Things go sideways.
My husband started a masters program at the University of Akron. I got pregnant with number five child. I was very uncomfortable during pregnancy; homeschooling became, keep people alive, fed, and rested. Housekeeping is a bonus. Then dear child was born; she spent a week in the neo-natal ICU before coming home with a supply of thyroid hormone replacement pills. We crushed one pill each day and hid the powder in breastmilk or applesauce, or just dabbed it on her tongue with a finger. She had allergies and was sick repeatedly.
The gas tank fell off our van while I was driving with our children; we replaced it with a white 15 passenger van.
When the baby was six months old, my husband burst into the house at 9 a.m. from work, gasping in horror. He turned on the TV and we watched the second of the Twin Towers fall as he prepared to go to the National Guard. He served six weeks as a guard at an armory whose unit was called out. When he returned to his civilian job, they found a reason to fire him. He fought for unemployment and won. So for 26 weeks we would have half his income; we were already on government Medicaid and food stamps. The church helped pay our fixed expenses so we could buy gas and maintain our vehicles. We filed for bankruptcy. My husband did all that paperwork, while doing two semesters of schoolwork in one. I cared for our five children. He graduated and got a summer job teaching at a junior college. In the early morning hours someone rammed into our car, wrapping it around a tree. There was a nice U shape in the front of the car. He replaced the car with a clunker just to get to work.
My husband decided he needed a better job, and to do that he needed more education, so he applied to the PhD program at the University of Wyoming. We prepared to move. We gave away almost all our furniture and most of our stuff. We kept our food storage (lots of number 10 cans of dry staple foods, plus some five gallon buckets and some totes of things in bags. We kept my collection of books, but ditched my LPs and my record player. The last thing to go to the curb pile was our faithful shop vacuum, a large capacity Craftsman that had overheated one of our household outlets, it was so strong.
My husband and I drove a load of stuff in the 15 passenger van across country, Ohio to Wyoming, took about five days to find a place to live, and came back. Our children had the flu in our absence, so badly that our pediatrician called us on our way back to tell us he had visited them at the babysitter’s home and that they would be fine. A couple weeks later my husband and a friend made a lightning trip out there with another load of stuff in the van. One drove while the other slept. We cut a sheet of plywood to put between the seats of the van, loaded the back up one more time, put all the children in the middle, and took off.
