Luxury vs. necessity
[Rod Dreher  03/02 05:04 PM]

Yesterday, I mentioned on the blog that I know middle-class couples in which both parents have to work because they couldn’t afford to get by on just one income, and acknowledging that it would be hard for my wife and me to keep up our lifestyle if my salary were cut in half. That prompted this response from a reader named Wendi, who doesn’t buy it:

I am a stay at home mom and have been since 1988. We homeschool. We eat organic when we can afford it. We grind our own wheat and make our own bread. We buy bags of oats and grain through a co-op (fifty pounds at a time). We gave seven children. The youngest is seven.

We are hardly 'comfortably middle class,' nor have we been able to do this because of my husband's wonderful salary. He's a hard working man, but for the first year of our marriage we barely kept our noses above water, selling nearly everything we owned, living without a car, without insurance, and sometimes without electricity because it mattered to us that I stay home. I owned two pairs of maternity pants that year.

Then he joined the Air Force as an enlisted man- the salaries there are no secret, so I'm sure you understand why the assumption that stay at home mothers can only afford that because they are comfortably middle class makes me raise my eyebrows. He stayed in the Air Force for twenty years, retiring almost three years ago. He now manages a discount grocery store. Our combined income from his salary, his pension, rental income and social security (two of our children are adopted and they get S.S. because their birth father died before they came to us) is about $50,000. That's the most it's ever been, and we're living a lifestyle we consider practically luxurious on that income. We have internet access, more than one car now (most of our married lives we've gotten by with only one car, and we have never, ever owned a new car. We bought new appliances when we moved here at my husband's retirement. This is the first time we've owned any new appliances, in fact).

I should perhaps add that currently we live in a 1,200 square foot house with one bathroom. It's over a hundred years old and has a hole in the kitchen floor and one window doesn't shut. We inherited it — but before we inherited this house, we owned the house we were living in (well, the bank did; we made the payments), and that was in Colorado Springs. Even if we had not inherited this property, we would have been living in a (much nicer house) in Colorado Springs, and all on one income.

It isn't usually our economy that 'forces' people to have both parents in the workforce just to 'get by.' It's our unwillingness to make the sacrifices necessary to keep a parent at home with the kids, and our high standards of what it means 'just to get by.' You say if your income was cut in half it would be very hard for your family to keep living as you do. Maybe the way you live is more consumer oriented than you realize.