Money can't buy me love....

When we are together as a family, it is magical. Loud, crazy, yelling, bickering, laughing whatever. Just so much energy. It happens so fast, we dont even know it.

I mostly notice it when there are other people around. I start to notice the look on their face that says " Are these people nuts?" " Are they speaking their own language?"

We are very rarely all together anymore. The two older girls are at college and the times when it is all 6 of us are few and far between.

We all talk at once yet we hear whats going on with everyone. We feed each other straight lines and laugh until we cant breathe when our punchline is returned. We make fun of each other relentlessly, not to say that it doesnt hurt sometimes, but we move on to something else so fast it is often forgotten. We are inappropriate and disgusting. I have been accused of having the sense of humor of a 12 year old boy.

It has taken me a long time to recognize how special our family is.

I always say you dont know what you dont know. Profound I know...

What I mean is that, yeah I should have known that there was a girls sporting goods Nazi who controlled the inventory and didnt allow anyone other than Port Jeff Sports to purchase pink batting helmets even though they didnt want them, BUT how could I even think for a minute there was such a thing if I couldnt even fathom such a thing occurring. You get my drift? There are things in the world that we could never explain if you didnt know it was possible. Do you think the Bushman in the forests of Africa would be worrying that an ipod would disturb the herding of the buffalo. ???? No because they never even knew an Ipod could exist in the world.

People dont know that this is what a family can be. It truly can.

For most people I think their family life is something like the family they grew up in. I know people think teenagers should be rude and bad and that terrible twos is a definitive moment and not just a suggestion.

I wanted to defy this. For selfish reasons mostly. I wanted to enjoy my kids and have fun with them and be able to talk to them instead of scream. I dont think its a rite of passage to drink when you are in 9th grade or be fresh to your parents at 12 years old. It is not written in the stars that way.

It is just bad parenting.

And I totally believe that Yes... children are born with different types of personalities but that is why each child needs to be raised individually. Rules and guidelines must be established and then adjusted as life goes on.

Most people are overwhelmed in our presence. Either that or they cant get enough of it. I think most of daughter #1's friends appreciate us way more than daugther #2's friends. They come from normal 2 parent households. They have always hung out, quietly observing, not sure if they should or could join in. They mostly just sat by and watched. It was way too scary to jump into the ring with Mike Tyson. He may bite your ear off.

We are our own table at weddings and parties and its not that we dont want to socialize with others, its just not a neccessity. We are our own team.

At the beach, we would be building a sand castle and that lonely only child would come over and want to join in. Daughter #4 was usually the most welcoming to this because she never had a younger sibling to boss around. But they never lasted long because we have an unspoken language among us. Mind powers, daughter #3 calls it. I say ok dont bring this up at this party or whatever and she is like "send it to me with your mind powers". It is intimidating to outsiders.

That is how we won a game last week, when she made one move to act out the clue and I screamed " EASY BAKE OVEN ". It was the mind powers.

I digress.

My point is that we may never have had a lot of money, but that didnt stop us from enjoying each other and having a lot of great times. Hubbys cancer changed our outlook on money. And left us with hundreds of thousands of dollars of bills and debt, because we charged the mortgage and our food so we could eat.

At some point in 2000, I went back to work and things were good for awhile. We had 30,000 dollars in the bank and I weighed about 138 lbs. Wow things were good. But then hubby was laid off in February 2001 the day before his 35th birthday.

And we started from scratch again.
With bills and debt and uncertainty.

It would be cliche for me to say, well we still had each other, but until you have gone through cancer like we did, you will never understand. We really did have each other. And when we couldnt go on vacation like the other families, hubby would take a day off of work and we would go bowling in the morning, eat at mcdonalds for lunch, go to the movies in the afternoon, play miniature golf and then have ice cream sundaes for dinner. It was fun. Realy enjoyable fun.

Those moments are some of the best in my memory. It didnt take a lot of money to have fun and enjoy each others company. We did that at our kitchen table which is the center of our home. We sit around it for hours and laugh and debate and of course, you know, eat. We have game playing marathons of cards or on the really long days Monopoly. And then we eat again.

I have worked really hard to make up for the fact that we certainly arent wealthy. At certain points in our life we have had more money than we do now but I have tried to just keep living like we always do. Just getting by with what we need and realizing the rest is just designer crap and empty "trophies".

I guess I never realized that it is hard for my kids growing up in a place where some of the kids get Hummers on their 16th birthday. We chose to live here because we wrongly thought the school district was a great place to raise kids. It is a safe, healthy environment and that is what we wanted for our kids.

yeah we could have had a pimped out camaro for each of our kids if we lived in Selden where we grew up. ( although sadly hubby and I were the poor kids in that town too) But we wanted to be able to leave our door unlocked and not worry about our car being stolen out of our driveway. Twice. ( long story for another time)

I charge things. I have been known to charge lots of things. Although when we get the 30% off Kohls coupon I choose to look at it like not how much I charged but how much I saved. ( we saved over 200 dollars on our last visit) hopefully you are not good at math and are not sitting there thinking, crap, if you saved 200 how much did you spend. Never Mind!!

I will be paying off charge cards probably for the rest of my life, whether that is 40 years or 40 days. It doesnt really matter.

You cant charge memories and enjoy them later when it is more convenient. It just doesnt happen that way. So if I insist that we all participate in something it is because that memory is worth more to me than getting a half of a percent interest if that money was sitting in the bank.

And you dont learn that when you are 13 or 15 or even in your 20's because life is uncertain. And at your age you think it will be here forever. And I hope it is, but you never know when a wrench is thrown into your life plan. Life is short... a borrowed dollar today may be the only thing you have in your memory bank for tomorrow.

Hubby was laid off in February 2001. Prior to his being laid off from that company, every Tuesday morning he had a meeting at the World Trade Center. At 9 am.

September 11, 2001 was a Tuesday. And at 8:50am lots of people lost their lives. do you think it mattered one bit to their families if they had charge cards that they needed to pay off?? I doubt it one bit. The memories they had were all that was left. Most didnt even have bodies to bury.

Things happen for a reason and you can never be sure when this might be your moment to make one last memory. Money is paper and metal and can never buy me what I treasure most in this world. It may have been important to me once.

I will never make that mistake again.