When Ken called me two weeks ago and told me he had lost his job--where he had worked for over 12 years as our family's sole breadwinner--there was a split second when I saw our family's lives flash before my eyes. Okay, maybe it was more like a good 30 minutes, from the time I got the news, called my mom and cried and panicked, to when I gathered the kids to go and pick up Ken. Either way, it was the longest split second of my life. In it, I saw us losing everything. I saw us standing in lines at soup kitchens and food pantries. I saw us huddling in our house without electricity, burning our eviction notice for warmth. I saw us throwing all of our earthly belongings into the trunk of our car (after selling everything we could for hard cash) and striking out for the great unknown like a couple of nomads in some romantic modern-day Hollywood remake of The Grapes of Wrath.

There is no feeling quite so terrifying (for someone like me, anyway) as drifting without an anchor, especially when you have kids to feed. But once the initial shell-shock began to pass, and once we had our night of just being together as a family and reaffirming our dedication to one another, we stepped back from the giant crater that Ken's former employer left in our lives and assessed our options, and we realized that we not only had a shot at avoiding the soup kitchens, but we also had a chance to do something better and climb even higher. In the quest to extricate myself from the sinkhole of hopelessness that threatened to swallow me, I decided to view this not as a setback, but as a catalyst to spur us in the direction we'd always dreamed we'd go but never did because we were too afraid to give up the devil we knew--the job that was just barely keeping us out of dire straits while slowly sucking the life out of my otherwise very happy and lively husband.
 
It's a scary world out there for sure, and I admit that in recent years I had been isolated from it. Times have always been tight for us. The idea of a cushion seemed a fantasy as we worked to spread our tiny pat of butter over the giant slice of bread we've cut out for ourselves, but we were just thankful that Ken's steady job kept us afloat enough to stay out of too much trouble while I waited until our kids (ages 6 and 8) were in school all day so I could have the option of returning to work. I had also been working as a freelance editor to the tune of a not-quite-steady paycheck as well as working on a novel and trying to sell short stories in order to advance my own writing career with the hopes that my big break would be the answer for us all. But with these new challenges, I too have been forced to throw my hat into the workforce and see who is willing to hire a displaced homemaker/starving artist. I'll keep writing, of course. Hell, there is nothing like a whole boatload of strife to fertilize the creative growing space for someone like me.

In the last two weeks, we have seen a lot and the journey, I'm sure, is far from over. There are a lot of unemployed people out there, and not enough jobs for all of them, so the competition is going to be fierce. In the meantime, we'll be leaning heavily on family and tapping whatever resources--government or otherwise--we have available to us in order to make sure that we are at least able to maintain the very lean lifestyle we had before this even happened. I look forward to writing the post that tells the world that one of us has found a new job. I also look forward to offering my own insights to those who are going through the same struggle and sharing the resources I have found and the things I learn along the way.

I know there are a lot of you out there. I am at least heartened that we are not alone.