How You Like Them Apples

So when I speak of having kind of made myself a "dowry" I mean it in the more traditional sense of what subsistence cultures typically meant: ENOUGH HOUSEHOLD GOODS for a young woman to set up a home separate from her parental home.

When I moved out, all I needed to finish furnishing a one bedroom apartment was a dining room table and chairs plus a couch for the living room. One relative gave me a hand-me-down couch and another bought me an inexpensive dining room set and I was good to go.

I didn't have EVERYTHING -- for example, I had no coffee table -- but I had enough to make life work without running up a bunch of credit card debt right out the door to make that happen. And it was in line with the middle-class expectations I grew up with, not cheap garbage because that's all I could afford.

My ex husband never once expressed gratitude about how I brought thousands of dollars worth of furniture and furnishings to the marriage. Our lives would have been vastly harder had I not done that because he was both a selfish pig and a financial moron, which was to some degree the fault of his parents.

He never really felt obligated to support me financially and allowed the Air Force to jerk him around for a year before finally going to the Army and asking them if they would let him join. He needed a waiver because once he did something stupid at age TWELVE, but unlike the Air Force they didn't have a big issue with his eyesight and they shipped him off to basic training pretty much immediately.

He spent the next year or two "asking" if he could buy x, y or z thing which was always followed up with some spiel about how he had desperately wanted one for like a decade though he was all of twenty or twenty-one and other heavy language about how incredibly important it was. I would say something idiotic like "Of course, you can! I love you!" 

And then when there was never enough money to spend on ME, it was MY FAULT because HE ASKED and I was the person managing the checkbook.

After we had a baby, I started telling him no. He simply got himself a credit card, stopped "asking" and would buy whatever the fuck he damn well felt like and then it was my problem to sort out how to cover the credit card bill.

Once in Germany we spent the lion's share of the last day he was home before going off to the field running around all over town looking for some markers or something he "needed" fucking DESPERATELY that god-damned day, even though it was late in the month and funds were short. Only AFTER acquiring this CRITICAL item did he drop the bomb that it had nothing to do with work, was not relevant to this field trip which would last a month or six weeks and was for his gaming hobby which he would not be pursuing again until after he returned home.

Double whammy that one: How to avoid any quality time with your wife and also screw her over financially right before going away for a few weeks because you're an introvert who goes out of your way to make sure your psycho bitch wife cannot possibly succeed in her insane goal of bonding with her husband or being intimate with him and also it's essential to fuck her over financially and pointlessly any which way you can.

At our next duty station, I acquired a credit card in my name at a clothing store of some sort and began paying for clothes for me and seeing a dentist, two completely "non-essential' items for his chattel property wife that the budget NEVER covered. Rather than getting a fucking clue that he didn't make enough money for his endless indulgences AND a family, when we fought about money his defense was now "YOU ran up those credit card bills TOO."

Yes, it's MY fucking fault we can't pay down our mountain of debts because I'm sick of owning two holey pairs of jeans while you buy eight extra pairs of military boots "for work" from Matterhorn style cold weather boots to lightweight jungle boots on top of the two pairs the military issued you AND also you NEED one extra pair so you have a pristine pair that is ALWAYS ready to pass inspection at the drop of a hat without you having to lift a fucking finger.

Your wife seeing a dentist is why we can't get our finances sorted out, not because your asshole father went car shopping with us while you were in basic training and picked out the truck of his dreams rather than something we could afford and then when we had our second child and were forced to sell the truck and get an actual car, you absolutely could not fucking wait two or three months to return to the US before getting another vehicle.

So instead of returning home with all our debts paid off and money in the bank and getting a reboot on our finances, we came home with an ALL BLACK vehicle, exterior and interior, with NO AC because when you buy a car in Germany, AC is not standard.

When we were in GEORGIA -- which is hot and humid enough to be the second home for Satan himself, no doubt the reason there's a song called The Devil Went Down to Georgia -- MY family paid a thousand dollars to install AC in this shit car you bought over my objections. They did so in order to make sure their daughter and grandchildren wouldn't die of heat prostration thanks to their daughter having married a selfish bastard and financial MORON.

I learned that if we had WAITED until we got to Georgia to buy the exact same fucking car, it would have cost a thousand dollars less and come with factory installed AC that actually fucking worked without eating SIX alternators and risking our lives and running up our credit card bills.

I've told that story in more detail elsewhere. TLDR: You're such a god-damned idiot and made such terrible decisions that:

A. My brother cleaning up YOUR messes made me decide him RAPING me at age twelve, nearly FIVE years before I began menstruating, wasn't such an unforgivable offense after all.

