Sunny’s Very Personal Finance History, Part 2

My new single life of queer freedom was intoxicating. My initial high carried me through the first hard months of single parenting and working two jobs (I quietly continued teaching online at Florida State to make up for lost income). But slowly the stress of carrying all of it got heavier. After our first year in North Carolina the kids and I moved into a more kid-friendly neighborhood near campus where they could walk or ride the bus to school. I managed the move by myself while the kids were in Florida with their dad, and sorely underestimated how much it would take out of me. Instead of slowing down and taking time to recover, I took on moving when I was already emotionally compromised from the upheaval of my personal life and from working at a burnout pace. I drank to cope. Later that summer I experienced the first of what would become recurrent emotional breakdowns right before my period.

I also underestimated how expensive moving would be, between moving expenses and that one month where I had to pay rent on my old place AND my new place. Oh, and the summer camps I had to pay for in Florida. I scraped by with the extra income from my second job and a little help from my mom, a seasoned single parent and diligent saver. And some credit card debt. Not only that, but rent on our new place was more than our last place and I would be paying it by myself, along with my student loan and car payments. My new single life of queer freedom was giving me a hangover.

I was single for about a year when my friends helped me put together an online dating profile. It was awkward and I wasn’t getting much traction as a newly out single mom of two kids who had spent the last 15 years married to a straight, cisgender man. In the darkest February, while enduring a cluster of snow and ice storms that closed schools for two weeks, an adorably boyish queer in Carrboro asked me out on OK Cupid. She was also a single parent and shared custody of her son with her ex-wife who lived nearby in Chapel Hill. Her dating profile was almost as random as mine, but we were a 95% match on the dating questions and neither of us was having great luck meeting datable people in our own cities. She planned our first date and I drove an hour to meet her in Carrboro in full queer armor – red mohawk professionally styled, vintage leather jacket layered over a demolished vintage denim jacket, a pound of spiky costume jewelry, skinny back-zip lady-pants, and gold Doc Martens. Her dog met me at my car with ferocious protectiveness and I stepped out into our first meeting irl and said, “This is how you greet me?” in a tone I thought was playful but was probably terrifying.

She was wearing perfectly faded ripped jeans cascading into weathered Frye engineer boots with a disintegrating long-sleeved white thermal shirt under a patterned short sleeved button-up with a casually knotted plaid tie and guy-liner. Swoon. She laughed, apologizing for her anxious dog, and broke the ice by giving me a hug on the front porch with a lingering squeeze of my elbow that I could feel through my leather jacket AND my denim jacket. Fuck. There’s a lot more to this story, but I’ll cut to it – we’re married now. And Shelby still takes my breath away.

Meeting Shelby catalyzed a bunch of queer firsts: I came out to my mom, my kids, my colleagues, my students, and on Facebook. My kids and I moved in with Shelby and her son a year after we started dating, a silver lining of primary custody. Yeah, yeah, lesbian U-Haul joke, yeah. I enrolled my kids in school as a queer parent, co-parenting with my queer partner to whom at the time I was not married, and who was also not their original parent. In case you were wondering, the parent contact forms they send home with kids on the first day of school were not even remotely designed for a family like ours. I felt extra vulnerable for myself and my kids, and uncomfortably aware of the privilege of default normalcy that I experienced in my straight marriage. Blending families and being out in such a big way in so many contexts for the first time was intensely stressful for me. I was also living in limbo, away from my friends and support system in Greensboro, without a lot of time or energy to make my own friends and community in Carrboro, and with increasingly failing mental health. Three moves in three years had taken a toll on me emotionally and financially. My periods and premenstrual breakdowns got worse, and I often felt lonely and sad.

In the summer of 2017, after a year of living together, I remember being at the community pool with Shelby and all the kids and barely holding back tears while I called the women’s mental health clinic at UNC to seek help for PMDD and perimenopausal depression. I started therapy and Prozac and began feeling better after a few months, until my nightmares and diminished sexual functioning (Prozac side effects) became unbearable. I tapered off Prozac and graduated from therapy right about when Shelby lost her job. At this point our family was in a sweet spot. Our kids had settled in together and we were all happy and used to each other. I still had my second job teaching online and our living expenses were relatively low. It was tight, but I could support our whole family on my income and Shelby pivoted from a 14-year career in retail sales to get her real estate license. It took a year for her to start making money but when she did, it was life changing. Shelby proposed to me on Christmas morning, and we got married in the summer of 2018. This might have been a good time to pay off my student loan, which by then had a balance around $40k. As a former public school teacher and now a faculty member at a state university, I theoretically qualified to pursue public service loan forgiveness. I started looking into it and learned that after years of making payments, I was in the wrong payment plan and therefore not making “qualifying” payments. Well fuck that. Instead of paying off my student loan we bought Shelby a BMW – used, but still.

We paid that off and then started planning some home renovations. We both needed home offices and studio space and we had three kids who couldn’t share rooms together. Believe me, we tried, and it put our marriage in jeopardy. We got quotes to enclose our carport when an off-handed comment by a contractor got us thinking. “Are you sure you want to put that much money into this 1960s brick ranch?” We started thinking outside the box and looking around for homes that might suit all our needs for space for our kids and creative work and businesses. And we found one at the end of a cul-de-sac where a bunch of our kids’ friends lived. We refinanced our house to fund a downpayment and moved into our new place in the summer of 2019.

Our financial life was looking good at this point. I had just earned tenure. We had enough income to save easily, we paid off our credit card balances every month, we paid off Shelby’s BMW, and we had cash to do some minor home renovations in the new house. And still didn’t pay off my student loan. Whatever. Our new space was perfect. Each of our three kids had their own room, we had a spare room for a home office, and we finished our garage to make a comfortable creative workspace. As perfect as our new space was, moving again was intensely stressful. Shelby’s heavy workload meant I was handling most of the moving process along with the process of preparing our old house to transition to a rental property. Additionally, I was still decompressing from earning tenure in ways I didn’t fully realize. The stress and uncertainty of being scrutinized by my peers and judged worthy of keeping – or not – activated intense anxiety that stayed in my body for a long time. My mental health started fading again.

I recognized the familiar symptoms of depression returning and started therapy and a new medication in January 2020. Far away in south Florida where I’m from, things were unraveling in my extended family. In February 2020 my 16-year-old niece moved in with us from Miami and started high school mid-year. Addiction runs strong in our family and both her parents struggle with tenacious substance use disorders. Her grandparents were caring for her until her grandfather died in late 2019. By the time she moved in with us, I had been strategizing and coordinating legal, educational, and physical logistics under duress for months, and was not sure I could keep working full time and commuting to Greensboro. There was so much to do and I was so tired. By March I was considering taking FMLA leave. And you know what happened next. COVID changed everything. Thank God for the online teaching experience I gained in my second job, which allowed me to transition to remote teaching easily. Life slowed down in quarantine and I could be still for a while. The time at home along with therapy and medication, slowly helped me begin healing from burnout and depression.

And we lived happily ever after. I. Wish.