Hey look, it’s my mom!(tried to be a math teacher, could never secure anything but substitute, refused to move outside the city for employment on another city, refused to “work beneath” her, my family was mostly single-income from my dad growing up)

Rant ahead: feel free to SKIP

She finally got a job when she had 0 calls in a year for a substitute position. Working for a hospital (hypocritically because of someone she knew getting her the job when she had been raging against that very thing in teaching positions for years) in their government insurance area. Or “beneath her” as she would have once said.

It gave me no small sense of Schadenfreude to see her “stoop” to my level after years of “I told you, you should have gone to college” the sheer unmitigated gall of which I clearly still hold a grudge over. I wanted to go to a tech school for welding. I could still have attended my AP science electives before going to welding class. And since nobody ever set a cent aside for college, it would have given me a way to pay for it if I decided to go. And most importantly I would probably have had my own house by now. Welders in this area get paid quite well. Especially if you can get in one of the factories nearby, they’ve got the best medical plan I’ve ever seen but apparently they’re owned by some European company so it makes sense.