A mixture of blessings&nettlesome problems, Pt. 1

Maribeth & I got married in 1993. When we spent money and made money we made more than we spent. Heck, we were able to put money away into the savings account (with Maribeth being a part time nurse and me working 45-50some hours, how could it be any other way???) Andy was born Dec., 1995, and we continued to make more money than we spent.

We made more money than we spent up to a certain year. Then came 1998. Maribeth gets pregnant early in the year and learns she has gestational diabetes. I was working 4 yrs. at a law firm in Joliet, but in that fateful May, the old experienced lawyer I was working for retired and I had to leave his little firm. I went a month feverishly sending out resumes and working at the hospital as a teletech. Now the "job experts" in Chicago state that when a person loses one job, either by choice or otherwise, and then finds a new one, the job search is 4-9 months long. I found a job after "only" a month. Well, it didn’t feel like "only" !! Although I worked more hours being a tele tech than my usual 16 hrs. a week (the law firm job is always the full time job and the hospital part time), we still lost over $1,000 in lost law firm wages.

Fortunately,after "only" a month long job search, I went to a Chicago law firm. Since I began my education as a paralegal in 1992, I always wanted to be a paralegal in Chicago and be in the vibrant Loop area of downtown Chicago. Plus, Chicago law firms pay their paralegals more than Joliet paralegals make. (This is backed up statistically by the +IPA salary survey.) So, there I was making considerably more money than I was in Joliet, and things seemed to be ok at home.
Maribeth was due in October but in August there was trouble. A man who ran a stop sign slammed into Maribeth’s car as she was going to work. Although she was not badly hurt, she started having contractions. She was rushed into the OB/GYN wing of the hospital rather than working her usual rounds as a cardiac nurse. They gave her medicine to stop the contractions, and Ted continued to stay in the uterus. The problem was that Maribeth was no longer able to work because she went back to being a high risk pregnancy. She didn’t work from August to October 8, 1998. Then she took several months off thereafter as any mother wants to do when they give birth to the baby they so dearly love.
The bottom line was that I was the sole "breadwinner" for 4 months. Although I worked 50some hrs. I was a salaried employee at my new firm Sudekum, Rosenburg & Cassiday. So despite working at both the hospital and the law firm, my salary for our household was simply not enough. This is especially true in the tony suburb of Oak Forest, where their schools have a very good reputation. When we later went to a marriage counselor, one evening Dr. Dan looked me in the eye and said, "your household income should be $100,000 for where you live." It most certainly wasn't. In December of 98, I sat down and reviewed things. We were blessed with a new baby boy. Maribeth and I at the time were not fighting nearly as much. She will tell you that the happiest times of her life was when her babies were born. Thank God, she hasn't been cursed with post-partum depression as some women are. We continued to go into debt. I looked at our finances, the credit card debt was not good. But after doing the math, I knew that we could do better in 1999 and into the new millenium. Yet there were obstacles as I was to find out.........................

To be continued. Part 1 of 3 series
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+Illinois Paralegals Assoc.