The Art of Being Broke

I'm convinced that being broke takes talent. Or, to be be clear, being broke and happy, being able to survive on very little and still feed your family, still keep the lights and water on, and still maintain a place to live, is an art form. Not everyone is good at it. It's kind of like writing or dance, in the sense that you can definitely teach it to the uninitiated, but the best writers, dancers, and broke people are always going to be the ones who started young, the ones who were steeped in the art at an early age.

By now, most of us have figured out that it's going to be a rough four years ahead. Already, there's massive layoffs, rumors of war, and threats to the social services that keep a lot of our people afloat. I'm sensing that a lot of us are going to have to get used to a very different standard of living than we've been used to, and I also sense that a lot of us aren't ready to do what it takes. If people were complaining about rising prices and inflation when the economy was actually growing and jobs were more plentiful, then what's going to happen when none of those problems are addressed, and millions of us are out of a job? Aside from all the government jobs getting cut, just think of all the harm to businesses and payroll when those same people aren't spending their federal paychecks any more.

For those of us who grew up poor, this is nothing new. We were so nourished by struggle meals that we consider them comfort food. To this day, I still catch myself craving a fried bologna sandwich with mustard and cheese. I'd even put an egg on it if I could afford them. A pristine yellow banana slathered in peanut butter is still my go-to breakfast. 

I'm not worried about my family. I'm confident in our ability to get by when the flow of money dries up and everything starts costing more. The ones I'm worried about are my neighbors who never had to make meal planning decisions based on coupon availability, if they planned meals at all.

I'm genuinely concerned about my countrymen who will spend the next four years putting restaurant tabs on credit cards instead of eating at home. Or the people who will refuse to back out of expensive outings or trips because they're too embarrassed to tell their friends that they lost their job or just can't afford it anymore. I'm afraid for parents who can't bring themselves to have tough, honest conversations about money with their kids, who might not even know about all the free options for family fun and extracurriculars in their cities. I'm worried about all the people in my community, regardless of who they voted for, who might take a serious financial hit because of all the changes happening now, and won't be able to adapt, because they've never had to live with less.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

So, from someone who grew up poor, who did my time as a single parent with two kids and survived without a ton of debt, here's my top five tips for being broke.

1) Frosted Flakes and Snowy Cereal or whatever grocery store knockoff are probably made in the same factory. Don't buy anything because of the picture on the box. Heck, the kids don't even need that sugar anyway, and the healthy cereals taste exactly the same - brand name or not.

2) Meal planning will save you a ton of money. You know what you can afford to buy, you don't spend on extra, unnecessary items, and you don't throw stuff out. Every meal has to be healthy, not fancy.

3) Your parents were right. We don't need lights on if nobody's there to see them. Make it a challenge to get your light bill down every month. (One exception: that AC is more vital than drinking water in the South, but if you have a smart thermostat you can just turn it down when you're gone and turn it back up before you get home.)

4) Do not put restaurant food or alcoholic drinks on credit. This might be the season you go sober. You can tell people you're fasting and praying if you want. If you have to charge anything, ask yourself if you would apply for a loan from the bank for it, because that's exactly what you're doing. 

5) Exploit every hookup you have, and hook up your neighbors as well. For the next four years, we're going to be bartering child care for hairstyling, tutoring for handyman work, and whatever skill you have for whatever service or commodity you need. Just think, after four years, our communities are going to be so tight we could print our own currency.

For those of us who grew up broke, I'm so sorry to bore you with all these things you already know, but I'm betting that some of our neighbor's need it. For those of us who might feel embarrassed or undignified by drastic economic cuts to your budgets and hard conversations with your family and friends, try shifting your thinking. Instead of thinking of it as deprivation, think of it as resistance. Personally, I believe that better days are coming, that if we can get through this short time, the country is going to hate these years so much, they'll do anything to get us out of it, including electing officials who aren't billionaires.

Until then, I'm going to live like St. Paul. Remember everybody's favorite Bible verse, Philippians 4:13? "I can do all things through him who gives me strength," right? What nobody seems to remember, though, is that Paul's not talking about getting superpowers or buying Lambos. The verse right before 13 is "I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want." Those of us who have learned to live broke, learned to enjoy struggle meals and not be ashamed to ask our passengers for gas money, we know that secret, too. And like
Saint Kendrick said, "We gon' be alright."

