It’s easy to say that money’s not the most important thing in the world when you’ve got enough, but when poverty comes calling, it’s a different story. Suddenly, everything is about money even when you're trying really hard not to be dragged into a poverty mindset.
Love doesn’t depend on money
But the cost of travel has been out of reach so I haven't visited my daughter for what feels like forever and it breaks my heart.
Spending time together doesn’t depend on money
Except that I have felt so time poor because I’m scrabbling around trying to earn enough to keep food on the table, even hanging out with my daughters who still live at home is pressured.
Looking after yourself doesn’t depend on money
Except that I can’t afford dental treatment, a massage, homeopathy – the things that make me feel well and cared for.
It doesn't cost anything to be generous
But my car is too small to offer someone a lift, I can't afford to buy a gift and I'm so stretched, my creative resources have dried up and I'm not managing to make anything or give of my time.
When poverty comes on the back of a crisis, everything can feel lost.
I knew that I needed support to develop some financial savvy as I set up a small business and made plans to create a raft on which I could sail away from a difficult marriage. When there was still some money in the pot, I signed up with a financial coach. She was expensive and I worked hard to shift a terrifyingly depleted money mindset. Born of evangelical Christian teachings that I have a 'debt that cannot be paid' (except through the brutal death of a divine being), that I am a woman who, by virtue of a prehistoric sin, needs a man, etc, etc. Who knows how our inner world is furnished, but somehow, mistaken ideas about my worth and the safety of money adorned the inner chamber of my mind. And instead of opting for a refit as soon as I hit maturity, I have been busy polishing and preserving these fittings for the most part of fifty years – often without realising just how diligently I've been doing this perverse housekeeping.
When undertaking any inner work, the first thing to jettison is blame. While identifying the sources of misinformation that have contributed to the depressing inner decor can help us declutter, the blame game only locks us into the prison of our egregiously furnished cell. No matter how reprehensible the ideas that have been handed on or the treatment that has caused us to form deplorable ideas about ourselves, forgiveness is a vital first step to freedom.
For a mixed bag of reasons that combine love and fear in equal measure, I left the marriage without reparation. The years of lockdown stalled the fabrication of my life raft so it was not water tight when it was necessary for me to abandon the marriage ship completely, evacuating the marital home because its captain had decided to return, and sailing into the unknown. Becoming homeless and starting from scratch in midlife with three dependent children and an adult daughter living at the other end of the country has, I won't lie, taken me to the edge of despair. I have questioned my capacity to recover from this shipwreck, I have lamented how hopelessly inadequate the spars that remained of my raft have been to keep us afloat. I remind myself when I remember, that in the context of a happy, supportive marriage, the work I do to raise and educate my children, the little business I run that brings a bit of joy and kindness to my community and the online services I offer that contribute to the transformation of loss in the lives of grievers, would be considered enough, celebrated even. As it is, in the context of single motherhood, it's just not enough. And not being enough is a garment I have long worn and one that matches the drab interior of a mind that doesn't know how to welcome wealth.
One of the first people I called on to help me was my financial coach. In the shipwreck of my life, I had no idea how to make a sound financial decision. It probably wasn't the wisest move to part with the last of my savings at this juncture but I reasoned the benefit would be worth it. The shame of feeling this desperate triggered panic attacks that made just getting dressed and showing up in the world a Herculean effort. At breaking point, it seemed reasonable to ask the person I had paid, to hold my hand and look with a steady gaze at my circumstances and help me take one tiny step at a time. In the meantime, a friend quietly added me to the list of beneficiaries for free food deliveries and I re-organised my little shop so there was enough floor space for the four of us to lie down should we need to sleep there. A financial coach isn't a mental health expert, however, and her firm telling off that I needed to think more of myself, that others in my circumstances would move to the mainland and get a job in Tesco and rebuild from there, and that while she would help me, I wouldn't get out of the hole I was in if this is how I wanted to use my time with her, was too much. I cried the whole session and cancelled all future sessions even those I'd already paid for. In the situation I was in, it felt like a disaster and confirmation that I was utterly financially bereft – both in my capacity to earn enough or even deserving enough given that I could no more pull myself together to organise the disposal of my belongings and relocate to the mainland to work in a job that would confirm my life's works and loves had amounted to nothing, than fly to the moon.
