Taking Responsibility
I was one month shy of turning forty-nine years old, it was March 20, 2019. Just before I went to bed that night, I wrote in my new journal on page one, “I can barely breathe, I am suffocating”. Up until that point and for the previous ten years, I had been drinking tons of coffee during the day, too much wine at night and taking over the counter sleeping pills just to fall asleep. I took daytime muscle relaxants during my waking hours in an attempt to try to numb parts of me and lessen the severity of pain I was feeling, even though it was not physical pain. Living in overdraft, maxed out with credit cards and lines of credit, drowning in a massive house with an enormous mortgage and feeling like a failure. My money was gone before it was earned, and I felt like I was better off dead. Twice divorced, my depression was so deep that each night I drove home from work and into my garage I would think about closing the door and not turning off the engine. That thought became my daily fantasy, and if it wasn’t for my two dogs and worrying about who would look after them and remaining together in a loving home, I am not completely sure I would be here today. I believe they saved my life.
I had spent most of my thirties and forties in bad marriages and a deep depression, stressed, lonely and resentful about the fairy tale of what my life could have been compared to what it actually was. After trying to conceive for years I was childless and constantly compared myself to everyone whose career and marriages looked more successful than my own. I was envious, jealous, resentful, unhappy at work and in my career, and was basically retail therapying my way through life. I spent money I didn’t have on extravagant things I did not need, to try to make myself feel better and impress people with my presentation that was bought with borrowed money. I bought expensive designer clothes, makeup, bags, shoes, jewelry and took lovely holidays and filled my home with pricey furniture. I had so many clothes I had turned an entire spare bedroom into a walk-in closet.
My first husband was very careful with money, and we had both saved a healthy nest egg in our retirement accounts by the age of twenty-seven. We started our lives together in Calgary, renting the upper unit of a fourplex for a couple of years. Although we bought a new car and took some lovely holidays we lived very modestly in our day to day life. Previous to this, we had lived quite nomadically for some time working on film and theatre projects and wanted to anchor ourselves to a city. I secretly (and not so secretly) had a desire to get married and start a family and felt my biological clock ticking! My career as a textile artist took a back seat to getting a real full-time job, and after taking a six-week computer course, I started working as an executive assistant for an investment advisor completely by fluke. Despite always being able to work full time in the arts, graduating with distinction from Art College and having received many scholarships and work at prestigious companies throughout North America my career as a textile dyer fizzled with settling down, and art morphed into a part-time hobby. My black sweatpants and paint clothes were replaced by beautiful wool suits and dresses. I enrolled in the Canadian securities course, starting my second career. I was spoiled rotten by my boss who introduced me to private clubs, five-star restaurants, paid underground parking downtown, fancy dress shops and a whole new way of living that I had never experienced before. I was so naïve and thought all executive assistants experienced the same daily spoils as my own. After two years of living together my husband and I used our combined retirement savings towards the down payment on our first home.
I greatly admired my husband as he was passionate about both the sports he loved and his career which was as a lighting designer. He had been hired at a prestigious performing arts center as a lighting technician and took on exciting side projects for dance and performing arts companies outside of his job. Although I was very happy for him, I became more and more jealous, watching his chosen career grow and seeing him live his passions, and I became increasingly resentful that I spent my days sitting in an office answering phones so I could bring in a pay cheque to pay my half of the mortgage and car payment. After we married and had been in our house for a few years I went to visit a friend in Toronto and spent the week walking around galleries, visiting my old employers and friends who all continued to work in the creative and performing arts. It was shocking how in only a few years I had become so far removed from my own art and from who I really was. I came back to Calgary, resolved to return to my authentic self, I quit my job and started working on local projects in theatre and dance. I must confess I did not discuss quitting my job and changing my career with my husband. He was living his dream and I wanted to live mine.
