Between The Lines

Posted On August 14, 2021

A few months ago my mother-in-law, hereafter known as la suegra, had a bit of a health scare. Luckily, everything turned out alright for her. It was more of a mobility issue; bad arthritis of the knees. My wife and I both work, and my suegra has been the foundation that allows both of us to work full time: she watches our children during the day. During her flare up she couldn’t watch our kids for a few weeks. It was a temporary inconvenience to drive my kids to my parents house in Marin county each day, an extra 30-40 miles tacked into my commute, but what a wake up call it was for how convenient my current situation was. During this time we started calling around and making visits to day care centers in our city and even though we had a general idea of the cost, the prices floored us.

My so-called path to FIRE hinges directly on who watches my kids and how much they charge. No matter how much strategical effort and detail I put into my FI plan and forecasted FI number, it nearly took some arthritis to ricochet my FI plan–dare I say life–off course and set off a chain of events to spin me into a new direction.

This thought was a shot across the bow to my dreams of early retirement and full-time travel. I realized, not for the first time, I have nearly no control over the timing of early retirement. So much of it hinges on the actions of others and my subsequent reaction to the uncontrollable. And it’s not just early retirement, but everything in my universe I have no control over. Every morning when I get into my truck and head out onto the freeways to commute I put my life at the mercy of strangers zipping along at high speeds beside me. My income is at the mercy of a bean counter saying I fit into the budget. My work is at the mercy of the economy. Same goes for my health and the health of those I love.

Anyway, I’m quite lucky and fortunate to be where I am due to the help of others. Nobody can properly say they’ve achieved FI alone…like raising kids it takes a village, if I may use the worn and tattered phrase. I feel as though I’m winning two fronts when it comes to my children’s upbringing. We have the peace of mind of family watching our kids and our kids get a healthy dose of Latino culture.

For anyone pursuing FI with kids, childcare is part of the program, an element that can’t be looked at through a pure fiscal lens. The cheapest option is probably not the best option when it comes to paying for the care of offspring. Here’s a little bit about how we make do and why I feel fortunate.

Prior to my suegra watching my daughters, we took our oldest to one of those professional daycare centers when she was 2. We liked this place. Though it came with a hefty bill. The younger the kids are, the more expensive child care is. The security was top notch, almost jail like, with one of those airlock type vestibules at the entrance, fingerprint scanners, and cameras in every corner. The classroom settings helped our daughter socialize and start to learn her basic letters and shapes at an early age. The kids were separated out into classrooms divided up by age. And each classroom had one or two teachers. We received daily reports when we picked her up, what she ate, what she did.

Pretty good system if you ask me.

When daughter number 2, came around in 2017, it so happened that my suegra was thinking about retiring. She was a house cleaner and years of working had taken its toll on her knees and body. The house cleaning work wasn’t as steady as it had been in years past. Her clients began to age and move to nursing homes…or die.

My wife and her mother were able to make an arrangement that satisfied both of our needs. My suegra would be able to stop working sooner and get paid a bit more than she was as a cleaner. Of course, at first, she didn’t want the money, but let’s be honest, watching kids is work, whether they are grandchildren or not.

So we pay my suegra about half what we would have paid for 2 kids at that fancy daycare and we buy her groceries. Food for the kids and staple items for her. With 2 kids in professional daycare, it would be more than my home mortgage a month. In our case it would be around $2500 a month for chilcare.

spanish

The best benefit of this arrangement, after the peace of mind of having family watch our kids, is that my suegra speaks more Spanish than English. She spent half her life in El Salvador, and her house and the way she runs it is steeped in that culture. Vegetables and fruit trees out back, a cup of water on top of the refrigerator, candles burning on the counters, Telemundo on tv, beans steadfast on the stove. I see this as a fantastic benefit for my kids. Part of the Latino culture of speaking Spanish wouldn’t be lost on my children the way it was for me, or at least the way it felt lost for me growing up.

My parents were both born in the United States and speak better English than Spanish, though English is both my parent’s 2nd language. And they never taught me or my brothers to speak Spanish.

Things were different for my folks when they grew up. Both of them were born here in the ’50s and graduated high school in the early ’70s. It was a very bad thing to speak Spanish back then. My father would get suspended from school for speaking Spanish with his friends if a teacher overheard.

My mother’s father forbid that Spanish be spoken in their household. The mindset back then, was that Spanish would only hold you back or get you in trouble. This led to much of my family quickly trying to extinguish their culture in order to fit in…probably not dissimilar to what immigrants from across the oceans did in other decades.

