Family Memoir: A Jobless Caregiver Essay

The sober statement that we need to establish a family meeting foreshadowed bad radicalsworthiness for several reasons. First, we were not the persona of family that had orb sit-down meetings. We were casual, informal, and the very thought that impudentlys needed to be communicated approximately a table suggested that something bad or terrible had occurred. Second, the tone with which the news was delivered was unusually stern and un securetling.Smiles were the rule in our house, laughter was contagious, and the look on my stupefys face as he demanded the meeting was only foreign and fraught with trepidation. If my father was worried then there was compositors case for worry among all of our family members. Finally, as we sat down to the meeting, my father carried with him a pen and a small notebook.He opened the notebook as we likewisek our places at the table and he clicked the pen to begin writing. I glanced at the notebook and saw that he had written the words monthly figure. He set down the pen and said to open the family meeting that have lost my job and until I can find a new job we have to make some changes around here.I was absolutely shocked. We had never imagined my father without a job, we had always taken our comfortable exemplar of sustainment for granted and then we were suddenly faced with the prospect of not having our basic needs met. My mother cried and I waited to find out what would happen.In retrospect, this was probably the defining moment in my familys existence. It was a rise for all of us, not simply for my father, and we all contributed to preserving the family despite the obstacles caused by an incidentally jobless caregiver. At that meeting, for example, we set out a monthly budget for the family and then monthly budgets for the family members.All of us promised to make sacrifices until my father instal a new job and it soon became apparent as we brainstormed how often money we wasted on a monthly basis. We ate th ings that contributed exact to our sustenance. We rented excessive numbers of movies when other means for makement were readily available.What I acquire from this intimate family tragedy, and the thesis of this family memoir, is that modern families spend far too much money and fail to properly plan for emergencies. Providing for basic necessities, in short, is a far nobler goal than pass money for the sake of spending when little or no value is secured in return for this type of indiscriminate spending.The first thing that my father did, after assuring us that he would immediately begin looking for a new job, was to specify in his notebook the purchases that we could not do without. He wrote down much(prenominal) things as rent, food, and electricity. Rather than assuming these as fixed necessities, however, he rather asked how we major power cut our expenses with respect to these expense categories.I admired my father for the way that he solicited or opinions as important members of the family unit, rather than dictating new rules and practices, and gradually we all began to come up with new ideas. Food was an heavens where out family had effectively overspent for years. In reality, human beings need cipher more(prenominal)(prenominal) than nutritional meals. We promised to eliminate junk food from our diet and to eliminate spare trips to the local fast food restaurants and ice cream parlors.We needed, to be sure, nothing more than the grains, fruits, and vegetables that we all learned about in the elementary civilizes food pyramid lesson. My father calculated some feeding practices on the notepad and it soon became apparent that we had been spending more on unessential dietary purchases than on necessary purchases. Together, we calculated that we could save a probatory amount of money by eating healthier and more simply. The aforementioned(prenominal) conclusion could be drawn after examining our monthly electricity and unoccupied expense s.We all promised not to use the electricity for unnecessarily long periods of cadence and to reduce the purchases of movies and magazines when we could secure the same entertainment functions by playing breathing board games or playing basketball outside. It was a startling actualization to discover that we spent a significant amount of money to entertain ourselves when we could have entertained ourselves without having spent a single penny. It cost nothing, to be sure, to walk to the neighborhood park and shoot a couple of baskets. It costs nothing to walk to the library and read more books than one might ever find in a commercial bookstore.This new set of experiences and the attendant realizations reminded me of something read as part of a school identification in which a writer named Henry David Thoreau observed that I jaw young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools for these are more easily acquired than g ot rid of. Better if they had been born in the open foraging and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field of study they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? (Thoreau 5).My family learned through deprivation what Thoreau learned more than a hundred years ago about life story in a competitive world. What we learned was that human beings create to a large extant their own financial dependence and that this painful rhythm method of birth control can be broken or tempered by living more basically. That my father would find a new job at bottom the next two months did not cause my family to forget the lessons learned preferably the contrary, these are lessons that are deeply etched in my familys corporal memory and which are applied in our daily lives. Life, in sum, is conglomerate by false needs and the failure to live simply and modestly. kit and boodle CitedThoreau, Henry D. Walden. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton, NJ Prince ton University Press, 1971. Questia. Web. 7 June 2010.