One day my dad came to pick me up from the theatre downtown I was working at. He asked me, as he rifled through the costumes on the racks, who had done all of this work, and I replied I had. It was the first time he had even seen my artwork and what I did for a living, and it gave him enough confidence to help me to open up a dyeing studio in Calgary with the business plan of, “if I build it, they will come”. It was a beautiful gesture on his part to help me start my business and after all of the years of negative comments about my career choice and hearing that art college should be illegal, I was overwhelmed by his newly found support. My business grew working on significant projects throughout Canada and the US, and I also became the North American distributor of a textile dye made in the UK, but over the years the time apart and strain of running a business also put a mighty strain on our marriage. My husband and I spent significant time apart with him working concerts in the evenings and weekends and me working throughout the day. We starting to fight a lot about everything, but mainly we fought about money. I enjoyed art, cooking, and decorating while he enjoyed radically different hobbies in the mountains, partaking in downhill skiing, mountain biking, ice, and rock climbing. Our free time was spent apart doing very different things, and aside from our joint love of sea kayaking our interests and passions couldn’t have been more different. In an effort to save our marriage I moved my business home, but it was too late, the damage had been done and our childless marriage was over. After he moved out, I saw him only once after that and then I never saw him again. It was like he had died.
We purchased our marital home in 1999 and when we got divorced in 2007, I had to buy it again for three times more than what we paid for it. I bought lots of things to refill it after we divided our assets, and I painted it and had some renovations made to the home to make it look and feel different, as it reminded me so much of my failed marriage and failed life. At the time of our divorce, I closed my business and got a job in the bank thinking it would provide me with more stability and benefits as I tried to navigate life on my own with a single income. I’d always been able to support myself, but my self-esteem was at an all-time low. I did not believe I would be able to survive as an artist, especially now as a divorced one. I had become doubtful of all of my abilities, not only as a woman and not being able to have children, but failure as a wife and not being able to keep a marriage together. I started work in an entry level position in a bank with a near poverty income and lived on sort of a budget that didn’t balance. I started to rely heavily on debt and credit cards to supplement my lifestyle and wants. I also started to “drink the Kool-Aid” of bank sales talk using home equity lines and credit cards with travel points as solutions to my problem of how I would fund my newly single life.
I got married again five years later to a man I met online and that I knew for less than two years but whom I thought I knew very well. He was a very successful salesman and had never married, had no children and had many childhood friends from school and church. He drove a company vehicle that I thought was his and I was wined and dined in a way I had never been before. I had made up a whole fantasy in my head about who he was, and talked myself into an idea that he must have lots of money saved due to him being single, not having children, and having a great job, but we never talked about money at all until after we married. I had simply created a fantasy in my head about my fairytale prince charming. While dating he bought me beautiful clothes, took me to concerts, hockey games, trips and stunning restaurants and would randomly buy me these magnificent bouquets of flowers. He would also surprise me often with thoughtful little gifts of things he noticed I was looking at when we went out. It was a refreshing change from my frugally romantic marriage, and I was madly in love, and having so much fun living this fairy tale romance, full of romantic gestures, gifts, and affection I had always dreamed of experiencing. I was literally swept off my feet. Dating him was just like being in the movies and I found myself living in a modern-day fairy tale romance of my very own. I loved him like I had never loved anyone and wanting a reprieve from having to pay a mountain of bills on my own, we married. I put him on the title of my home and moved him in feeling like the luckiest woman in the world!
