Nobody wants to hear that the month is too long for your money. Debt is too personal, too emotional, too complicated to discuss, especially when there’s two of you involved. I have some money mum left me when she died 22 years ago, it’s my security blanket; only I can cash it. The amount matches our rapidly expanding credit card bill, and also the monetary worth of my husband's broken classic car, which is his dream.
The unsaid stuff has to be bought into the light. I no longer focus my energies on cleaning enough houses to keep the wolf from the door, now I focus on birth work, some paid, some unpaid…unpredictable, but then so’s birth. My husband turns a blind eye to my lack of regular monetary input in return for me turning a blind eye to the credit card payments which are spiralling us into enormous debt, and the car, the sale of which could save us. The discussion of these subjects means reaching into the depths, to places we don’t go, uncorking a flood of anger and aggression which is really only fear.
We talk. Cry. It’s unbelievably painful and big and awful, healing, refreshing and freeing. I love him more than all this crap anyway.
I cash mum’s saving investment thing, to pay the card. Will the money come before Christmas? I don’t really care. The tree is up, and our children and grandchildren will all be here, each will bring some food to share. I haven’t the money to pay my phone, or the gym, or Sky TV, or to drive to meet a prospective client, but what’s meant for me will never go by me. I keep a tenner for petrol for the Christmas birth client who is only two doors away but birthing in hospital, and for my clinics. Another for presents for the little people in the family. Another for bread and milk and cat food and chocolate. I give thanks for having all that I need.
I look forward to the fun and cheer, the catching up, and to slipping away from the shindig when the call comes to be with a woman as her baby begins to move from within her and another human arrives earth-side to fulfil his or her destiny on this planet.