To Become Real

“To become a real boy, you must prove yourself brave, truthful, and unselfish.” 

― Pinocchio

                 I have wondered as of late and often voiced my thoughts and questions on a subject that has poked and gnawed at me. I have wondered when we will finally be "real people."  To me this idea of "real people" means that we wont struggle with our finances, in fact we will have enough to meet our needs and save for rainy days because we seem to have quite a few of those in our forecast! It means that we will join the land of vacations and campers and children playing sports or twirling through ballet class as they have always wanted.  I have seen these "real people." In fact I know some of them and they seem to be some of the nicest kinds of people!  I had wondered if someday a switch would flip and we would suddenly be a part of this group.  I guess I had kind of hoped it would happen that way but past experience has shown me differently.  We were on our way to being "real people" once! We were hiking that path! We had the house, we had owned three of them in fact! Not all at once but we were actually grown up enough to be aware of how to buy and sell a house! we had the nice minivan that I cleaned out once a week and drove back and forth to the store to buy the items I had so carefully price matched. I only had two kids then as opposed to my crazy 5 now but things were working and I felt like an adult.  I knew we weren't quite where some others were but we were headed for "real."
Now, after an abundance of trials we have no house to call our own.  We live in a house but it is not one that is ours and as much as we want it to be it probably won't.  We are very blessed to pay a very small amount of rent but even then, most months it is hard to pay even that. I knew things were at their worst a year and a half ago. We were as far from being "real people" as we could ever be and so I prayed. I prayed so hard and got a clear answer.  I put myself through nail technician school and it has been the best thing that could have happened to this family right now.  It helps to fill those gaps when the paycheck can't stretch any further.  I thought then that we were closer to real but we are still as far as ever.  I just wonder at our age how in the world we are going to make it to real.  My dad was 10 years away from retirement at our age and we have very little retirement to look forward to.  I will do nails until the day I die or we won't eat! It is hard to see some of our friends hitting the milestones that we so badly want to hit but are so far from but we are undoubtedly happy for them! we celebrate for them and have nothing but happiness for their success.  It is well earned and well deserved.  We have had to start over earning our "real people" status and that is discouraging but we'll get there someday, wont we?