Not quite the woman I want to be

Well, we made our rent. Barely. We didn't have Christmas, except for some presents my parents sent the kids (they didn't know about our financial crisis) and a couple of things I'd picked up before everything fell apart on us. And then we had to get a new warm coat for the teen, so that was a present, too. Not that he needed much. His mother sent him three boxes of presents the week before Christmas. He ripped them open as soon as he could, naturally.

I didn't tell anyone in my family because it just didn't seem important to tell them. I wasn't going to accept any money from them; circumstances weren't that dire and none of them are all that well off, either. It wasn't really something I thought about until the day after Christmas when my sister called and started rattling off all the presents that she got and the presents her kids got, and that's when it really started hurting. I was trying to be happy for her but the strain must have come through in my voice because she suddenly stopped and asked what I'd gotten.

I tried to say, very casually, "Oh, nothing." Not too successfully, I'm afraid. She asked why, I gave her an abbreviated explanation of what's going on and the conversation got very stilted. She said good-bye soon after.

My mom called a couple of days later. "Why didn't you tell us? We would have sent more presents!"

Yeah, sure Mom. You're barely making it yourself. You shouldn't have sent us any presents at all, because you can't afford it. But thanks for the thought.

You'd think I'd be too old to care about not getting anything for Christmas. I certainly don't feel very mature. I keep reminding myself of the tsunami victims. There is always something worse, and our problems are pretty minor by comparison. We were able to make the rent, after all. I guess I still have a lot of growing up to do.

Experiences like this just give me plenty of opportunity to work on that.