It's not what you think. I don't mean I was propositioned for sex. Unless you count my husband. I mean, my mom made the deal of the century for my family and I.
Let me start at the beginning. Bear with me, as this may be a long story by the time I'm done. My husband Scot and I once moved to South Carolina where his sister lives with our oldest who was 3 and our 2nd who was 6 months old at the time, in hopes of making a better financial life for our little family. That didn't work out so well. We were worse off than before we left Connecticut, financially. And then after a few months, and missing Christmas with my family and New year's AND my son's first birthday, I was suicidal. I also found myself pregnant with our 3rd child because we were epically stupid and didn't use birth control. So that February of 2005, we took our tax return, rented a truck, bought a mini van, packed ourselves up, and came back home. We stayed with my mom for about a month in her tiny 2 bedroom apartment that she shared with my 2 youngest siblings. That was rough!
Finally we found a really great place that we shared with my dad. Things were going great for a while. Then we got a mice infestation and the cheap ass landlords wouldn't hire a real exterminator and got their lawyer to lie to the Dept. of Health so there was nothing we could do but move. I was not about to stay there with mouse shit everywhere, dead mice on my now 4 year old daughter's bedroom floor, with a 2 year old and a 1 year old. And guess what? I was pregnant again. Can you say STUPID??? EPIC, what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-us stupid. We had condoms, but one night Scot just didn't put one on and I looked right at him, dead in the eye, and said, "You do know this means I'm pregnant right?" Of course he blew it off as nothing until the next month rolled around and I didn't get my period. I'm getting off track though. My point is, we HAD to move. It was now a severe health hazard to stay in that place. So what do we do then?
Well, my mom's upstairs neighbors moved out so there was an entire 2 bedroom apartment for rent. With the landlord's consent, we moved my mom upstairs and we moved in downstairs with 3 kids and one on the way that we never even told them about. Legally we didn't have to tell them. Things were good for a while. The rent was cheap, it included heat. Then the health problems hit me. I found out I had thyroid cancer. Pretty advanced. I had a baseball sized tumor on the left side of my thyroid that started to infiltrate blood vessels. I'm happy to say 7 years later I am cancer free though! But I'm getting off track again. I warned y'all that I do that!
We started having problems with the landlords not fixing things around the house. The electrical wiring was shot. The walls were crumbling. The bathtub was falling through the floor. They just kept sending "John" their horrible handyman to "fix" things. Finally we had all had enough. My mom started looking into buying houses to get us out of there. She just needed to clean up her credit just a hair more to get the loan she needed. So she moved in with us and gave up the apartment upstairs apartment so she had the money to clean up her credit. Then one winter the landlords dropped a bomb on us. They had moved to Georgia and one day I get a phone call from the wife saying they were no longer going to buy oil to heat our 3 family house that shared ONE furnace! Excuse me? Fuck you! So we stopped paying the rent. I knew the eviction papers were coming. A month later we found a new place to live and we got the hell out of dodge.
That new place to live is great. It's where we currently reside. My mom had her own part of this huge house and we had the rest of it. The only problem is that it's extremely expensive to live here. The rent is $1,900 a month. The electric bill runs anywhere from $230 a month to $500+, depending on what time of year it is and if we have air conditioners running. Luckily there's no gas in this house. The furnace heats our hot water and it's well water so there's no water bill. But the cost of heating oil is not exactly inexpensive right now. Which leads me to my next paragraph. I have to back track a bit.
For a while I had temporary guardianship of my sisters 2 children and they lived here with us. But it was only supposed be for a couple of months, which turned into a year. Our landlord didn't want that many people here anymore and gave us until September 2014 to get my niece and nephew out. My sister, a single mother, had nowhere to go with them so my mom, who was finally in a position to buy a house, went and bought a house. She thought she was going to have to take over guardianship of the kids and move with them. But my sister and her current boyfriend (not her kids fathers), wound up getting their own place finally. So my mom went ahead and moved into her new house. But that left Scot and I in a really big bind. We can't afford the rent by ourselves at all, let alone the exorbitant electric bill and oil every month throughout the winter (only every 6 weeks in the summer, or so), on top of our vehicles, our phone bill, car insurance. All the every day things we need for our kids. Oh by the way, we now have 5 children. But baby #5 was a truly honest oops. I got pregnant from complications of medications and health issues related to the cancer I had.
