Poverty to Live

For over a year my husband spoke of nothing but how we could be saving so much money if only we would move out onto his Dad’s raw land. We can’t work on building anything if we are not out there! he would repeat. We’ll never save any money or be able to buy building materials living in town! he would lament time and again.

I prayed on it a lot. I tried to listen. I am not a Church going Christian. I try to shut up and listen to the Creator tell me what needs to be done. When shit hits the fan I wonder if I was deluding myself into thinking the Creator spoke to my heart and I was only following the path of my ever failing human design.

I felt I was supposed to go there. Support my husband in that way. But now there are ever more problems looming. My husband refuses to plan. Does not believe or cannot comprehend the idea of CYA (Cover Your Ass). Pre-planning is something he refuses to do because he holds the firm belief that none of his plans ever work out as expected. He makes no room for change. Often, if I step in with suggestions he explodes in a temper tantrum because now I am telling him he is incapable, useless, a failure. I have had to, at times, go ahead and do things as I knew they would work and this angers him. Whether it angers him because it works for me or just because I didn’t do it his way I don’t know. The arguments have become frighteningly domestic. Over three arguments he punched or kicked seven holes in the hollow core door we have between us and the cold. I have at him for attacking our children’s home. One time I took all the money from their piggy banks, packed our overnight bags and was going to head down to see if relatives could take us in until I got us on our feet again. But I don’t want to become a burden to them and I didn’t know if the women’s shelter could house me and four kids. I didn’t want to be in the damned shelter anyway. His sister was there once and she showed him where it was. I had nothing. I have nothing. Without someone to watch my kids I can get nothing. My Uncle has told me to contact him if I need help before, but his health is not good and I am a burden. I and my children are a burden. So I did not leave. I told him if he wanted me to stay he would agree to couples counseling. He bitched and moaned but said I had to find someone who would work around his graveyard work schedule. It has been three months and I never even bothered to make the call. Why? He doesn’t want it, it will do no good. I told him if he continued to smash things when we fought I would leave and take the kids to the shelter.

This makes me the evil one in his world, the bad person. That I would Take His Kids So He Could Never See Them Again. Fucking drama. I refuse to let him hold the power of terror over me. I will leave him before it erupts in war because there are days I think I could really hurt him when he gets like that but for the sake of my kids I can’t. And for the sake of our kids, he needs to grow the fuck up and stop throwing an infantile screaming temper-tantrum shit fit every time we disagree.

I worry that I will have to build the house and care for the kids while he works. I watched him build the addition onto the camp trailer we are living in. The roof isn’t even attached to the walls. There is plastic sheeting between us and the gusting winter snows that come in the gaps between the two by fours. The ceiling is only partially insulated and all the paper is still exposed because we ran out of money to buy plywood. He refuses to use sheetrock. He got angry with me because I insisted on building the floor on treated posts instead of right on the dirt. Threw his measurements off he said. The OSB board should have been covered in tarpaper at least to keep the moisture out but it’s not. Now the snow is piled against it and the rotting begins. Everything he builds is cobbled and slapped together, crooked, incomplete.

I had a dream of building my own home when we moved out there. But the home I had in mind and what my husband’s ideas are far different. I didn’t expect a palace, but a solid house with finished walls an ceilings isn’t exactly palatial. I had a vision of trying to eke out a miserable existence in these piece of shit falling downs shacks.

What is the lesson here? Right now we have no amenities. No electricity save what the generator can give us the rare times we have gas for it. No running water. Twelve miles to haul water unless we haul it in gallon jugs in backpacks across the train trestle. The trestle that is posted with No Trespassing signs.

After weeks and weeks of sleeping in her car on the property last summer his Mother acquired a two bedroom fully self sustaining trailer. Propane appliances and lights. Water tanks. Deep marine batteries for power. The guy she bought it from was supposed to pull it up the steep switchback driveway and get it set up for her. Instead, he got it stuck in the steep switchback driveway and because he had a guy coming to buy the tractor he was pulling it with, he left it, stuck in the mud in the driveway, totally blocking it. Before he left he re-opened the old back road coming in off the Forest Service property so we could drive up. It stayed there for about six weeks until my husband had time to get the old 50s era D8 Caterpillar started. He got that trailer pulled in. We had our driveway back.

But his Mother got another two bedroom trailer for free and wanted that up there too. For storage they said. Or maybe for us to live in. There was no room to put it anywhere with the plethora of junked cars, but they had to have it anyway. Save us all money on storage they said. His Mom paid a guy $150 to rent his heavy duty truck to pull it in from town and his cousin with the CDL to pull it.

The cousin with the CDL pulled it right into the hole the previous trailer had been stuck in and there it sat. When my husband got the Cat started to pull it out he threw the track off backing up and there it sat. There they both sit, actually. Though the Cat is fairing better in the three feet of snow than the trailer has. The trailer was pitched at a severe angle sideways downhill and with the snow weight on it’s walls has now folded over like a fucking cracker box. Flat.

With the track off the Cat we had no snowplow. His car was snowed in first then on Christmas Eve, coming home, I knew we were in trouble with the amount of snow when it began blowing up over the hood of the Ford Explorer to coat our windshield. We got over a foot of snow in one night. The hole my car got stuck in coming up the drive kept it there until we got someone to plow it out, but it may be the fuel pump is frozen because it won’t start. We have to walk the trestle any time we want out now until, well, spring maybe. Who knows. Our woodshed is emptying and his Mother’s boyfriend comes down and helps himself to our wood. Doesn’t get any for us, though my husband cuts all of his (I refuse to help him. It would be different if he helped us but he doesn’t). All of his Mothers too. When she’s there, which she hasn’t been for weeks and weeks.

So much is broken.  I don’t know if when or how it will be fixed or if it is fixable.  This is a small piece of what is going on there and all I have the energy to write about right now.  I feel I am failing.  Foundering.  Drowning.  The blessings are hard to see.  My faith is shaky.   I am so tired.  So damned tired.  Stranded right now, away from my home.  Have to make the trek in tomorrow, wanted to today but husband wouldn’t get us there.  I feel like I am suffocating.  Trapped in my home, trapped away from my home.  I am getting so damned angry.  I don’t know who to ask for help.  This I suppose is the most frustrating thing of all.