The Give and the Get

It's been almost a month since my last post, and what a crazy month it has been. My baby graduated high school and left immediately on a choir tour through Philadelphia, PA, and returned to start working her first job. My oldest started a new job and a new relationship, and I, myself, am rehearsing for a show. Life has been hectic to put it mildly! I don't think I'm alone when I say that when our lives are rushed we tend to be a little more stressed. We're rushed from here to there. We don't take any time for ourselves, and the end result, for me, anyway, is irritability, and, frankly, I get bitchy with most of the people around me. I mentioned that my youngest graduated high school. This was certainly a happy event in our lives and cause for celebration, but it also brought with it anxiety. I have known this day was coming, and have dreaded it because along with her graduation from high school came the end of her child support down to the fact that the last payment for June was prorated because she graduated 3 days before the middle of the month. Forget the fact that she still lives with me. She will be living with me as she pursues an education in the fall. I would never kick her or her sister out of my house. But the law says 18, so in their father's eyes, his responsibility has ended. This is not a diatribe about the much needed reformation of child support laws. I only pointed that out to paint the picture of the mood I have been in for the last month. I have really been down, for lack of a better word. I saw something today on social media that really made me take a step back. Briefly, it shows a young man asking people in a pizza place for a slice of pizza because he is hungry. He's not dressed particularly shabbily. He just looks like a regular kid. I will say he's a little abrupt in the way he asks, and the two people they show that he approaches tell him , "No." The next part of the video shows two other young men approach a homeless man on the street and present him with a full pizza. He thanks them, and they move on. The same young man from the restaurant then approaches the homeless man and, again, asks for a slice of pizza. The homeless man shares a slice with him without hesitation. He truthfully has NOTHING except the clothes on his back, and he shares with a total stranger expecting NOTHING in return. Two statements are superimposed over the video, "We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give." Seeing a man who had NOTHING  give so freely really made me re-evaluate the way I look at things. I often think I barely have enough money to pay my bills and eat. How can I give what I don't have? Now, I am not one to compare suffering. I think it's wrong. Suffering is relative. If you are hungry and have nothing to eat because you didn't grocery shop this week, it does not make you less hungry because I remind you that there are people who are starving and have no money to buy food. It may make you feel bad about complaining, but it does not change the fact that you are hungry. Seeing this video didn't change the fact that I am struggling financially and wish there was a way to crawl out from under bills. It did however make me see my struggle in a different light. It made me appreciate the countless times I have been helped by family and friends and even strangers. It made me realize that it isn't always about running around and working myself to death for the getting. LIFE is about the giving. I guess you could say that my financial life is a struggle because I did make my life about giving. I am sure there are a lot of people who would look at my life on paper and see that I have been single for 16 years and think, surely you should have been able to "move up" in those sixteen years so that life at 50 would not be a struggle. And.....if I had made my life about getting for those 16 years, I probably would be at least comfortable right now, if not a little ahead of the game, but I didn't. I made a commitment to giving my time, as much as I could, to my children. That meant taking the jobs where I didn't have to work nights, the jobs where I was off in the summer with them, neither of which pay a very big salary. And what have I gotten in return? A LIFE! A life full of love and beautiful relationships with both of my daughters who have grown up to be amazing young women, something I'm not sure would have happened if I had spent all of my time getting instead of giving. It's just like the story of the butterfly. Without the struggle, the beauty never materializes. Did I like struggling? No. Am I glad I struggled? Yes.