CSW....You seem so smart and really great at a lot of things. Why not use those skills and find something different and that will offer benefits. If they don't appreciate what you have to offer there then you can move on with the many talents you do have. I am sorry you didn't get the raise you asked for. But try not to let it get you down. Maybe it is just a sign that you need to find something better. Somewhere that will appreciate your talents.
I hope your MRI goes well. You have made so many changes. I am sure your wife is noticing. I can understand that she wants someone who could support a family and wants to make her dreams come true. You can be that man. You just have to find the right job out there and prove to her you can stick with it.
csw...You really are confronting so much at once...your finances, the marital probs, your health issues, and so on. You are working hard and have a lot to be proud of...you will not be spending your life in loneliness. Squirrel will stay a squirrel...you are changing and growing every day.
I agree with the others. You have a job right now, but it's obviously not exactly what you want...but you ARE free to look for another, surely your friend would understand that you must do what you need to do.
Has she re-written history in a way that prohibits you from measuring up, or have the things she wanted such as college paid for before kids were born, been her goals all along?
My guess is that it is re-written history. If not, it wasn't very practical to begin with. That doesn't mean that you dismiss her desires, but you do have to separate the doable from the not.
10 years ago, I had a 15 year old daughter that was already for college (sans the maturity), and I was 70 grand in debt on credit cards alone. I had just started a new technology business with a very high overhead, I had no money, a business that had just failed because a venture capitalist got nervous and pulled the plug, and no income.
I had stupidly put most of my money into the failed business since it was only a couple of months away from being profitable - or so I thought. It failed anyway.
I took a huge risk and basically finished myself off - financially by starting the second business. For a couple of years, MrsNOP and I cried, got angry, sold off assets, ate beans and rice a couple of meals a day (seriously) and slowly but surely, our new business started to make a profit. Three years from the start we were in the black. Five years from the start, we had paid off ALL of our debt. We are now in our tenth year.
The reason I tell you this is simple. Situations may change slowly, but they do change. Ultimately, unless you try, and sometimes even take a risk, you will never know what might have been, or how far you might have come.
I agree that a low wage job sucks, but look at what you can learn from it, and eventually apply to your own business. Opportunity is where you find it, and what you make of it.
So, get up, dust your ass off, and get back in there :-)
-NOPkins-
I will ferret out an affair at any opportunity.
-An affair is the embodiment of entitlement, fueled by resentment and lack of respect. -An infidel will remain unreachable so long as their sense of entitlement exceeds their ability to reason.
csw, I agree with NOP (gee, this is starting to be a pattern ). Look for another job, one with benefits, but don't quit the job you have.
Don't let yourself slip down that slippery slope into giving up. You've made great strides. You might consider starting a gratitude journal. Every day write down one thing to be grateful for. Make it a running list. Every day you have to add one new thing.
Don't analyze and fret too much. Just do what's on your plate in front of you.
My husband talks daily of starting our own business so that he can get away from the corporate world. I keep telling him it's not all wine and roses but he maintains that it's better than working for a place in which the worker bees work their asses off to make a select handful of executives rich. IOW, he'd rather be poor at his own hands than poor at someone else's.
C, Rome was not built in a day. So you didn't get the raise; we all know you deserve it, you know you deserve it. They should (rightfully) expect that you will go looking for something else. So do it.
Lemme ask you this: Do you have to have W's salary in order to pay the bills?
Oh and I know people say this all the time but, honestly, it is true. Children are not all that expensive. It is truly possible to do a great job raising your kids on a severe budget.
I was thinking of you last night, too, and I think the next thing your wife will want to see from you is some genuine interest in having kids. Do you want them as badly as she does? Just curious.
Hang in there, C. I know it seems dismal sometimes. You are doing everything that you can possibly do and, though it aint fast, it is working.
CSW, You are doing a great job at the man o'steel thing. I think all of your friends here can see your progress, and it is both substantial and amazing. Keep up the good work, you are doing fantastic.
HP, starting a business is likely both the scariest and hardest thing I've done, but I've never looked back. I was fortunate in that my line of work requires a relatively low overhead (basically a top of the line computer workstation and a suite of certain CAE software). I was able to wrangle deals with the software companies whose products I use (CAE design software, some of which is many tens of thousands of dollars per seat) wherein I promote the product to my clients in the course of my normal work and get a deeply discounted price in return. I also had the advantage that MrsGGB was still working for a large well known computer and printer company and receiving a decent benefits package when I quit my day job, so there was a cushion there. I can tell you that starting his own business, he is going to work harder than he's ever worked for the company. There will be times he has to put in long hours, and he's going to need you 100% behind him even when he's immersed in the business to the point where you and the kids are being shortchanged for his time. There will likely be times, especially when he is starting out, when you'll be eating nothing but rice, noodles, beans, and PB&J to stretch the little money that is left over when an order doesn't come in or a customer renegs on a big invoice. Those are the downsides. The upside is the potential of doing quite well for yourself, the personal satisfaction of it being yours, and the fact that your work is enriching you, not some corporation.