It’s what you do in America. You fit in.

stuck between

Times have changed. Now speaking Spanish is an asset. Parents pay to have their children immersed in another language at school. It’s easier to get a job if you speak a second language. And here in California, Spanish really is the second language of the state. The United States having more Spanish speakers than Spain.

It’s assumed, everywhere I go, because of my looks, that I speak Spanish. I actually grew up quite embarrassed that I couldn’t speak Spanish well. I felt as though I were somehow letting down my culture, family, and the expectations of others. To top it off, some Latinos look down upon me in thinly veiled disdain. There’s even a Spanish word they have for people like me: an Americanized Latino, called “pocho”, which translated means rotten fruit.

My grandparents didn’t like that I didn’t speak Spanish either. Not to mention my youthful unwillingness to eat a jalapeño with my meals or try some menudo as a picky eating kid; of course, now I eat everything under the sun. But back then it was like an insult to my grandparents that I didn’t like their hardcore Mexican food.

“Come on, are you Mexican or not? Why don’t you want to eat this?” My grandfather would often ask me jokingly.

He may have been joking, but it really did make me question my cultural identity. I’m only one generation away from being born in Mexico and probably living a very rough life on a ranch. Luckily, I was born here, an American, so why would I question my lack of Mexican-ness?

I’ve always been sort of stuck in the middle because of this. Not Mexican enough according to those who would call me pocho and make fun of my Spanish. And not American enough for others who take one look at me and make a conclusion.

On the job site as a carpenter, I’ve felt this gray area between cultures acutely. But with the bad comes some good. I can trace back my start in leadership to translating for management from English to Spanish. This helped me get used to telling people older than me what to do, and also made me comfortable dealing with the haters who looked just like me, but would stab me in the back the first chance they could because I spoke flawless English.

Even now I walk between worlds with ease. Being in the office there are times when I feel out of place among the nearly all college graduates who habituate the office side of construction. When talk comes up about fraternities and college days, I don’t have much to say. It reminds me of the obscured barrier I would feel working on Mexican crews with not much to say because Spanish isn’t my first language. More importantly, I’ve been able to benefit from my chameleon status, shifting back and forth from the rough field side to the white-collar office side with ease. Which I think benefits my leadership style, especially since there are many more foreman leaders on the job who live in this world between the lines as I do.

When I go pick up my kids these days from my suegra’s house, beans are cooking on the stove. They are too aware of the story of La Llorona and the cucuy who stalks the shadows. And while they don’t speak Spanish, they understand it. My oldest daughter surprises me all the time by using Spanish words, and it fills my heart to hear her speak Spanish; because I never could at her age. I hope that one day she won’t feel a sense of embarrassment when put in a situation where it’s expected she speak Spanish as I felt many times growing up.

I speak Spanish fluently…now. Years of working as a carpenter with the paisa’s, and living in my suegra’s house for a year while we saved up to take a gap year in my 20’s, built upon the language base I had. Spending months backpacking in Latin America was the cherry on top of my bilingual success.

house of cards

The cost of childcare is an inevitable burden for parents who have dual incomes either by choice or necessity. I’m really very fortunate that my wife and I both work by choice. We could live off one of our incomes if it came to it. But that would also snuff out the flames of our FIRE pursuit a bit.

After the recent health scare for my suegra and the possibility of paying the going rate of childcare, I’ve realized that my FI date of 2026 hinges almost entirely on having low cost childcare. To pay $2,500 a month on childcare would be tough to digest…as this would be the cost we’d pay for two kids at a professional place

Of course, if it came to my suegra’s well being we’d take our kids elsewhere in a heartbeat. I’m not a heartless miser only thinking of my money.

It’s nice (and scary) to sometimes stop and focus on how thinly strung together our current life is. How delicate each connection is. And how it could all change in a moment. Cue being grateful. To look over my life and try to find any certain path to my current position would be delusional thinking. Sure I can lie to myself and say I had a plan to own a home, have a wife and kids, a specific title at work…but it would be the same as believing the daily horoscope’s vague assessment of my life.

Things have turned out well and I’m grateful for where I’ve ended up despite the chaos of my past and the uncertainty of the future. In the end, my thoughts are something I have some control over…most of the time.

What about you? How do you control the uncontrollables…if that’s even possible. Maybe a better question is how do you make peace with the lack control we have over our universe?