Didn’t Need This

On Wednesday, I got my third Social Security check.  It was about $185 less than it should have been.  I looked on SSA.gov website, but it showed a full payment.  I looked at my bank, no explanations, there.  So I’ve been calling for a few days, and finally got through, today.

It’s student loans.  Over $120,000 worth.

I graduated from college in 1996.

My tuition at community college was $12/unit.  Books were usually less than $200 total.

My tuition at University was $1003/semester.  Books were usually around $200 to $300.

While in college, I worked as much as I could.  Target, where I worked at the time, sometimes cut our hours down to as few as 9 hours per week.  Other times, they’d work us to death.  I took it all, because I was married, and my husband was a credit card junkie.

I borrowed the maximum amount allowed, every year that I was in college.  Dave insisted.  Sometimes I couldn’t get all the supplies or books that I needed, because he used my student loan money to pay off his credit cards.  I never stood up to him.

My credential program, which required me to teach for a year for free, cost a small fortune, but even then, they just raised my max amount and Dave spent it where he could.

I have worked and worked and worked to recover from the damage that this man had done to me.  I worked right up to the point where my health gave out on me.  Even then, I tried to work, just not as a teacher.

Until I had a stroke.  It took the federal government two years to decide that a woman with an immune deficiency disorder that requires weekly subcutaneous infusion, who has had a stroke, is legitimately disabled.

My disability payment is literally 10% of my loan amount.  And it took that same government fewer than 90 days to garnish my wages.

Now, 21 years after Dave took the coward’s way out, I’m still struggling under the weight of his obsessive need for guitars, amps, three copies of every new album he wanted, his truck and all its accouterments, while I had a microscopic diamond in a whitegold setting, and wore the same bras and underwear I’d had since high school.

I really could have lived without this.