The Shift

The American Dream....

You eat your vegetables, go to church on Sunday, get good grades....
You get a degree or a job, meet "The One", get married, have 2.5 children....
You buy a house, pay for little league, braces, birth control....
You keep up with The Jones'.
You plan your retirement, save money for "later", work your ass off for 20 years and then retire to Florida to live out your Golden Years and enjoy the "fruits of your labor".


Yeah?  Maybe for Mom and Dad of the 1950's.

This is how it went down for me:

I ate my veggies.
I got married my best friend.
Had four beautiful kids.
Everyone was in church every Sunday, active and faithful.
Paid for Little League, braces and birth control (my own).
Bought two homes,
Survived two corporate moves,
Never missed a mortgage payment of property taxes.

I even had dogs and a station wagon.

I was living the American Dream, right?

Right.

That is until the company that my husband worked for 15 years and moved us twice closed unexpectedly and really changed the canvas of our lives forever....add that to the housing finance fiasco and we took a hit that, honestly, I didn't think we'd come out of. We lost the home we raised our family in to foreclosure.

Read without prejudice, because we weren't one of the many "underqualified  borrowers".  What happened to us put us in a very interesting niche.  We didn't qualify for any aid in saving our house like you heard many others did. Why?  Because we weren't "upside down" on it.  We never missed a payment and we were never late on property taxes.


Indy Mac sold our loan to a bank called Equine.  Equine did not honor the terms of the loan we had made with Indy Mac and refused to work with us.

Yes.  THAT HAPPENED.

In a desperate attempt to find a way to keep our house, we hired a lawyer to block the sale of our home each month to buy us time.  This was not a cheap service, but we did it. What choice did we have?  Until one month the lawyer MISSED the sale date to block and the house was sold.

GONE.

It has been almost three years and we are STILL trying to recover.  We went through our savings trying to save the damn house....my husband was unemployed and working part time jobs. I was doing my best to take care of my kids, work as a Personal Trainer and Group Fitness Instructor (which, by the way, pays next to nothing.  It certainly doesn't pay any bills). 

My husband is STILL working only part-time, because that is how companies do it now to save on benefits.  I interviewed for two years for full time jobs I am MORE than qualified to do only to see them handed to 20-somethings. Something else companies do to save money, because youth is ignorant and you can't push a 50 yo around too much. Yes, ageism is real.  You can argue my opinion, but you cannot argue my experience.

So what do you do when you literally come to the end of your rope?
Well, you can:

1) Let go

2) Tie a noose and hang yourself.

3) Or make a Shift and see it as an ESCAPE.
An escape from limiting beliefs and what society sees as "acceptable".
You take complete control of your shit and own it....and then do something about it.


The world owes us NOTHING, people will hurt you and break promises and the government sure doesn't give a shit about my house or my kids (the auto industry, though......)

Letting Go and The Noose were never an option.  I have beautiful children who need their momma AND I still have A LOT to offer.

There had to be a Shift.

...and so I shifted from doing everything that was expected of me as a "productive citizen" (The American Dream crap) and said:

FUCK the house.
FUCK the jobs.
FUCK the Jones'.
FUCK The "American Dream" that we've been force fed through TV, newspapers, magazine, Church and good ol' Mom and Dad.
FUCK what's expected
FUCK society and it's norms
FUCK ALL OF IT because it can disappear in an instant.

IN AN INSTANT FOLKS.

Right here...in My Life....There's a New Sheriff in Town.
I'm defining My Life from now on.  Don't like it? Don't care.

It's Time for The New American Dream.