I remember when I was small watching a cartoon adaptation (probably Disney) of the ant and the grasshopper story where the ant spends the summer squirreling away food for winter but the lazy old grasshopper just enjoys the sunshine, then ends up in trouble during the cold bleak winter months. If I recall correctly the ant comes to the resuce and shares his supplies, the grasshopper learns his lesson and the next summer they gather food together, or some equally tidy ‘happy ever after.’ I have a horrid feeling I somehow missed the point of that tale and an even more horrid feeling that I might just be that grasshopper.
I was discussing this with my Dad on NYE actually – although he was the wrong side of half a bottle of whiskey so perhaps more argumentative than usual! I don’t know whether it is a generational thing, a sign of the huge consumer driven, buy now-pay later, because you’re worth it, very clever marketing campaigns, materialistic society we live in. Whether it is a result of 9/11, knowing too many people who were just like that ant but spent the best years of their life working, saving and seeing no reward, dreaming of their ‘winter’ retirement and never actually living to see it or just keeping up with the Jones’ I don’t know.
Me, and more than a handful of my friends have lived life so far to the full. We have earned okay money but spent a good deal more, lived on overdrafts, credit cards, many of us bought property at the right time and have been borrowing against all that bricks and mortar equity ever since. We have lived way above and beyond our means. The phrase all fur coat and no knickers could have been coined just for us.
In the last year several things have conspired to make me question this lifestyle. The first is my carefully constructed house of cards arrangement of our finances crashing around our ears with the total loss of my income and a cut in Ady’s. The decision to Home educate and therefore not make use of the free childcare that is the education system will prevent me from re-entering the ‘tradional’ workforce again in a couple of years when both kids are of school age. A very close friend is currently in severe financial difficulties – which could result in many scary worst case scenarios if the bank does not consider him a good enough risk to push more cash his way. I have ‘met’ (both online and IRL) people who I would never have mixed with before, most of whom live a more frugal, spirtitual, worthy and otherwise sensible life than anyone I have ever met before. I guess my eyes have been opened good and proper 🙂
I have no religious beliefs, I am not particularly spiritual. I believe myself to be a good person, who would help out others in need, a good and true and faithful friend, loyal and loving to my family, a supportive and caring wife, a mother who does the best I can and strives to do even better – not here to change the world, but certainly to enhance it for those who share my little bit of it. But I am feeling a bit small, a bit shallow and a bit empty really. I know our children are still very little but an episode with Davies today where he got really really upset when I wouldn’t buy him a present in Boots (yes, just two weeks after he got *that* mountain of gifts) has worried me that my attitude is being passed down to them it’s not actually that nice a reflection staring back at me.
I still stand by many of my opinions. I am glad we have spent our money (or rather the banks!) on plenty of the things we’ve done, I still don’t see the point in working hard all your life never to enjoy it and to leave it all to your offspring (my main argument with my Dad btw). I think life is for living and enjoying and grabbing all you can from. I think that for me, for the moment the gesture of giving something back by HEing the children is enough – although to some it may seem like a very little, I know to others it is a huge big deal. But I do think that at some point in the future I would like to do something for others who have not had all that I have had. I am very aware that although I have grabbed all the opportunities life has shown me there are many who were never shown any such chances to grab and maybe there is something, somehow I can do to help open some doors for people who can’t open them for themselves.
So as I sit here, looking round my house at all that we have, with my two babies who I have spent a lot of the day just cuddling and being with, in a house which is warm, sturdy and filled with love, waiting for my husband to come home for the evening and know that I have all I could ever need and more.