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 depressive episodes 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 in a straight marriage.

Then when I least expected, in February of all months, while enduring a cluster of snow and ice storms that closed schools for two weeks (every single parent’s dream), an adorably boyish queer asked me out on OK Cupid. She lived an hour away and was also a single parent who shared custody of her son with her ex-wife who lived in the same town. Shelby was the gayest person I’d ever dated, or as she described herself, “the dykiest dyke you know.” She looked like Shane from the L-Word, came out in the 1990s, had a donor-conceived child with another woman, and was OUT OUT in every context of her life – at work, in her giant southern mostly-conservative Christian family, at her kid’s school, and throughout the community she lived in. I, on the other hand, was still figuring out my queer style and gender presentation – somewhere in the both/and territory between butch attitude and a pencil skirt – and was not even out to my mom. I managed my anxiety about whether I was worthy of dating someone as experienced and confidently gay as Shelby by showing up to our first date 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. If I didn’t quite feel queer enough, I was damn sure gonna look queer enough. As I pulled into her driveway, Shelby’s dog ran up to my car barking protectively and I stepped out into our first meeting irl and said, “This is how you greet me?” in a tone that I thought was playful but was probably terrifying.

I can be scary when I’m scared of not being enough. And of barking dogs.

Thankfully for me, Shelby was as disarming as I was armored. She greeted me wearing perfectly faded ripped jeans cascading into weathered Frye engineer boots with a worn long-sleeved white thermal shirt under a patterned short sleeved button-up with a casually knotted plaid tie and guy-liner. 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. Shelby touched the softness beneath my armor, or as she later put it, my hard candy shell. She had that effect on most people.

There’s a lot more to this story, but I’ll cut to it – we’re married now. <3

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 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.

With low expenses and a high combined income, we started planning some home renovations. We both needed home offices and studio space and we had three neurospicy 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 for me. 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 uncertainty and risk of being scrutinized by my peers and judged worthy – am I enough? – amplified the anxiety I’d been trying to outrun for years. My mental health started fading again.

I recognized the familiar symptoms of depression returning and started therapy and a new medication in January 2020.

Meanwhile, 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 have struggled for decades with tenacious substance use disorders. (Side note – being the high-functioning super hero in the family for so many years kept me from seeing how much of a problem my drinking and spending were becoming. More on this to come.) By the time Emmy joined our household, 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. Instead, COVID happened. Thank God for the online teaching experience I gained in my second job, which made the transition to remote teaching fairly seamless for me. I was grateful for the slow pace of early quarantine and the chance to be still, which I desperately needed. The time at home along with therapy and medication, slowly helped me begin healing from burnout and depression.

From there on out it was smooth sailing and we lived happily ever after. I. Wish.