September of 2008, we celebrated Emerald’s first birthday.
It flooded in Lubbock that day, so it was a small event attended by in-town family and friends. We didn’t have any money to throw a “proper” party. I made a funfetti cake that I decorated; of my many skills, cake decorating is not one of them, and it looked truly awful.
Rhonda hosted it at her place and bought a smash cake, a concept I had never even heard of. The birthday girl delicately scraped icing off using one finger, daintily licking it off. She wasn’t much of a messy girl. I was painfully self-conscious of the fact that we couldn’t afford balloons or decorations or even a gift.
I was enrolled in school again as a full-time student that semester, having a relatively smooth pregnancy comparatively. Emerald was going to a Mother’s Day Out on a scholarship at the same church whose benevolence center we had visited months before. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she and I went to school.
At the end of the school year, Michael had not renewed his contract with the school; he simply was not making enough to support a family of four on. Through the summer, he worked with a temp agency trying to find permanent placement somewhere. They got him a job working at an AT&T call center, but the position did not open up until December.
In the meantime, he managed to land a job installing hardware in classrooms all over the state. They paid well, but he was gone for days at a time, leaving me in our little apartment all alone with Emerald. I couldn’t drive--I had never gotten my license--so I was pretty much confined to wherever I could comfortably walk with Emerald in the stroller.
October was a stressful month.
The thirty-six hours surrounding the eviction were...pretty crappy. Michael had been gone for four days on a job; I had a doctor’s appointment just before he came back into town, so Michael’s grandmother (who worked on campus) watched Emerald for me in her office.
Michael came in looking devastated--while he was gone, the company had hired a full-time employee to fill his temp position; he was no longer employed.
Distraught, disheartened, and thoroughly depressed, we loaded up in the jeep to go home...and the damn thing broke down. Right there on the side of Slide Road.
His mother came and picked us up; we just had to park it and hope it would be a really cheap (preferably free!) fix. Rhonda drove us home, where we found a bright pink eviction notice taped to our door.
I mean, it is almost laughable, how comically tragic our lives had become. Maybe God wanted to completely rip the bandaid off all at once--propel us into big change, but give all the awful stuff all at once so we could get it over with. Maybe He was tempering us for the trials we were to continue to face in our lives.
Whatever it was, those two days completely and totally SUCKED.
Michael was absolutely crushed. He was the provider, a job he took so seriously; every time we struggled financially, he took as a personal failure on his part. Now he had this young pregnant wife and infant daughter whose futures were uncertain and to him, it was all his fault.
He still had the job at the temp agency, who he called several times a week, but they had no positions open until the call center in December. We dropped applications off absolutely everywhere, but this was right in the heart of an economic recession--nobody was hiring. Michael was beating himself up for not returning to the school; it wasn’t great pay, but it was at least something.
For almost three months, the only money that was being brought into the house was by my part time position at the pet store, making minimum wage.
I applied for food stamps again; Michael trying to find work with the temp agency helped a great deal; they approved us for $600 a month. It saved us--the property manager did not charge us for rent in the last month that we were there in an attempt to relieve the financial burden, so as long as we could keep the lights on, we would be golden. We had to work out a payment arrangement to get those remaining bills handled, but for once, food was not an issue.
Those three months Michael was not working would accrue a debt that would take us years to recover from.
Nearly every quad was occupied when we got the eviction notice taped to our doors. November 1st, all utilities to the building were to be cut off. Michael, my ever-persuasive and charming new husband, was able to work out a deal with the electric company and property manager that would allow us an extra week of lights so that we could move our belongings out. Now we just needed to find somewhere to live.
It wasn’t that we wanted to stay. Our time at the dark and dank little apartment was laced with disquieting moments of strangers looking in through our windows in the middle of the night, neighbors knocking on the door at midnight to see if we had any weed, news that the taco restaurant down the alley was being robbed at gunpoint. While pregnant, I had waddled across the street to get avocados (they were sold four for a dollar, and I had such a craving for them), and was backed into a corner by a strange man; I knocked over a display of cans and scootled away as fast as my cankles would allow while he was distracted. After that, I waited for Michael to escort me to where I needed to go. We never felt fully safe and relaxed there.