My mom said she would pay her half of the rent for this house until we got our 2015 tax return so we had the means to move into something we could better afford. And then my baby brother moved in with us, in place of my mom. But he can't afford what she was paying here. She's a nurse. He builds office furniture for $12 an hour. So my mom is currently still paying $350 a month of our rent but Scot and are are struggling with our portion, the electric bill, the phone bill, our car insurance. Right now my van is not registered. I have to pay my city property taxes before I can reregister it. So yes, I've been driving it illegally. SShhhh. I know I just posted that for the whole damn world to see. Oh well. There's just not enough money for everything. With my continuing health problems, and having 5 children with no way to pay for childcare, I can't work to help support our family.
I knew my mom wasn't going to like living alone for very long. She's lonely. She's also now struggling financially because of her new mortgage, her continuing to help us with our rent, and all her expenses (she totally has way too many credit cards, I may have to reign her in a bit financially haha). So yesterday she made me the Ultimate Proposition.
Here's the deal... When she dies, I get her house. Not my brothers. Not my sisters. I DO. I'm the only level headed one of us that can even take care of a house and final expenses and her life insurance policies, etc... So I get the house. She doesn't want to live alone anymore. She was planning on renting out 2 of her rooms to someone to help financially and so she's not alone in the big ole house of hers. But she REALLY doesn't want to rent to a stranger and frankly, I don't want her to either. I'm fearful of that and it'd be awkward going to visit my mom knowing she's got someone living upstairs in her house. We had a nice long talk yesterday about all this. Here's the deal... She offered her entire upstairs to me and my family for $1,000 a month INCLUDING EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING. If we want cable tv we'd have to pay for that ourselves cuz she's happy with her Roku and Netflix and Hulu. And of course our cell phones. But this would mean financial security for us and her. It would mean going from wondering where the fuck we're going to come up with $300 for the next oil delivery because we're going to run out and have no heat or hot water, to never having to worry about that again. It means only having to save $250 a week to give to my mom, not some landlord who doesn't like fixing his properties up, instead of scrambling at the beginning of the month to come up with the $950 that is our share of JUST the rent for this big awesome house we live in now. It means never having to move again unless, God Forbid, the house burns down. Even my brother can come. She offered to build him his own little space in the basement. She's got a 3 tiered back yard. The neighborhood is fabulous.
There's just one catch. Her town's high school does not have color guard. I'm afraid it would devastate my daughter to move away from here. So what do we do? Struggle financially, be under so much stress Scot and I are at each others throats, and STILL possibly lose what we have here because we just can't do it anymore (after March my mom isn't helping us with the rent anymore, she just can't)? Or break our almost-14-year-old daughter's heart? I know you're thinking, she'll get over it. Financial security is the most important thing in this world we live in right now. I know. God do I friggin know. IF, and only IF, we go through with the move, it wouldn't be for at least 6 months or more. We have to build a room for my brother. We have to winterize one of the upstairs rooms to make it a bedroom. We have to put in new flooring in one of the rooms the old owners cats ruined by using the carpeting as a litter box. Also, I'm not ripping my kids out of school mid-year to start another school and take Amanda (my 13 year old) away from color guard right this instant. We did that when we moved to this house and I wont do that to them again. The move would be during the summer when there's no school to interfere.
So what do you think? I really would appreciate opinions, realizing that yes, they're just opinions, and that my husband, brother and I need to figure out what the best decision is for us and our family. But I'd still like to hear from you.
Feel free to share my blog with everyone you know. Share it on facebook, Twitter, your own blog, wherever. I don't mind. I just started this up and have nobody to read what I have to say yet! Thank you for reading this though. Really. Thank you. And please, get used to really, REALLY long blog posts. The writer in me just doesn't know how to keep anything short and sweet. Also, I'm Italian and I talk A LOT!
~Rosie
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