home. Which means my kids are bored because I don’t have loads of toys for them here. I bought what I can but the goal was to go out and make memories. We don’t go out and there’s nothing for them to do here.

There’s only so often I can suggest board games. We constantly do movie nights. I want to do more cookie decorating with them but groceries are so damn expensive, that’s sadly out now too.

I signed my daughter up for a particular gymnastics class she wanted.

I’m opting for her gymnastics classes over getting preventative gum grafting (which I would have easily dropped my credit card down in a heartbeat in my prior life).

I’m so fucking angry that my life has come to this. I’m so fucking angry at my ex. I’m so fucking angry over our dead bedroom. I’m so fucking angry that I forget about his massage parlor trips because that wasn’t even the reason for me leaving.

I’m so angry that I was the controlling battleax wife when I was the one who was trying to keep the ship afloat. I didn’t have a partner. And then in the 11th hour when he tried to be better, my heart and brain no longer trusted or cared.

I’m so angry that I believed I was unlovable. That if anyone did care for me, it’s because I conned them. I let him convince me that I was deep down not a good person with good intentions.

It’s not that I think I am a good person. But it was to the point where I hated myself and didn’t believe I was worthy of any goodness on earth. He had me believing that my intentions were always bad, controlling, and unreasonable.

I just wanted a connection. I wanted intimacy. I wanted someone to believe my words and not insist every time that they knew my motives better than I did. I never said the right thing during a fight and even if I brought up something that upset me, it always ended with me apologizing to him. He always insisted that I never wanted to try or that I wasn’t trying hard enough.

Eventually, I just shut down. I had nothing left to give. I don’t know if it’s my fault for not trying more like he always said. But everything in our lives was on our plate, the only energy I had went towards the kids and friends who were needed because we had no other support system.

I felt like I was never deserving of a happier marriage. Some people get to have great lives. I wasn’t one of them. I had a shitty upbringing in a strict, violent household. My marriage was just another shitty secret unshared with the world. No one knew how bad it was.

It’s not that I played the victim. More like, I played the part. In a movie, everyone has their role. Someone has to be the one with dark secrets in her life. That was my role. End of story.

Anyone who says divorce is the “easy way out” needs to be punched in the throat. To try and improve one’s life when you don’t even know how takes so much courage and sacrifices so much.

And I realize I did it at my kids’ expense.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to live a happy life. I don’t know what it feels like to be happy for anything more than snippets of moments. In a way I’m in a whole other mode of survival. Did I switch one misery for another? Or is this still part of the transition? It’s been 9 months since I moved out. I can’t tell if the dust has settled yet.

This past weekend my kids came up to me crying again about how much their lives suck because of the divorce. I want to take their little hearts and cover them with sugar. I want to take the pain away from them.

I went to lower the AC then remembered I can’t afford electricity so I put it back up and turned on a small fan.

I want to be able to afford bagels with cream cheese again. I mean, I’m not so broke that I can’t afford one every now and then. But I’m trying to be as disciplined as I can because for me, the little numbers add up. It’s how I managed to save up enough money for a down payment on a house. And a bagel with cream cheese is almost $8 right now. I can’t justify that (why do store-bought bagels have to taste so shitty? And why does store-bought cream cheese taste like trash?). That’s $8 I need to put towards Chick Fil A for my kids.

Everything feels like it’s pending. Like this isn’t my actual life. This is just a holding cell until the final situation happens. This can’t be it. This can’t be all there is.

I screwed up cutting layers in my hair because I can’t justify going to the hairdresser and now I just keep it tied back. I’m hoping by October things will be more stable for me to afford to see my former hairdresser, who will have to play surgeon to fix this mess better than anyone at Great Clips ever could.

Fuck. I hate that my quality of life sucked because of my loveless marriage and now my quality of life sucks because of my penniless bank account.