Oh, that wasn't what I was planning to respond to here. HP is right, children don't have to be expensive but you do have to fight the urge to let them have anything they want (it is good for them to not have everything they desire as well). You can get perfectly good(often times brand new with the tags still on them) kids clothing and toys at less than 10 cents on the dollar by shopping garage sales and now even ebay. We get chided somewhat because of our clothing "store" in the basement. Mrs GGB has what must be 30 huge bins of kids clothing in various sizes she's collected over the years and passed down kid to kid. When the kids outgrow something, it gets washed, and if still serviceable goes into the appropriate size bin where it is stored until another kid needs it. Boxes of clothing have been circulated through ups to other family members, and stuff we haven't seen in 10 years has made it back here to be used again. As far as toys go....well, let's just say toys breed. Leave a pile of toys in a dark basement for several months, and when you come back there seems to be more.
Lunches: kids don't need a hot lunch. There is nothing wrong with a brown bag containing a PB&J, a piece of fruit, a couple cookies and an unbreakable container of koolaid. You can pack more than a dozen lunches like that for the cost of one hot school lunch, and at least a half dozen of these for the cost of one grocery store pre-packaged lunch like a lunchables. We make our kids pack their own lunches, starting right in first grade. It teaches them responsibility. If they don't make their lunch, they go hungry, and its their problem. (A 4 year old can make a PB&J if given a chance). Yeah, we've occasionally gotten a note from the school saying something like S6 didn't have a lunch or lunch money, so we bought him a lunch, please send in money for his lunch. He did that one time. When the school called us about it, we told them do not feed him, it was his responsibility to make a lunch and he didn't do it, so he's got to pay the consequences. Well they fed him anyway. That night we made his favorite meal for dinner, but gave him a PB&J and told him he already had his hot meal for the day. It never happened again.
My point is that you can raise kids on a shoestring. Don't buy into the common misconception that the kids need the best of everything to get a leg up. Based on my observations, the kids that have to do without come through much better prepared for life, and tend to be much more resourceful when it comes to getting things they want. Make do with what you have or do without.
Also it helps if you like homemade things vs. storebought things. I have a brother in law who thinks that storebought is always best. He would rather have a frozen waffle popped into the toaster than fresh hot waffles off the iron. Baffles the shiit outta me. He truly thinks things are of a higher quality if you buy them. Me, I think the quality is MUCH lower because that company is trying to make a profit, not make you happy.
So I make a lot of things instead of buying them. This keeps costs down, I feel like I'm giving my family the best I can and I feel good because I know what they are eating, etc. Some of the things I make are: baby food, baby wipes (the storebought kind are hard on baby's skin), some clothes for the kids, bath and body products, all meals that we eat..I make and freeze things like calzones for H's lunches, Christmas and birthday presents, things for the kids like playdough, silly putty, bubbles, etc. ETC ETC
This bb is my only leisure; all of my other time is spent doing junk for the family. I like it!
GGB, he and I have read books on starting your own business and the pitfalls of it and remember stories like yours from the books. I know it would be hard (on all of us) but he is just not cut out to work in the corporate world. He's not good at it because he is not ruthlessly ambitious and yet he wants to make a good living for us. It will take a lot of thought and planning and 4 weeks isn't enough time to do squat. I told him to take whatever job he has to, in order to pay the bills, and we will slowly but surely work our way towards owning our own business, if that lifestyle is still calling him.
Hp.......Would love to have your recipe for Calzone's. Yummm I have ordered them from this Italian restaurant by us. But would be clueless how to make them.
Cally, I am so weird and never make the same recipe twice. I don't know why and I'm sure it drives H crazy, lol. As soon as he finds a batch he likes, the freezer fills up with something else. I make bread dough and cut out little circles and fill them and bake them. Sometimes I use frozen bread dough, like the Rhodes brand, sometimes I just make it as I like to make bread. The fillings..I put whatever I have on hand in there, his favorite is sausage and cheese with a little tomato sauce. I've also done ham and swiss cheese, cubed, or chicken and broccoli, etc. I fold the circles over and crimp it with a fork and bake them for about 20 minutes.
The only bad part is wrapping those suckers in foil, individually. Takes forever and I've got little kids clamoring for a bite and stealing them while I'm wrapping them up. Quite a few times H has opened his lunch to discover it's already been 'tested'. LOL
). Look for another job, one with benefits, but don't quit the job you have. 
Yummm 
I have ordered them from this Italian restaurant by us. But would be clueless how to make them.