My life in New York was many things, but most of all it was a story.  And as I’m writing that story, I remember beyond the romance and the friendships to an especially difficult part: my steady financial decline throughout five years there.  I remember getting my first paycheck, seeing how much was taken out for taxes, considering how much I was paying for rent, and realizing, This will just not do. So I found a friend who was looking to move and we became roommates a little further downtown in a much smaller space.  My new apartment had no view of the Chrysler Building or the East River, but it was a thousand dollars less a month for me, and there was a perfectly good subway to take me to Central Park whenever I wanted.  I was back on solid ground.

Then I wasn’t.  When my first tax season in New York hit, it hit hard.  All of a sudden I found myself having to question and defend my reasons for being there, and if they were worth the cost.  Because, there in front of me in black and white and with IRS stamped on it, was the official bill that the city was charging me for life upon its island paradise.  And that bill was STEEP.

I called the Dad crying, I found a friend-recommended accountant, I prayed.  And somehow (hmm…wonder how that could be?) I made it through April 15th, year after year.  But only by the skin of my teeth, as I found myself–a letters-behind-my-name, higher-educated professional–budgeting for gum and toilet paper. New York giveth, and New York taketh away, but that balance remained in the positive column as I found friendship, love, and faith surrounding me daily.  I grabbed my bottle of Trader Joe’s Two Buck Chuck, threw down my towel, and sat on my fire escape as the world walked by my window.  And I was happy.

But that’s me, a white upper-middle-class female who has never faced the threat of homelessness or had to choose between paying the bills or eating.  I knew that, with all the financial difficulty life in New York presented, I was choosing it for myself and could ease the strain whenever I wanted by simply leaving.  I was poor, but only by Manhattan standards.  Maybe I sat in the rear balcony for Broadway shows, but I still saw them.

And then when the BF proposed becoming The Husband and we said those vows, he did it with the understanding that not only was he gaining no dowry, but he was actually acquiring debt when he took me on.  I owed the Dad some bank for his sponsorship of my New York Assistance Program, and I had spent six years in those hallowed academic halls racking up student loan debt to go along with post-name letters.  So he said I do to sickness, health, and the opposite of wealth that day on the beach.  Good thing his debt was less than mine and his savings greater, because last year we shelled out for our share of the American dream: two cars, a house, rooms (to go) full of furniture, a Georgia dental license, a honeymoon, a down payment (literally, and on our future).  When he opened our tax paperwork a couple of weeks ago, I saw the calculations whirring around his head before he asked it: Where did all our money go? But he knew, and I knew: we were standing in it, were surrounded by it.  In a year, we had gone from an engaged New York couple with two banking accounts, one anemic and one healthy, to a married suburban couple with a joint account that had been left ravaged and gasping for air.

The Sis quoted Ingrid Bergman to me the other day: “Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.”  It made me think of how much of my life was spent heading for something, a race to a finish line.  How after all those years, I finally reached that self-constructed endpoint and was left wondering what life was supposed to look like beyond it.  When so many of the big questions have been answered, we are left sitting on our sectionals in our living rooms and driving around in our cars listening to XM radio as life goes on, stability replacing drama and routine replacing angst.  Each generation amasses more stuff than the one before it, counting vacation homes instead of rationing sugar.  We are overeducated, overfed, over-stimulated, over-blessed.  And we still look around and wonder what more there is.

I know what it’s like to go from thinking that God is good because of all you have, to knowing he is good because he is all you have. To hit every rock bottom there is–emotional, financial, spiritual–and be lifted back up by a faithfulness that includes and exceeds all forms of practicality and imagination.  It wouldn’t be fair, or nice, to wish that kind of descent on anyone else, but what I do hope for is that regardless of the road we each take, it is a path beyond our efforts to keep control and bigger than our prior planning would allow.  Accompanied by a faith that knows the one outside ourselves not as ATM or executive assistant, but as everything.

After the honeymoon, I drove to Wells Fargo (nee Wachovia) and closed my account, receiving for my efforts a sad little check that I deposited into our new joint account across the street at B of A.  Five years, plus the twenty-eight before it, on a sheet of paper to be combined with what he had saved.  All of him, plus all of me.  It may not have looked like much–but it was everything.