Once Upon a Time…

…there was a little girl with freckled skin and curly red hair. She lived in a middle class home in a nice suburb with her two parents and 3 siblings. There was a picket fence around their yard. She didn’t have everything that she wanted, but she had most things she wanted and certainly all that she required. During her formative years she learned many important life lessons.

Education is important. Hard work pays. Exercising your right to vote is important. Men wear suits and ties and go to the office. Women stay home with their children. Almost everyone in the world loves Jesus, and the few that don’t are going to burn in hell unless we repeatedly remind them that they should love Jesus. Summer vacations are the norm. Someday you will get to retire and enjoy the fruits of your husband’s hard labor.

Now that she’s an adult, she thinks most of that is a crock of something she’s not supposed to say.

She still thinks education is important. She just can’t get any. She tried to go to college, but working full time and nursing between classes wasn’t working out so well. Now that she has a mortgage and two kids there’s no way it’s happening.

Hard work – doing more than is asked of you, doing whatever it takes to get the job done, excelling at your tasks, continuing to educate yourself and take on more responsibility – gets you nowhere. It gets you taken advantage of. Mediocrity is the way to go. Of course, it’s too late for her. She’s worked hard and now people expect it of her. She sees the way other people barely do the minimum and no one seems to care. But if she tries to do what she’s supposed to do and not go that extra mile, she hears about it.

Voting is still important to her. She worked hard on a presidential campaign and is tears up when she votes because she feels fortunate to get to do it. Of course, she cast her vote for the “wrong” guy as far as her family’s concerned, and things got ugly. They told her they wished she hadn’t voted. Apparently it’s only important to exercise your right to vote if it’s for the right side.

The only men who wear suits to work are preachers and sales people. Enough said.

Only one of her friends stays home with her children. The rest of them can’t afford to. And not because they live some crazy gotta-have-it-all lifestyle, but they just want to make ends meet. No one works for fun.

Most people in the world do not love Jesus. A majority of people love Allah. They think Jesus was an ok guy, but not THE guy. And she’s not convinced that they’re going to burn in hell. She’s completely confused and conflicted about the topic of religion and it’s led to a great amount of anxiety and depression. She’s pretty sure people just die and turn into dirt. And that upsets her.

The only summer vacation she took was on someone else’s dime. It was a lot of fun, but it was probably the only summer vacation her children will ever take. On the upside, she’s discovered the fun and financial acceptability of camping, something her family did only once, and failed at, while she was growing up.

She will never retire, unless you consider death retirement. Her savings account sits empty, and she’s never been able to afford to contribute to her retirement account at work. Nor has she had health insurance in the last 5 years, but that’s an entirely different topic. She will work until she’s in the ground.

She still has freckled skin and curly red hair, but she is wiser than she once was, and markedly more angsty than teenaged her could have hoped to be. She just wishes someone would have told that little girl that life was hard, that nothing was as it seemed. She wouldn’t have avoided all the hard knocks…she just would’ve been braced for them.