Pregnancy in the time of corporate bailouts.

You know what’s funny? Being pregnant during the great economic disaster of our time. No wait, did I say funny? I meant it’s suckass.

Things have been bad for awhile, I realize, and always getting worse. Home values falling, foreclosures, gas and food prices rising.  Even so, I consciously decided I would do whatever I possibly could to get pregnant. I’ve been trying for years and seeing the potential for tough times ahead wasn’t going to stop me. Let’s face it - besides the economic disaster there are two wars afoot, tensions around the world are rising and then there’s the incredibly scary reality of global warming. Things don’t look rosy on the global scale, for sure.

On a personal level, hard economic times have resulted in me having my hours slashed at work and as a result my healthcare is about to be cut off. I’m the primary breadwinner, so we are fairly strapped for cash as my husband is trying to finish up graduate school.  Talk about a clusterfuck of life timing.

As strange as it sounds, I feel better when I consider that my in-laws were born during the Great Depression. My mother-in-law can tell stories about growing up on a farm in Nebraska, a busy happy life but one so devoid of excess, she and her four siblings sometimes had to even share one towel or one tub of bath water. 

My father-in-law always used to say, “I never knew I was poor, because everybody else was too.”  He didn’t have a sucky childhood because of the Great Depression. I guess that’s because kids don’t need money or things. Or at least they don’t understand that they need those things. They just know that they need parents.

And whatever else happens, I  know I can give my kids that.