Sink or Swim (or Float)

Being a single mom gave me many opportunities to be both very poor and financially creative. There was always an undercurrent of impending loss in my life, anyway. I was brought up to believe that anything good, was probably too good to be true. And then, there you’d be with egg on your face, thinking that something good might actually happen, to you.

I gave up believing things being good was an impossibility, and I do hold out that life can even be mostly good. I can remember when I was first married, at all of 21, living in a beautiful new apartment complex in Edina, newly home from a honeymoon to Paris and London, and I asked Steve, “Will it always be like this for us?” I was asking him, really, “Can I finally just let my guard down and live?” His answer was “Of course.” So, I believed him for a blessed while.

And, of course, things weren’t always like that. Because things are not always like one thing or another. Things, being life, are always changing, unless we’re trying really hard not to change them, and that brings with it it’s own strangeness. That, however, was probably the last time I really believed that things could just always be really wonderful. Finances, too change. As much as we can tout financial planning, frugality and the like, sometimes things are hard, and sometimes, people who are not that good with finances seem to always have enough. Finances, like life circumstances are fluid, not set.

I’m at another crossroads, as I now know there are many in life. My small business is going okay, but not enough to support me. I still have my day job, which only partially supports me. So, in trying to explain where I’m at to someone, I simply said, “I guess I just have to wait for the universe to shift. Someone else might say, they are waiting for an answer from God, but I’m waiting for my good energy to come to fruition.” To which he replied, “God helps those who help themselves.” A saying that I’ve come to dislike, (and I told him so) as in this is a time in my life where I’m: a) too weary to help myself, b) have helped myself repeatedly to no avail, or 3) see a). I’ve been to this place before.

So, mulling this over, driving into work, I thought of the saying “sink or swim.” This didn’t seem like a good option either, when you are weary, you can’t swim, but you don’t really want to sink, either. Unless of course, you are Virginia Woolf, and that is just a sad, sad story. So, I decided to tell myself that there is a third option, float.

I noted this to my daughter, Kathleen, who in conversation, brought up the “God helps those who help themselves” adage. I told her about my addling float, to sink or swim, and she wisely said, “Well, floating is what you are supposed to do if you are drowning.”