While at the bank to add my husband to the mortgage, my friend and fellow banker asked my husband about his terrible credit. I was taken aback…what terrible credit? He was nonchalant with answering and explained that he had taken off time from work to look after his mom as she suffered through cancer, and during that prolonged time had let a bunch of bills slip. His response seemed reasonable to me. I believed what I wanted to and ignored all of the red flags as I was so in love. At first, life was bliss and with my husband in the house and having him there relieved me of half of the bills and mortgage. For a little while I was able to breathe and enjoy life without going into debt each month, however our marriage soon started to fall apart within the first few months and with the merging of finances, the money fights soon started. I worked a nine to five job in a bank, and he was an outside sales rep for a large international company and was out on the road all day making sales calls. About six months into our marriage, I came home from work early feeling sick, only to find a letter from a law firm taped to my front door that read a lien was being put on our house for $25,000 for unpaid payday loans. Unfortunately, I had to discover in this way that my husband had a secret gambling problem and issues with cash money stores. For the next couple of years, I lived in a shock like state, full of repetition and disappointment, where as soon as we were close to paying off one loan another payday loan would appear for $15,000 or $20,000. Heated fights were common, usually ending with something in the house getting smashed or broken, and once I called the police. He was a big man and when I would bring up the never-ending loans, he got angry and violent, and I became very afraid of him in my own home. Mixed in with this was excessive alcohol consumption and catching my husband chatting with numerous women online. The flowers, concerts, restaurants, and gifts stopped immediately after our marriage.
It was during this time I adapted to living on sort of a budget to pay down those payday loans. Being an addict of gambling, he felt he could not stop, and I had sympathy for him and tried to understand and be sensitive to his struggle. He joined gamblers anonymous, and he went to counselling with someone that specialized in addictions as well as seeing a priest. My ex had been in counselling for a few months, and I was invited to go in with him one day to see the counsellor together. The counsellor started the meeting by asking my husband why he gambled. He gave what felt like an insincere answer with almost a smile admitting, “Well, I’m an addict and I need to”, and the counsellor turned to me and said point blank, “My husband was a gambler because he chose to gamble”. I will always remember the look of disappointment the counsellor had for having to be the one to answer that question correctly, instead of my husband, after months of counselling.
The counsellor went through with me the steps it would take my husband to gamble:
1. He would have to get into his vehicle and drive to a payday loan store,
2. He would find a parking spot and park the vehicle,
3. He would get out his truck and walk into the store,
4. He would present his paystub, and apply for the payday loan,
5. He would accept the monies and sign paperwork for the loan,
6. He would walk back to his vehicle with the cash, get in and drive to a casino,
7. He would have to find a parking spot at the casino,
8. He would get out of his vehicle and walk in,
9. He would have to find a table or game to gamble at,
10. He would sit down at the table and place a bet.
This hour spent with the counsellor may have been the most impactful hour of my life. That day, I realized that his actions of gambling weren’t one impulsive act but rather the result of many determined and calculated choices that took place over a period of time. I confess that perspective changed my level of sympathy for him quite a bit, especially with him knowing the pain his actions were bringing to our marriage. Although after that meeting my husband never returned to counselling again the discussions during that hour made me understand some things about myself and jolted me into realizing that I may have my own addictions, especially my addiction of going to the mall afterwork to unwind:
1. Instead of driving home I would detour and stop off at the mall.
2. I would find a parking spot and park the vehicle.
3. I would get out my car and walk into the mall.
4. I would wander around the stores looking randomly at stuff.
5. I would find something that was cute and try it on.
6. I pondered the purchase, feeling that I had worked hard that day and deserved a treat.
7. I would whip out my credit card, buy it and take it home.
I could apply these steps so easily to so many things in my life. The actions of everything I did, shopping, eating, buying wine, travelling, etc. I do realize that addiction issues can be very complex and by no means am I trying to simplify that, but certainly what was blatant, was that addictions weren’t quite as impulsive as I had always thought of them as being, and the act of gambling for my husband was not that far removed from my own addictions, including my own addictions. A year later we were in an even worse financial situation, and my sympathy morphed into anger at this point. I perceived his actions as selfish, and I started to hate him. All of my salary and efforts in my job had been going towards paying down his perpetual enormous payday loans while we were both earning great money yet buying our groceries at the Dollar store. It felt like I was tossing my money down a street drain, and it had been going on for too long to not see any sort of improvement to our situation. I felt despair and disrespected by him as his wife and our marriage became silent, lacking in all communication. It was a cycle of gloom that wouldn’t end, and one day, after going out for my lunch on pay day and being told my debit card had been declined for a two-dollar cup of coffee I knew I was done and I would have to leave my marriage. In that moment I decided we needed to go our separate ways otherwise I would continue to slide into deeper emotional and financial despair. I was at risk of losing everything again including what little equity I had left in the house from my first divorce. It was devastating to realize the only way out for me was to leave him and our marriage. Leaving that marriage and being a ‘twice divorced person’, is a shame that I carry to this day.
