Making the Best of It

I’ve been hearing a lot of people expressing what I’m feeling.  “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be now. I’ve worked hard all my life, and I shouldn’t be having to deal with this.” “This” being job loss, reduced income, and financial uncertainty.

In other words, it isn’t fair. My mother always said that life wasn’t fair.  Then she made every effort to spend the exact same amount on Christmas and Birthday presents for my sister and me.  Still shaking my head on that one.

But no, life isn’t fair. Some people find their bliss in their 20s. Some people take until their 40’s and some of us spend our entire lives wondering about the what if’s.

Maybe if I’d found out earlier how much I loved writing, I’d have a best seller by now, and I wouldn’t be experiencing this economic adjustment with everyone else.  But I too am trapped in this world that we’ve created. 

We’re used to having money and spending it. We’re used to living the good life in a very consumer spending sort of way. But that’s changed.  We’re now all crunched between what money we can bring in and what money we were used to having to spend.

My parents were always cheap.  Okay, frugal. And questioned our spending habits. Yeah, Mom, we bought too much stuff, but we still weren’t as bad as some other people.  But this frugality didn’t keep my parents or their parents from enjoying their lives, friends and family. 

I remember my parents throwing dinner parties, but my husband and I always went out with friends.  My mother bought whole chickens and cut them up for the parts; I always bought the chicken breasts.  (Combine the dinner parties for 12 and buying whole chickens just to get the breasts, and you end up with a freezer full of chicken parts.) My grandparents thought a rib roast was a celebration, and generally ate less expensive cuts of meat  (remember pot roast); my family had steak at least once a week.  I didn’t even know how to cook a pot roast.

But that’s changed. We’re trapped in a world with prices that haven’t gone done and income that has, and we’re all feeling the pinch.  Right now, businesses are raising prices to cover the rents that were set years ago. But increasing prices in a down market is pretty much a recipe for disaster. In another five years, more businesses will have failed, landlords will have dropped rents and things will have, hopefully, settled out.

So, the pain isn’t over.  There will be more business failures, more layoffs, more foreclosures. Those who are barely hanging on may survive or they may give up and decide to move or declare bankruptcy. 

No, none of this is fair.  But we were living a life that was unsustainable. And now we’re paying for it.  I miss the way we used to be able to spend money. And I hope that in a few more years everything will be better.  But right now, I’m going to try to hang in there by my teeth and enjoy what I get to do now.

Throw dinner parties, cooking whole chickens and pot roasts, and save the rib roast and steak dinners for celebrations.