I "only" work part-time. I work twenty hours one week, twenty-four the next. I have at least a forty minute commute each way. I leave for work about twenty minutes before my daughter's bus comes to take her to school, and get home a little more than two hours before she does, if I don't have errands to run after work.
I am lower management at my company, but again, only part-time. This means that if I want to provide my daughter with certain things, I need financial help. This also means I need to figure out what the hell to do with her in the summer when she's not at school but I'm at work.
So I applied for financial aid through the local YMCA.
And I was given a 60% reduction in costs for all programs EXCEPT summer camp. Unless I applied for and was either accepted or denied help from a local child care subsidy organisation. But I don't work enough hours (and can't work enough at the job I have) to qualify for their regular support, and don't know if they are getting the summer camp subsidy again this year.
I spent two hours this afternoon crafting a 24 page application for a subsidy I won't get, so the YMCA can tell me if I can get a reduced cost on summer camp.
Oh and 60% off still means at least $1,000.00 this summer for camp.
And the best part of all of this is that I am supposed to claim child support for all these applications, but my ex-husband is literally on the run, camping in Florida, so he doesn't have to pay. His assets have been frozen (but there aren't any) and now there's an order to seize assets, but he's gone. He hasn't contacted his daughter in over a month and yet I get penalized because there's an order of support.
How much support? Five hundred dollars a month.
He's given up his child, for five hundred dollars a month.
And I can't get her into summer camp.
This is my divorced life. Sometimes, I really fucking hate it.
So in the midst of this long as hell application writing, I vented to my father and there were tears. He barks at me "Why are you crying?" because any time I do he gets mad.
I'm crying because I'm angry. I am fucking pissed that every single time I have to fill out one of these fucking applications I have to explain, again, that my child's father has forsaken her. Has given her up so he can find "his healthy path" living like a feral animal in the wilds of Florida.
I'm crying because I hold it together every single day and wonder if I will ever find a partner who loves me in spite of this shadow of filth that hangs over me and makes me crazy.
I'm crying because I want to love and be loved and I have a beautiful daughter who is on Adderall and Prozac in the first grade.
I'm crying because you're my Daddy and I should be able to cry to you when I'm overwhelmed.
I managed to say some of that out loud and quench the tears before they really started and he seemed to get it. But who knows.
I shouldn't cry.