B. Your bullshit excuse about wanting to see Roman ruins at the last minute "on the cheap" before leaving Germany as your justification for SCREWING us financially both inspired me to make sure we made a list of things to see and do when we arrived at all future duty stations so you couldn't repeat this kind of stunt AND the shit car cost us so much, we could have flown to fucking ITALY for a two week luxury vacation to see whatever Roman shit you desired.

You did the EXACT same thing AGAIN when you insisted on buying a computer NOW instead of waiting six months to get some other debt paid off so we could more comfortably afford it.

Your idiot move of renting a TRAILER for cheap, where we went out for meals constantly because the kitchen was practically non functional led to me insisting you buy me a god-damned house in Kansas if you wanted to stay married, unstated subtext I'm certain you heard in my voice because you told the real estate agent "Whatever SHE wants." when I was like "THIS is THE house!" 

AND also I only know the doorknob of the front door came off in our hands when we were shown it because you told me months later you hesitated to even LOOK at the house because of that. I had completely forgotten this irrelevant detail on the only house in our price range with a decent floorplan and three bedrooms, not two.

Yes, it was a fixer with a motivated seller and we had no savings and etc. YOU had military benefits and didn't need a down payment. I had read endless real estate books and negotiated for the seller to cover closing costs and my real estate agent asked them to cover paint and we supplied the labor to paint the house shortly after moving in. 

Buying that house put something like $7000 or $8000 in our pockets compared to renting a three bedroom apartment in that town.

That trailer damaged my health and everyone's health in our little family, yours included, and is the reason I have the policy "I would rather sleep in a tent than live in a trailer again." It's a policy I backed up with multiple years of homelessness where I in fact slept in a tent and turned down the offer to move to a trailer at one point. It also is the reason I told you bluntly "You are never picking out a rental for us again." and you never did, which sometimes involved us paying out of pocket to go visit the new duty station ahead of time so we could apartment hunt.

While married to you, no amount of money was EVER enough to pay down debt and I CHOSE to not get a paid job when you were pressuring me to do so because I was crystal clear YOU would buy more useless shit to indulge yourself and me and the kids would suffer and it wouldn't really be THAT much more money anyway but you would be too fucking stupid to understand that.

After paying for childcare costs and for more take out meals and fast food meals because I was no longer a full-time homemaker, we would be lucky if it added $2000 a YEAR to our net income.

I made at least that much net benefit in one month by going and serving as unpaid slave labor for my ungrateful sister when I served as her nanny for a month. She could pay for plane tickets for me and my two kids to come out OR pay a nanny. I told her I wasn't ASKING for pay, duh, so she bought the plane tickets.

The last week I was there, to my surprise, a store called Tuesday Morning opened which was only intermittently open and my sister spent about a hundred dollars or so on pieces of my dream cookware in a non standard color they had discontinued which were selling at 80 percent off and I bought several pieces myself plus some ridiculously high thread count Egyptian cotton sheets for next to nothing.

I flew home with a king's ransom of cookware and sheets in my suitcase. Afterwards, having high quality cookware meant I enjoyed cooking more and did it better.

Shocking how having good tools can improve your performance, even if you are lowly chattel property AKA a homemaker.

My sister got a real career and many thousands of dollars in benefit as well out of me, her lowly scumbag stupid useless homemaker sister doing things for her like serving as an unpaid nanny and helping her paint and wallpaper on some other visit, which got her house appraised at thousands more than she expected when she was refinancing it. 

I also took care of her child when she had major surgery and took care of her after she came home, which she told me probably prevented her from getting post operative pneumonia. But I'm still not worthy of ANY respect because I don't have a PAID career on par with hers that last I checked publicly available Internet resources was paying her ungrateful disrespectful sorry ass $140,000 annually and she occasionally sent me a few bucks for Christmas and birthdays out of the kindness of her Grinch-like heart that never had a "grew three sizes that day" event.

So I spent two decades as a homemaker while enriching the lives of various relatives and feeling extremely unappreciated and undervalued, plus I have read a lot of real estate stuff and even taken a college class in real estate appraisal, so I FUCKING KNOW that what I did is worth big bucks -- THOUSANDS for making relatively small improvements to my fixer and to my sister's house.

And my experiences as a homemaker influence my opinions of how Western culture shits all over Native cultures and PRETENDS that it's NOT worth tons of money for the express purpose of getting shit for FREE or cheap out of people whose culture is built primarily on SOCIAL capital that outsiders want to benefit from without earning it.

It's a form of unrecognized theft worse than the fact that Europeans ALSO took their lands and spit in their face and said "Hey, we PAID someone a handful of beads for this land!" and never mind that person probably had no meaningful right to SELL it AT ALL.

And then Natives continue to AGREE with outsiders that this unmonetized stuff has no real value rather than doubling down on the fact that the concept of something being "priceless" can mean "Buddy, if we tried to attach a dollar value to it, you couldn't fucking afford it if you were the king of England."