Ah . . . Much Better

Purging. Great for the soul. I think I got the quite a bit of the toxic stuff out yesterday in my post about my anxieties about Jack Bauer having a job when he returns in a few months. Like I mentioned, I saw my therapist again today, and I think I worked out a bunch more.

I suppose we all have some defining moments in our lives. One of those for me was when I was about 10.

My dad was out of a job . . . again. Apparently, money was running out and my mother asked me, her 10-year-old daughter, for $150 from my savings account for grocery money. My world stopped spinning. The air stood still. I was scared and shocked and horrified and embarrassed.

I am cannot imagine what courage it took for my mother to ask, but she clearly needed to feed me and my sister, so she did what she needed to do.

Fast forward 23 years and there I was 4 days post-op from gallbladder surgery saying goodbye to Jack Bauer who was driving off to move to Westville to begin to prepare for this deployment. And I hadn't a clue about what to do with our finances; Bauer had done everything for so long, and although he tried to coach me on what needed to be done, I was not in a frame of mind to deal with it let alone manage it and make it work.

Luckily, I asked my mother (a finance person) for help. She set me up with a budget, and slowly, and steadily, I began to clear away the dust, and the preconceived notions, and dug in. I adopted an attitude that our money is the only thing that we will around to take of us in our old age (we have no plans for children), so I need to take care of it in its childhood, nurture it, make it secure, watch it grow.

I have worked very diligently and with a tremendous amount of effort to get us on the right financial road. We have a ways to go, but we are headed in the right direction.

So when you take our rocky financial situation, my childhood filled with unsteady employment by my father, my profound disposition for anxiety, and the uncertainty of gainful employment for Bauer once he returns, I think it is understandable that I have been a bit on edge about Bauer finding a job long before he gets home.

I must say that I am doing so much better with handling these types of anxieties than I used to even a year or so ago. Thank God for good therapist.