My house that I had lived in for fifteen years was full of so many memories, but it was time to start anew. My ex-husband sat down on the couch the night before the house got listed for sale. He was angry I was no longer going to be party to putting my income towards his never-ending payday loans and told me he was going to fight me in court for half of the money from the house. I looked at him calmly and said that it was no problem, and he could do that, but I would also fight him for half of his pension. Thankfully it was worth as much as the equity I had remaining in our home. In that moment, I realized what a façade my marriage had been, and how little he loved me, and that moment deeply affected me for years to come, as I had loved him so very much. How could I have married a man who was such a stranger to me and who would want to inflict so much pain on me? Did he only marry me to use me? A woman with a house and equity he could financially drain. It certainly felt that way. Had I married him just to get relief from the burden of being the sole income earner and because I was lonely? Our divorce entailed us selling the house and paying off his remaining $30,000 payday loan debt, his $10,000 credit card debt, the $15,000 legal bill for our divorce as well as the mortgage we had recently refinanced. When we last saw each other, he told me he would pay me back every penny, but a decade later I have yet to see one red cent.
At forty-four I found myself twice divorced with no children, and I was alone. My life decisions and family circumstances had taken an enormous emotional and financial toll on me, and I lived in a state of feeling constantly stressed about money. Within one month, I quit my bank job in Calgary, put my beloved house up for sale, sold it, filed for divorce, paid off the mortgage and debts and moved across the country to start a new life.
I wanted to start in a new place with a clean slate. Leaving my home was a very difficult decision as it had been such a part of my life and was full of so many memories (good and bad). It was my safe place and my jewel box, but it had also become unaffordable, and every corner of the house was full of good and not so good memories. I had married my husband in our living room, and there were too many remembrances. I simply wished to start all over again somewhere new.
What I didn’t realize at that time was that I had a part in all of my bad luck! I was the cause of my own problems, and I was taking myself and all of my bad habits, and pain with me to Ontario. It was easy to blame my exes for my problems, but as Judge Judy says, “You picked him, you hitched your cart to his horse”. The truth is a hard pill to swallow, and I had turned a blind eye to a long list of red flags. In my first marriage I had married a man I am not sure I loved or felt any passion towards, but I was of an age that I thought I was supposed to get married and wanted desperately to start a family. I knew we had very different interests and hobbies, and I wasn’t a hundred percent in love with him or romantically attracted to him, but he felt safe, and I hoped that we would grow into each other, however, this was not the case. In my second marriage I did love him desperately wanting the fairy tale life, but also saw an opportunity for some financial relief of a two-income household. I had ignored the red flags of never being allowed to see where he lived while we were dating, and his very extravagant spending patterns, buying my own engagement ring, and not coming into the marriage with anything except for a garbage bag of clothes. One of my friends had mentioned to me that even the homeless had a cart full of things they carried around. I had done my own fair share of damage within my marriages and was completely emotionally unequipped to handle chaos and conflict. There are fight or flight personalities and I was definitely flight! My problems didn’t dissolve with moving and I certainly didn’t leave anything behind. Everything that was getting in my way of financial freedom came with me to Ontario, and that included myself!
In Ontario I bought a 1000 sq foot fixer upper with cash, got another under paid lending job, and over the first year of being there gutted the fixer upper to stud, spending over a hundred thousand on renovations. I got a nice new mortgage to pay for it all and had essentially re-created the exact same financial chaos I left in Calgary within a very short period of time. After nearly two years, once my renovations were completed, I invited my parents to come to visit me for a week. I wanted to start repairing our damaged relationship and was proud of what I had turned my home into and to have them there, but within the week my father turned to me after building up tensions all day and asked, “Why did I buy this shit box?” In that question, all of my emotions of not being good enough rushed to the surface which prompted me to my next disastrous decision.
