On a winning streak – but victory tastes bitter when the game’s already fixed

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Over the last month, the world has changed. Or rather, it’s changed for us. We are back in the game, and I don’t mean football.

Where I was, if not exactly poor, I am now, if not exactly rich, at least relatively comfortable. We have been offered a lifeline out of the rat race where it is almost impossible to live within our means. We can now consider the possibility of luxuries rather than sticking largely to the basics. The future is looking brighter.

What’s strange that I’m not quite sure how I feel about it.

Tom got offered a job, one which is stable, future proof with a potential trajectory; not just another of the stopgap roles he has been doing to plug a hole in our finances since the financial crisis left us casualties of a broken capitalist system.

We are once again it’s winners. The upshot is, we will no longer be eligible for child benefit, but who cares, when we may now be able consider the possibility of a holiday home in Portugal? It’s a far cry from where we were just two months ago, negotiating, as a couple, the fifth job related crisis in as many years.

So we are back where we started when we first got married; with one important difference. I have a clearer idea of what I want from life, and it’s not what it was in my early twenties. The financial power balance may have swung back in Tom’s favour – as a copywriter, I’m unlikely ever to earn megabucks. But I’ve moved on from the careless materialism of my youth. These days, I want success more than stuff, and for my children, long term happiness rather than short term empty promises.

Looking at it all through the lens of hindsight, the whole experience of poverty has been hugely beneficial. It meant I had to pull my finger out of the childcare related hole I had got myself in, pull my weight, even when it meant starting from the bottom again, bringing me fulfillment –  I never really got from shoes and handbags and holidays – for all it gave me pain.

The fallout has left me wiser: more aware of the fragility of my mental health and the need for stability for my children; but also how the grind of subsistence living leaves little left for pleasantries. The world treats you differently when you are poor. You become somehow less important, more likely to be somehow at fault, less likely to be offered a hand out, or a leg-up. Either way, it becomes infinitely harder to find your feet. And you in turn are much less likely to do something for nothing: the world owes you less when you’re nobody, it seems, so why should you give it anything in return? Poverty does not make you kind, although it does make you more compassionate.

It opened my eyes to how it really is for people who manage without: not just those who have had the rug pulled from under them from their comfortable middle class existence, but those for whom living on credit is a lifetime’s reality. My levels of judgement fell, as I acclimatised to pound shops and council run services; the bare minimum provision for those who can’t afford better. You soon get the message you don’t deserve better. Poverty and idealism are uncomfortable bedfellows.

The grind eventually tested us too. Tom and I, used to a certain standard of living became angry with each other as we tried to keep up appearances. We explored other options, each of us hoping for a way out of the grind. Luckily we saw sense in staying together before it became irrecoverable. We’d come this far together for poorer. At least now we are richer, we can hope for happier times ahead.

We are lucky, in that we had the groundwork, the connections and education to pull ourselves out of our hole. My diligence and Tom’s upbeat personability combined to make it harder to accept that success was so far from reach. I rolled up my sleeves and got on with it, for all I might have sometimes complained. Tom took pride in living well on a shoestring, making even the toughest times more bearable with good food and home comforts. Netflicks became one of our biggest investments. The fact we weren’t the only ones to find ourselves on hard times made it all easier to bear. The ones that didn’t soon found excuses to to hang around in any case.

Our mutual failures nearly compounded the situation, making me spiral into a depression caused by a bitter sense of injustice. I’d always been the type to do the right thing. My education seemed to be failing me, my babies weighing me down. I quietly became a feminist and started to seethe. I don’t doubt there are plenty who end up stuck in this particular rut.

In the end though, the system provided for us – where we were being unfairly treated, we got compensation. But my faith in human nature took an almighty battering. Human decency thrives on equality, and beneath a certain level, it seems you are fair game to be dehumanised.

Money may not buy happiness. But it certainly gives you more power: power to look the part, be the places, to get the things and know the people, to access opportunities for investment that you need to be successful. It lubricates social situations, removing the grind from the everyday, removing the barriers to change that poverty sets in stone.

But poverty certainly also teaches you what being rich cannot: who your friends are, how the other half live and what their challenges are; and how it is possible to become defeated by life and compound the situation in which you find yourself. It also teaches you what you can do without.

Although it’s sometimes been a struggle, as I looked at my home and my family, newly liquid, feeling once again that life might be worth living after wall, I realised there isn’t much I need, and certainly not that which can be bought, except perhaps time.

But with power comes responsibility. I hope to retain some of the lessons of the past few years, and not just start to squander resources because I can. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that things can change and quickly, so shoring up our situation will be our first challenge as a family, to make investments that mean we are less reliant on the whim of fragile markets and sociopath bosses.

I also hope being financially better-off doesn’t make me lose focus. Being hungry for success is the best motivator there is, although  an uphill struggle mean it’s all too easy to get demotivated. So onwards and upwards. I can at least now dream of a future where  life might be easier for my children; or even think about adding to my brood, for all that might not be entirely wise.

But unless the playing field evens out for everyone, it is be a bitter sweet victory and one that is unlikely to make the future a better place for anyone in the long run.