shoulder

I don't have one to cry on, beloved audience, and so, for tonight, you will be mine. How can my oldest girls teachers assign them huge online homework projects, assuming that every household has unlimited computer and internet access. I have so much homework to do, and every hour they spend, diligently searching "environmental news stories of 2004", is an hour I spend panicking about my late assignments. This world, here in beautiful central oregon, has complete disregard for the single mother on a less than crappy income. The state will help me with childcare after I jump through 100 hours of relentless hoops that land my kids in a pedophile infested daycare that I have to drive them to at god awful pre-work and post-work hours. How does that help??? I don't qualify for foodstamps, so all of you self-righteous right-wingers can rest easy, the money that I make that barely covers the rent will keep us in rice and beans and your hard earned tax money can be spent on someone more deserving. what the hell. I am angry. I don't expect a free ride. I am working ridiculous hours trying to support five people, and pay a nanny that I can't afford. But I need help, and there is no help for someone like me. If I quit my job I would be immediately eligible for all kinds of amazing things. I could stay home and make quilts, maybe even get an A in a class again. Wouldn't that be wild? Of course, I would be severely inconveniencing people like, oh , me? who pay taxes. God bless America, and save me some space in Canada, because I am high and dry for medical insurance, a policy for me would be more than my car payment, and my kids barely qualify, because I am making so much. Do they not know what rent is, and what it costs to feed 4 kids, to feed Halle? And where is their father? Wouldn't we all like to know. Well, don't worry, he's paying child support. Less than his minimum, but enough to make us ineligible for any help. Right on. Who made this system up? The same cop that pulled me over for not using a turn signal and took me to jail? The idiot who invented the lie that the lord opens and closes the womb and we should just have as many babies as we can possible crank out before our uteruses turn into quivering masses of escape-artist caliber stealth. Where are you now, you lofty purveyors of righteous charity and provision of the Lord - he always pays for what he orders, doesn't he? That's why there are babies starving to death all over the world. God loves them. I am angry and the religious right, the religious masses, religion in general. You told me that these babies were god's will and here I am, failing them miserably. God doesn't give you more than you can handle - which is the reason for 80% of suicides. I am tired. Tired of fighting and trying and working and hiking and struggling and paying and wanting to do the right thing, pull my weight, pull the weight of five, no six people, since the father of my children can't shoulder his own. To all of the people who told me I would be blessed with my full quiver: where are you now? Don't chide me for my shortcomings. Congratulate me that the five of us are still alive and relatively healthy, in spite of you. God, let me raise my children to be wiser than I. You gave us minds to reason, bodies to use and govern, and hearts to care. Let me impart this to my children, if I give them nothing else.