Donna’s visiting her sisters in Michigan and I’m sort of on my own for a couple of weeks. Sort of because our prodigal daughter is back, once again unemployed and homeless, squatting in our guest bedroom with her cats. Last time she stayed three years. Where have we failed? Current mood: despair.<\/p>\n
A bit of good news, though: two months ago we loaned our son and daughter-in-law some money so they could make the down on a new house outside Las Vegas. The sale of their old home went through yesterday and today they paid us back, with interest (which we did not ask for).<\/p>\n
You hear people talk about how the economy leaves them living less large than their parents, and how they fear their own children will have to live smaller yet. We haven’t seen that in our lives, and we’re thankful for it. Donna and I got a little help from my parents during the first years of our marriage, but mostly we were on our own. We, on the other hand, were able to pay for both our kids to go to college, buy them cars when they needed them, and even help with serious shit like that new house. Our son’s been a great provider for his family and they live at least as well as we do, arguably better (they’ve been able to send both their kids to out-of-state colleges, something our kids could never have hoped for). Our daughter has\/had the potential to do just as well, but her troubles come from within and have nothing to do with the economy. At least we can offer her a roof when she’s down and out. One day we’ll die, and there’ll be something in the estate for both our children … maybe not much, but something.<\/p>\n
So there’s a sense of accomplishment to offset the despair. Few parents get just one or the other, am I right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So there’s a sense of accomplishment to offset the despair. Few parents get just one or the other, am I right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3947,3945,3946],"class_list":["post-31306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","tag-currentmood","tag-familynews","tag-generationalprogress"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31306"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31308,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31306\/revisions\/31308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}