Being the Broke Parent
Odds are good that when planning to have a child, we all envision the best lives for them filled with all the extras we grew up with, or didn’t. We start thinking of the plans for the extravagant birthday parties, the spoiling on Christmases or other gift-exchanging holidays, the trips to Disney or Six Flags, summer vacations and the like. That’s all fun and good, but what happens when life flips the script and you get caught on the receiving end of being a broke, single parent?
This is something I’ve got extensive experience with over the course of the last 9 years due to no one’s fault but my own. See, I come from a background of being an artist; a starving artist, a struggling artist that spent what should have been my college years traveling the country with various rock bands sleeping on floors and panhandling for cash. From that, I self taught myself photography, and while I’m not bad at what I do, and having worked with some incredible clients and even having had a full time staff position as a photographer for several award winning magazines, I just haven’t found the level of financial stability that has allowed me to pay my bills on time while also having the capabilities of planning any sort of trips on top of the other parental obligations. The rent checks, the utility bills, the grocery checkouts, the car payments, and the rest of the financial responsibilities so many of us are strapped with have always eaten up the entirety of my paychecks before I’ve been able to provide for the fun times and the theme park trips, or sometimes even the most basic of birthday gifts. It’s been an unfortunate situation at times, but it’s also given me the chance to provide other opportunities that don’t involve the swipe of the plastic or exchange of paper currency at a register.
Despite my inability to pay for the long distance trips, the theme parks, or what-have-you, I’ve made up for by using my head and making attempts at being constructively creative with our time together. We’ve developed a set of activities that we are able to take part in and have fun with, all while getting to know each other on a deeper level without much, if any, of a monetary cost to me; success.
Every afternoon that I pick the little lady up from school during the week, we go home, assess her homework situation, change clothes, and play with our cats while plotting the rest of the day. A lot of times, weather permitting, we’ll pick a park in town to either go play on the playground or go for a long walk. I’m talking 5 miles or more around Cascades Park to Railroad Square, wandering the trails at Tom Brown, hitting the paths at Lafayette Park, or taking the scenic route around Myers Park. We’ve learned the ins & outs of the FSU campus together, we’ve wandered several of the hilly neighborhoods in town, and we’ve swung on just about every swing that our beautiful city has to offer. All the little pathways, all the swing sets, and all the workout stations make for an opportunity to start a new conversation about ‘why is this here?’ or ‘how do you do this thing?’ followed by one of us laughing at the other when we inevitably do it wrong and fall off. During our walks and in-between falling off of things, we make time for each other where there’s no internet service, no television, and no cell phone in my hand, other than when I take the much needed selfie or occasional sunset photo, of course. It’s amazing what can be learned from a 9 year old when you just let her talk. She’ll go on & on about her school day, which classes she learned what in, what her and her friends joked about that day, and while the jokes are all very elementary and usually not anything I may have an immediate interest in, it opens up the gate for honest communication, which is something I do have an enormous interest in. I’m hopeful that by opening the field to this type of interaction now, it will become more of a normal thing that continues into her tween and teen years. Wishful thinking? Probably, but hopefully not. That’ll have to be written about by future me, and I’m hopeful that it’ll be a positive writing experience whenever that time comes.
Remember that ‘no internet service’ thing from above? Right, so that all goes back to being the broke parent: I can’t afford it, so we don’t have it. That’s right, folks, no internet or television at my house. That means no Netflix, no digital babysitter, no real screen time, which all leads to no real downtime for me because it leaves me to be the sole provider of entertainment in the household, other than the 2 cats. This, as you can guess, has left me to have to become more resourceful to keep my active child, and myself, from going absolutely bonkers during rainy days or long afternoons spent indoors, so we’ve figured out some things that work for us. The main thing that occupies us these days, other than our long walks, is reading books together. Through my own recent love of reading, I acquired a library card for myself, as well as one for her, so that we can check out all of the books we want and read them as wanted over their 21 day checkout period. This has led us to some absolutely incredible times, even better conversations, as well as memories that I wouldn’t change for the world.
Personally, I became an adult before the Harry Potter craze took over the world, and as a lot of too cool 20somethings, I deemed myself to be too cool for the whole HP thing and it never caught on with me. Some 15 years later, my daughter has found herself immersed in the world of Hogwarts and everything that it entails. This left me with 2 main options:
1) I could continue to not care about it and we could maintain our separate reading times and book lists, or
2) I could meet myself in her world and we could read the books together, out loud.