I relinquished what remained of my raft and found myself in free fall to the bottom of the ocean. Housing eventually came my way after the charity Shelter stepped in to help me, and I shut the door behind me and cried for six months. The cumulative loss of love, dreams, aspiration, trust, time, hope and faith left me too fractured to do anything other than survive, practice breathing techniques to soothe the panic and care for my children with every ounce of my attention. Letters went unopened and bills unpaid. It’s not ideal and I’m not advocating a head in the sand approach to financial management, but at that particular juncture in my life, although the metaphor of having sunk to the bottom of the sea expresses my despair, actually sinking to the bottom of the ocean, would be a cruelty to my children that I needed to do everything in my power to avoid visiting on them. Sometimes the stormy seas beckoned with alarming allure. As a culture, we are shy of talking about poverty, especially when we encounter it in our own lives, and even more coy about confronting suicidal feelings. It's a very lonely place.
Constructing a seaworthy vessel whilst treading water is no mean feat and it isn't completed in haste. I have found a few gentle affirmations serve me kindly – I'm doing my best and that's enough; money comes and goes and it will come again, my work in the world is meaningful regardless of income. I do everything I can to recall that my worth is rooted in the divine and doesn't fluctuate with this struggle. I remind myself that this too will pass. It turns out that condescension inversely mirrors wealth, so when I am treated patronisingly, I make an effort to recall those whom I have looked down on in the past and offer them a silent apology. I also rehearse what I’m rich in – in my case: daughters; sand, living as I do by a long beach on which I walk every day; stars, thanks to the expansive night sky untarnished by light pollution; food – I’ve not yet gone a day without victuals unless I’ve chosen to fast; water that pours from the tap – remembering how I could hardly lift the empty vessel that the women I stayed with in Ethiopia would swing onto their backs brimming before they made the long steep trek home from the river makes me especially grateful for this one.
I think of the women who have experienced hardship. My daughter's grandmother is one I have often called on in my heart. I never met her, but her son told me about her and I have one precious photograph of her that reveals my daughter's heritage through a shared resemblance. She was faced with circumstances too terrible to contemplate, and I imagine her looking down from wherever she is now at a granddaughter she long pre-deceased with wisdom and love that can be our inspiration if we are able to tune into it. Taken as the second wife of a man who allowed his first to throw her out of the marital home shortly after she'd given birth, she made her way to the north of her homeland where she worked as a travelling merchant. Being in Ethiopia as a single mother makes what I have experienced look like child's play, not least because when her son was just 5 years old, famines devastated the northern regions. At this point she made the decision to sell her child and prostitute herself so they both had a chance of survival. They did both live to see the end of the famines when thousands didn't and, mother and child were re-united for a few years until her husband summoned his son to the city for an education. Following her boy’s removal from her care, she saw him when she visited Addis Ababa once or twice a year, until she died when he was just sixteen. Her life and story suggest to me that the struggling single mother is a trope of the human condition. It's a vignette of human experience that is expressing itself in my life at the moment. Not, I am grateful, with such intensity and suffering as it did in hers. I don't need to take it personally. I don't need to dwell on the contradictory feelings I have of being both a victim of circumstances and existentially not enough to deserve anything better.
What I can do, is mindfully re-decorate the interior of my mind, discarding the drab for something colourful and joy-making. The Grief Recovery Method has been my life-vest and Decorator's Handbook rolled into one. I'm finding that money does come and go, enabling me to do the things that make my heart sing one day, and giving rise, on other days, to conditions that make me fret and worry. What I have found to be essential in riding out this particular storm, is being kind to myself as I make mistakes, and bring to peace the losses that have led to and accompany the experience of poverty.
If you are experiencing the pain of financial loss and want help, I can't offer financial advice, but I can take you through the Grief Recovery Method so that you too can find peace in unwelcome circumstances. If money's too tight to mention, you'll want to know up-front the costs. The programme runs for 7 weeks, the first week is free to give you the opportunity to determine if it's a good fit for you, each of the subsequent weeks is £60 a session. I offer a sliding scale, so don't hesitate to say if this would serve you, and I guarantee your money back if you follow the programme diligently but don't feel any benefit.
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