Broke and not

I really dislike living in a broken house. I hate my kitchen with its cabinet doors forever coming off the hinges; for as long as we have lived here it has been this way. One never feels quite so trapped by one's circumstances as when one is facing a huge upcoming expense and can't figure out how to meet it. So I dream of more expense, redoing my kitchen, refinishing my scuffed wood floors, painting the house, replacing the broken down living and dining room furniture, lifting up the carpets in the bedrooms and laying wood floors instead, redoing the bathrooms, yes, all of it.

This is what I'm thinking about this morning instead of contemplating how I will find a rather large sum needed for an essential thing related to my mother's estate. I don't want to fight with my brother about it. I feel us teetering on the edge of the kind of family conflicts so familiar after a parent dies. I have seen it close up again and again, the bitter rifts, and I swore that I would not let that happen with my brother and me. So even though I wish he would help me with this, maybe he simply can't, and I will have to figure it out myself. I love my brother. He has been good to me and good to our mother. I am writing this here because I want to call myself out for the resentment I am feeling over having to take this on all on my own. It's just money. Although it's never just money when you don't have it, is it?

Perhaps it is time to wade back into the waters of debt, from which I so carefully extricated myself some years ago. I'm not at the age when one should be taking on new debt. God, I feel anxious. This whole situation is making me so anxious I want to cry from sheer frustration. And yet I will walk through this. I will put one foot in front of the other and meet this. I will try to dissipate my resentment over the lack of support I am feeling in this moment from (almost) all quarters. I will try to see this differently. Here's something: My brother did take on the lion's share of expenses for our mother's care in her waning days and I was grateful to him for it. So I will do what is necessary now to puzzle out the situation and carry out my mother's wishes. And then I will move on.

On a much brighter note, last night my daughter strung the lights on our very fat Christmas tree. Her dad and her boyfriend helped her at certain points, but she was the driver of that train for sure. She refused to be overmatched by the size of the tree the men in our family happily chose. That thing takes up so much room I'm thinking of charging it rent. Here's the Snapchat she sent out. It doesn't really capture the tree's spreading width. Our darling girl is definitely the chief holiday ambassador in this household. What would we do without her? ❤️