It was also very small--two bedrooms, one bath. I had just learned that for such little people, babies came with a lot of stuff. There were flies in the summer, the air conditioner went out at least once a month and stayed off for nearly a week every time, which was scarcely pleasant in the triple-digit days. Our “backyard” was a shared dog-run, a grassless stretch of maybe twenty feet.
We weren’t jumping up and down to stay there, but we didn’t know where to go.
The university I attended owned some houses in the area; my mother-in-law, who worked in the education department of the college, got information about a house for rent for us. It was a beautiful buttercream yellow, three-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath house with a big backyard. It was on a quiet street and boasted a giant tree that shaded the front lawn. It would cost us $600 a month, plus utilities. Barely more than we had been paying at The Dank, the name we affectionately assigned our first apartment, and it was much, much bigger and nicer, in a reputable neighborhood patrolled by the university police.
With the eviction date looming ever nearer, it was an answered prayer.
I have no idea how we were able to convince the school to let us move in there--we had no money down, no deposits, and no income, but Halloween 2008, five months pregnant with our second child, we moved into our new home.
Michael was primarily in charge of the move--I helped where I could, specifically with packing, but it fell to Michael to get everything transferred one truckload at a time to the new house.
December, Michael started at the AT&T call center. He went to training weekdays for the first six weeks, steady 8 to 5 gig. Once his schedule kicked in, it was four days on and three days off. He left at 9.30am to get to the call center across town for his 10am shift, then worked until 10pm. Work was exhausting for him, and most days we saw him only for breakfast.
They did pay him better there, and he would be able to put us on his insurance after he was finished with training, for a reasonable $50 a month; we seemed to be on an upward trend. We would be able to afford our pretty little house, our pretty little life.
One blessing that Michael and I had: we rarely, if ever, fought. Never about money. Hard to fight about something you don’t have, and our resources always went to required areas--bills and food.
Our biggest fights always stemmed from feeling unappreciated. I felt like I was home all the time, alone, trapped in the house with the baby. I was expected to go to school and take care of Emerald while he was at work, plus being responsible for all the cooking and the cleaning and the laundry and all things relating to house and child, on top of being pregnant.
There are preconceived notions, I think, about what our roles in marriage are supposed to look like.
To Michael, whose mother was in charge of all household things and whose father was responsible for the outdoor things like yard work and handyman duties, it must have seemed natural to him that I slip into that role of homemaker. After all, he was the breadwinner, and I was physically IN the house more often than he was.
I am sure that was not his actual train of thought; it was more of an unconscious expectation that I was consistently failing to meet.
My family on the other hand was more of a commune--if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat. With my father in the hospital so consistently during my formative years and my mother working long hours to cover his medical expenses and provide for the family, the household responsibilities were divided between the four children.
In the end, Michael ended up resentful and frustrated that the house was not as spotless as his mother’s had always been, and nothing was getting done because I was flailing under the insurmountable work I had laid on me.
He and I were both feeling taken for granted, him working at a job where customers are unspeakably rude and spiteful, me with how much I felt he was unjustly putting on me. It wasn’t a spoken thing; we didn’t really have a name for this discontentment that was brewing just beneath the surface of our marriage. There was so much stress in our lives living paycheck to paycheck, that we assumed it was circumstantial and not actually a fault in our relationship.
At this point, I was 21 years old, and he was 23. Emotionally, we were barely ready for a commitment of this magnitude, and we had already been married for a year. When you’re growing up, you fantasize about the wedding, but everything after is a mystery peppered with vaguely concerning Bible verses about submitting and obeying your spouse. Going into it, we didn’t know what to expect, what to do, how to make it work. It was almost like playing house, our understanding of marriage was so infantile and incomplete.
November 24th, we celebrated our first anniversary. Dinner at IHOP and eating the top layer of our wedding cake that his grandmother had so thoughtfully saved for us, we retired early so the preggo could rest.
Around that time, I had an accident at work.
--Andie
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