Now, if I’m being honest here, at first I was a little bit hesitant about getting involved in it because even in my mid 30’s I still seem to think I’m too cool for some things, but I’m not too cool to admit when I’m wrong and here I am, admitting I was wrong. At the time of this writing, we’re halfway through the 2nd book, and we’re having an absolute BLAST reading them together. We switch off chapter by chapter reading them out loud to each other while the other reads along in their own copy of the book. This not only allows her to get more used to reading aloud in front of someone, but it gets me directly involved in something she loves, and it gives me the chance to be extra dramatic when I read my chapters and bring myself into the characters in the book, which has proven to be a ton of fun. I get to shout and use all the funny voices I’ve accumulated over the years without her looking at me like I’m a total weirdo. Fun times for us both and, like I said, I wouldn’t change it for the world.
The whole being broke & not having internet thing can be a bit of a drag a lot of the time due to the nature of so much of life being lived online these days, but having the ability to spend this kind of time with my kid has been a blessing that I didn’t even realize it could be when our internet connection first got cancelled due to non-payment all those months ago.
There are, however, a bunch of drawbacks to being the broke parent that don’t have anything to do with our lack of internet. There have been too many evenings to count where I’ve gone without dinner so that she would be able to eat, there have been weeks where I’ve had to call her mom and arrange her staying at her place for longer than usual because my power was cut off and I couldn’t afford to get it turned back on. There have been the times where I’ve felt even lower about my situation when she’s told me about the shopping trips she’s been on, the awesome vacations that her mom & step-dad have taken her on, and the cool gifts that she’s been given by everyone that loves her that really make me take a step back and dwell on the mistakes I’ve made throughout the years that have put me in these predicaments. Again, they’ve been no one’s fault by my own, and I acknowledge that, but that doesn’t do too much to make anyone feel better in the moment.
I’ve had a lot of people tell me that my child needs to be sheltered from the fact that I’m broke, that she doesn’t need to know about any of the hardships I’m faced with, but I’ve always erred on the other side of that conversation, and I feel my relationship with her is stronger because of it. She has known my struggles with money, she has hugged me while I’ve cried during bouts of unforgiving depression, and she has been the cause and creator of some of the strongest and loudest belly laughs that have ever come from my tiny frame. We share everything together. The kid is my absolute best friend and biggest supporter on the planet, and I truly believe I would be doing her a disservice to not be honest with her about the trials & tribulations that occur in this twisted game of life.
When I first found out that I was going to be a father, I was a 24 year old alcoholic that thought I had the world in the palm of my hand and that I had all the answers. The 10 years since then have, very obviously, shown me otherwise time and time again, but I’ve learned from it all. I’ve been shown the brutal truth of how life operates on too many occasions, but each time, I do my best to take the lessons I’m being taught, dust myself off and stand back up as tall as I can. Sometimes I’ve been successful, sometimes I haven’t been, but isn’t that just a part of life?
I’m still the broke parent in terms of financial stability, I’m still being offered hands to pull me up when I make my miscalculations, and as an almost 35 year old man, I’m still unsure of what my future is going to look like. But as a friend on Facebook said to me recently, with a quote from Coco Chanel, ‘There are people who have money and there are people who are rich. Matt, you are a rich father and I say that money also flows to you soon.’ and while I eagerly await some money flowing to me soon, I have got to say that, given my circumstances, I am one of the richest fathers this planet has ever seen.
While I hope that no one reading this ever has to experience being the broke parent, and that you never have to go the night without food so that your kid can eat, I do hope that you can take away 1 small point from what I’ve learned over the years, and that is how important it is to maintain open and honest communication with your kids through it all. Show them that you care about what they care about. Meet them where they are and embrace all of the little qualities that make them them.
We’ve all got our ideas of who we want our kids to be and how successful we want them to be when they grow up, but as I’ve said for years, as long as my daughter is healthy, happy, and safe, then I’ve succeeded in my role as a parent, at least in my own eyes, and isn’t that all we, as parents, can really ask for?
That’s all I can ask for and I really just hope I do well by her.
disclaimer: I am not meaning ‘single parent’ as though I am the only parent in her life. Her mom and I spend an equal amount with her, this is just my experience as a single parent.
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