remember

remember what it felt like to be young and full of ideas,plans,dreams,expectations,hope...do you remember how you looked at how your parents lived and thought " I will never be like that"..I will raise my kids differently, I will decorate my house differently, I will eat differently,love differently, work differently...I will never force my kids to eat food they hate,I will never point out my daughters physical faults, I will never spend every saturday cleaning the house....I will have lots of windows and very few curtains, I will have dogs that are allowed in every room of the house, I will not own more cleaning supplies than books, I will allow my kids to be kids...in some respects I have stayed true to myself...when it comes to my kids, I have made the sacrifices I needed to make...I opted to stay home and raise them myself rather than put them in day care-it has been an enormous financial burden trying to live on one income but we managed. Was it the right thing to do? To devote my days to raising my kids...what about now...they are raised, Jill is completely independant and jenna needs very little from me...what now? I always thought that having my kids early in life was the best idea so that when they were raised I would still be young enough to enjoy my freedon, my husband and I would have plenty of time to do the things we wanted to do, now here I am.... FREE....still young but with no marketable job skills so my choices are extremely limited...minimum wage, competing with high school kids. My husband and I can't do any of the things we wanted to do because we have no money, we are still living paycheck to paycheck..we wanted to travel but we have only had ONE vacation in the past 20 years(and we took the kids..we've never been on a trip alone=sad), we wanted to renovate a dream house but we can't even afford to build a front porch on this house...we used to talk about our daughters getting married and how pretty the wedding would be...now we are hoping they elope. So what do we do?? Keep dreaming?? Keep planning? Is that what life is...constantly struggling?I am disillusioned, I am tired of the constant battle to make ends meet. There has to be more to it than this.