The Employed Housewife

I'm sitting here waiting for the dryer to finish its cycle and am flipping through photos on Facebook to pass the time. You know how Facebook works. You end up adding most of the people that you went to school with, regardless of your current relationship with them. If you were friendly to each other in school, then you're Facebook friends.

This, as you know, allows me to be nosy and look at peple's pictures and try to figure out what their life is like to an extent. That's what brings me to this post.

There are a number of people on my friends list that post pictures of their life constantly, which is fine. It doesn't bother me one way or the other because I don't have to look at them. Through these pictures, I can see the inside of their home, how they dress, places they go, who they spend time with, etc, and usually makes me happy for them or sad for them.

Today I was looking through a few albums of a girl that I know, and I always remember her as being a nice, fun, happy person, but from what I can remember, she grew up in a world of financial difficulty, and due to the neighborhood that she lived in, was probably exposed to a lot of things that a kid shouldn't have been exposed to. In the photos I saw of her, it seems like her life is no different now. She seems live in the same type of neighborhood, if not the same one that she grew up in. She seems happy, which is good, but I can't help but wonder if she ever really tried to change her life for the better.

I wonder this about people all the time. I didn't have an easy childhood. We didn't have a nice house. We didn't have a nice (or even decent), car. My mom worked really hard to support her children and we just always had troubles along the way. When I started kindergarten, I knew then that I wanted to be a teacher. I didn't know yet that it was a profession that required college, since most 5 year-old kids don't know what college is, but I remember learning later that I would have to go to college and that college cost money.

I didn't really care though. The older I got, the more I was convinced that I wanted to have a different life than what my mom had. She worked hard and did the best she could. I tell her this still and I'm grateful for that, but that doesn't mean that I want to follow in her exact footsteps. So I made it happen. And my siblings have made it happen. My older sister is graduating in May with her Bachelor's and I couldn't be more proud, especially since she got some kind of award for her hard work. She's paid her way through school while having a child. Just because her life didn't go exactly according to her plan, didn't stop her from continuing in achieving goals she set for herself.

So maybe it's because of the way that my mind works that it makes me sad for the people who never try. It's one thing to try and fail, but keep trying. It's different to try and fail never try again, or to just never try to change their life in the first place.