It Makes Me Sound Spoiled, But I Admit...
I thought life would look differently by now?
When we first moved into our small, fixer upper home 10 years ago, our electricity bill was about $70 a month. It’s now almost $200 a month for an 800 square foot home. 10 years ago the groceries for our family of two were about $80 a week. Now it swings between $150-200, depending on what we need that week. We haven’t even had any big life changes, like adding to our family, and almost all our fixed expenses have doubled.
I know that I’m lucky. Lucky to have bought our home when we did. Lucky that my partner recently chose to retrain and go into a higher paying field. Lucky that I didn’t have a lot of debt coming out of college. But in some ways it does feel like our dream of one day owning a small, country house with a little bit of acreage is becoming out of reach.
We’re making the best of things. This week we’ve been building a fence to block the new neighborhood that’s being built in the woods that were once behind our home. This year we put in a few fruit trees and cleared a different spot in our yard for our vegetable garden. Next year, if we have the money, I’ll probably turn our front yard into a vegetable garden too. (I can do whatever I want if I don’t have to worry about resale value.) But our true dream feels farther away than ever.
In some ways I feel spoiled for admitting to wanting more. Despite a natural disaster, our home’s value has doubled in the past 10 years. But so has everyone else’s home, so we can’t afford to move either. We have some great neighbors, but we also have some terrible ones who don’t cut their lawns, have 10 junk cars and keep dangerous animals.
This is the part where I’m supposed to look on the bright side. (I have a home! It’s a beautiful home! Every home has problems!) But I want to let you know that you’re allowed to mourn a dream, even if it makes you feel a bit silly or spoiled. We don’t always have to be comparing and minimizing our problems or traumas to make them valid. You (and I) are allowed to be disappointed that our lives aren’t what we thought they’d be.
Now onto everything I spent in July!