Don't Shake the Web

 It's been a rough couple of weeks with a lot of family drama and changes going on. As a way of processing all of it, I started listening to the audiobook of The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins. I'm still working through it, trying to get my head and heart wrapped around it, but it's got some wisdom that I've sort of intuited for some time. The gist is that we can only control ourselves, and the more we try to control others, the more stressful and futile or lives become. With that truth in full view, we stop trying to manage adults and their desires and behaviors and just "let them." If they want to do something that I think is a bad idea, then I can speak my piece and, as long as this decision doesn't affect my own life and welfare, let them. The other side of that coin says "let me," meaning that as I surrender the futile attempt to control others, I also ramp up my efforts to control my own life.

I might think it's crazy that my friend wants to go backpacking through Europe at his age, but it's not my place to control what he does. If he really wants to take that risk, let him. If he wants to go into debt, let him. If he wants to borrow a couple racks from me to make the trip happen, let me just set that boundary right there and deny his request. But also, let me consider why my friend needs this trip at this stage in his life. Let me determine if there are some adventures that I want to take before I get too old to follow that star. 

Like I said, I'm not done with the book yet, so I'm still waiting to hear where the line is between letting them and enabling bad behavior, or where to stand aside and mind my business and where to intervene with a loved one who is really headed into certain danger. The idea sort of reminds me of what St. Paul wrote in Romans 12, "if possible, so much as it depends on you, live peaceably with all." But even Paul acknowledges that sometimes it doesn't depend on you. Sometime the peace just gets broken whether you like it or not. 

Photo by Josie Weiss on Unsplash

Still, overall, I'm seeing a lot of connections between the let them theory and blended families. In one chapter, Robbins applies the theory specifically to step-parents. She uses this beautiful metaphor of the spiderweb, all dotted with dew and beautiful in the sun. It's such a thing of beauty, but also so fragile. Even the spider tiptoeing along the strands (and I'm assuming here that spiders have very tiny toes to tip with) can knock loose some of the dewdrops and create empty spaces in the web's design. As a parent - step or otherwise - in a blended family, we don't want to enter the scene with such a harsh tone or heavy hand that we concuss the whole web of the family and destroy the beauty that already exists there.

It's a metaphor that stuck with me for some time after. I kept going back over that part to make sure I not only understood it, but to get that image fresh in my mind again - the brilliance of the dew in the sun, the delicate pattern of the web, the way each of us in this newly minted family adds a strand that connects to the other strands in different ways, hard to see from some points on the web, but definitely real and important to the overall structure. The way each of us adds beauty to the family as well, with our unique points of light.

It made me look back over the last thirteen years of this blended family and all the ways we made efforts to tread carefully, from the very beginning, and all the ways we failed sometimes. We decided from even before the wedding that we'd wait to have a baby together, to try not to add more tension to the lives of our kids who might already feel less connected, to allow them to be the focus for a while. But that failed. We got pregnant on the wedding night and had our baby girl before our first anniversary, before the year had even ended. We spent our first Christmas as a blended family separated - the kids with friends and neighbors and us in the hospital trying to unwrap a Christmas baby. So, a bunch of dew drops got knocked off already. But our baby did turn out to be a blessing to everyone. She became the nexus of all our threads, connecting everyone to each other. We tried not to shake up old routines, even if it meant my new bride had to eat tacos every Tuesday for years. We tried to include their input when we had to move to a new home or change their schools. 

Photo by Pavel Neznanov on Unsplash

But ultimately, while I love the metaphor of the spiderweb, it does have its limitations. A blended family, definitionally, is really about change and growth and making new routines and relationships. Some of those dew drops might not be so beautiful once you inspect them up close, and it might take someone from outside the web, whether that's the step-parent or a counselor or trusted relative, to make us see that. It might be that a bunch of dew drops need to fall. After all, a spiderweb covered in dew drops might be beautiful, but it won't catch any flies, which is its primary function. A spider could die of hunger in the midst of all that beauty, and a blended family could die of stagnation and lack of growth in the midst of a whole lot of niceness and caution. 

It's such a difficult path to walk. On the one side, letting others - the exes, the steps, the relatives, the community - do what they want without surrendering your power over your own life by uselessly trying to control others. On the other side, protecting your children and your fragile new family from very real dangers, steering your kids through this new situation with both their respect for others and their respect for themselves intact. It might not be as beautiful as that pristine spiderweb, replete with every glistening drop of dew, and it might have a bunch of dead flies trapped in it, but even with some of the beauty knocked off if it, it still nourishes us. It holds us up and gives us a home, binds us together in new and intricate ways that we might never have imagined, and even without the sun's brilliance, it's beautiful, because it's us.