Thread by @RoadsideMum

Not even halfway into the monthly payday cycle, and I am already running alarmingly low on funds. Every fucking month is like this. Every one. I can't even spend what energy I do have on productive steps forward out of the mire because I am spending my mental energy on making do.

It's so much more work to be poor. Imagine you can never replace anything and everything you have was either old or low quality to start with, and you have to juggle work arounds constantly... I'll illustrate...

Imagine you have so little money for food, you now take risks on what's gonna be ok. Stuff you never really liked but it was in the reduced. A past-best-before company your mate rates. Whatever came out of the foodbank last time you had to. Dinner becomes a game of chance.

Which means if the kids are gonna eat it or spit it out in disgust and horror and it's gonna go all down their new cream-marl patterned top (which was from a £5 clearance outlet anyway), and then squeal like you are killing them. 🙄

Of course it would help if the kids were seated at the dining table (which is tatty and the laminate is peeling off the legs but nevermind, it was free off Facebook), because the dining chairs need gluing again- a regular occurrence. New chairs are totally off the budget.

Nevermind dinner, coz now the child in the previously cream marl top has managed to get something brown all down the front, and you are fairlt sure that needs to be treated like soy sauce and got off right now, so you chastise the kid, leave your tea & head for the bathroom.

While you are standing there, using your knuckles to scrub possible-soy-sauce from a £5 marl top, you pray it's not got wrecked through a combination of all the ways in which you can't afford anything normal (furniture, food everyone knows they like, tops that weren't £5, etc).

You can hear noise in the kitchen but you haven't quite got the mark off the top yet, so you shout, and the feet scurry. You get the stain out, drop the top in the laundry basket and come back to find, the kid has helped themself to the last sliced bread and all the chicken roll.

Which now means that unless you go to the shop right now (where you will pay over the odds because it's Sunday and the supermarkets are shut) you have no bread for breakfast. Since there was only a slice each left anyway it would have been egg on toast, and now it can't be.

Lunch is also buggered as well, because without chicken roll, "salad" will literally be lettuce, tomato, and cucumber and that's just depressing. You are pretty sure the shop doesn't have chicken roll, only ham- the pricey kind. You could use the eggs maybe? Yes, the eggs.

So that means breakfast needs to be porridge and that's gonna need a pint of milk... And that means... You are gonna have to go easy on the coffee today unless you want to be drinking it black... And you don't.

By the time you get back to your food it's cold as well as yukky.

Smirking child with the chicken roll sandwich has finished it off already, not even a bite for you, and there you are, eating cold brownness (two portions because you can't waste food) wishing you had just made pasta as everyone eats that. But the colander broke. So that's hard.

And if any of that sounds far fetched... You have no experience at all of poverty because firstly that was my actual afternoon today and what is more, it resembles the amount of everyday, ordinary, constant making-do going on in the homes of 4.3 million children day in day out.