Soon after my parents returned to Calgary, I sold my cute little fully renovated house at a loss of $120,000 and bought a 3900 sq. foot home with a brand-new massive mortgage. It had three living rooms, four floors, four bedrooms, and three bathrooms. What the hell was I thinking? I was so ashamed of myself for getting divorced twice, of being childless, of being in debt and having a crappy job that I hated. I would recite negative mantras to myself all day about how stupid I was, how worthless I was, and questioned, “how much dumber could I possibly be”. I continued to build my mountain of debt, trying to look impressive at any cost, taking beautiful holidays, buying beautiful clothes, renovating, decorating, and spoiling my dogs rotten. I was miserable and stressed 100% of the time.
That night on March 20th, 2019, just before my forty-nineth birthday, I looked at my mortgage renewal that came in the mail and contemplated if I should refinance the hundred thousand dollars’ worth of credit card and line of credit debt, I had racked up into my mortgage after only three years of buying my house. I had only a tiny RSP and was in overdraft in my chequing account living paycheck to paycheck. I had chest pains and hoped it was a heart attack so I could just die (and I am not making light). I had a revelation that night that I was in debt to so many things, not just money but my entire life, my friendships, my body, my marriages, my career. The shame I felt for not even being able to look after myself and my finances washed over me like a dark shadow. My dad had been right about me all along. I had really failed myself, and the weight of that feeling was the lowest point in my life. All of the money that had gone through my hands over my lifetime, nearing thirty years of working hard, and I had nothing to show for it. I was never going to know what it was like to be debt free, and I was never going to be able to retire. I was really in the shit, and I had to make a serious change for a better life once and for all and stop the destructive behaviors. I cried myself to sleep that night lacking all confidence in my abilities to turn my life around, but when I woke up, I felt differently and realized I wanted to push myself out of my mess. I wanted to live and live well and to be happy. Everything in my life was in a negative position, and I vowed to turn it around once and for all. I realized in that moment I had the power of me, and my life, and possibility, and I promised myself that I would do whatever I needed to, to turn my life around. I was going to have to find the courage to change what I could and not worry about trying to impress anyone anymore.
About a year before this moment, I had met a man by chance. His name was Bill and we had started our relationship as friends. He was good company, and we laughed a lot. Conversation was easy, comfortable, and relaxed. He was honest and an open book about who he was and didn’t put on airs which was refreshing! He was also struggling financially, renting, paying child support, estranged from his father, living cheque to cheque and was also a little bit depressed and down on himself. I identified with his struggles, and he identified with mine, and our mutual attraction grew to become friends and then the best of friends, and eventually over a few years we became engaged. I decided to have a heart-to-heart talk with him and confided that the house and the life I was living was an illusion, and I was drowning, unhappy and scared. We talked about possible solutions of how I was going to get out of this mess. Should I sell the house? Where do I start? I did this for a living, but it was much easier to give the advice than actually live the advice. We had both spent a lifetime struggling and we were both tired and needed to make some changes. We decided in that first week we would find courage to take the journey together to become debt free. After a lot of discussion about our options over the next couple of weeks, I accepted that unless we won the lottery, I was going to have a mortgage and be living cheque to cheque, until age seventy-five, so with Bill’s encouragement we decided to get out of the mess together. I vowed that by my fifty third birthday Bill and I would both be debt free once and for all no matter what it took. Honestly, I didn’t know if it was even possible, but we were both going to try like hell!
I had only myself to blame for the horrific state my finances, my mental state, and physical body was in. Learning to accept full responsibility for my own disaster, and acknowledging it, was step one for me on this journey.
Step 1: How did you get here? What is your story?
