I remember only vaguely when college became different for me than it had been during my first two years. It was a cold day. I was on break, and I was home, talking to my father about the life that he and my mother were so good at hiding from us. It was my junior year, second year at Orono, and I was trying desperately to turn my sinking ship of an undergraduate career around. Because my father was in the Navy, we were always moving around, and always finding ourselves in new places and situations. Of course, all that suddenly became suspect in San Diego, where I remember doing anything to find money for food, gas, or just about anything. I was the oldest, so when Mom told us to do those things, I didn't question, because I already understood the necessity of what I was doing. I remember scrounging through couch cushions, I remember Mom asking me to sell my baseball card collection. Shit like that. Shit that no kid should have to endure. Well, that was only the tip of the iceberg. Turns out, nothing we owned as a family ever really stayed or amounted to anything. Our stuff constantly got repossessed, but I never knew why. Turns out that we never made payments where any of our stuff was kept; most of our family belongings from our early childhoods were auctioned off long ago. We never owned a house; turns out we always rented because we could never get approved for a mortgage, and with the debt problems that my mother would create and my father would try to combat, we could never save for a down payment. We never made any progress, and it took my father and my family years to get back to square one. So, I resolved that I would never let my life turn out to be like that. It was too painful, and that gave me enough motive to work hard, wish for a little luck, and at the very least, not put my future spouse (now Shannon) or my children through that. That motive, and my passion for educating people, got me through. So here I am. I had hoped that, by the end of this school year, that once I had a steady stake in my job, Shannon and I would close on a house and start tucking financial equity and a retirement nest egg away. My grave fear is that if something would happen to me at 50, like Shannon's father, I would have nothing to pass on, nothing to show for my life. Hell, I'm scared of that, even if I die at 75. I got a taste of just how I would want to be living at that age. One of my colleagues, Sully, has been teaching for 40 years. Owns a beautiful house, plays golf and watches TV with his wife. Brings people over, has grandkids, is happy. He taught students math for 40 years, a profession that doesn't pay as well as a mathematician could earn elsewhere. Yet, life is comfortable for the Sullivans, and they are happy and secure, and will be for the rest of their lives. Their debts are secured. They don't owe anyone a minute of their time or a dollar of their money if they wish, and they've earned it. So, naturally, I feel like, in 40 years, if Shannon and I do the same thing, we can have the same thing. Then, what's the road block, you might ask? Well, I don't know. I wish I could tell you, so that I might figure it out and make it better, but I can't. I know Shannon's paranoid about debt, and about getting started on things like houses, especially so soon. That's what we've spent the last hour and a half arguing about. I can't convince her that the idea of buying a house, of paving our own financial security, is something that you want to start as soon as possible. I can't convince her that procrastinating on that aspect of your life is no different than procrastinating on chores or homework: the longer it sits, the more you feel like you don't want to do it, or shouldn't, and then when the pressure's on, when it's 11:59:59 PM, you'll try to do it and you'll do a shitty job and it'll be too late. I can't convince her that debt is unavoidable, and can be used to your advantage; I can't convince her that it'd take a lifetime of living in apartments to save enough money to buy a house, the only method she'd ever be truly comfortable with. I feel like Shannon doesn't see what I mean, like my communication with her is somehow getting lost. All I heard from our discussion (to put it on as lightly as varnish on a bookshelf) was how a house was a not for us. We can't: it's too soon. We don't have enough money. We can't this. We don't that. All I heard was about how paranoid my wife was that our debt would swallow us whole. And it frustrates me, just because I saw that after graduation, after life had settled down and the initial anxiety of teaching had subsided, things would look more secure, and the broader picture of life as a teacher would look more promising. Debt or not, I have been convinced that whatever we have to do to get what we want in life is manageable, so long as we start early, and, like it or not, my confidence has once again been shaken, and I don't know what I did or said to make that confidence seem ambiguous or unfounded. I've been telling Shannon for years that no matter what, student loans, credit cards, mortgages, and the like, that we'll be all right, that they're simply means to an end, and that come hell or high water, we'll live the rest of our lives with more to show than if we hadn't taken on those ventures. I've never seen anyone pay for a house or a college education or a car in cash, and the people that use debt responsibly don't end up going to debtor's prison. I say these things and I know them, but I just feel like the message is lost. Not that I'm being ignored, but that my own wife doesn't believe me. I'm going to go to bed wishing she would.