Frustrated

I'm so frustrated about my situation in life right now. I wish I could either be the normal kind of stay at home mom that doesn't have to work or be a working mom. Instead, I'm in between and being stuck between a rock and a hard place. The online tutoring creates so much tension and so many issues in my marriage. I think it's the main source of our problems, yet it's the only way I can bring in the income that I need to pay MY bills. Right now I have to tutor around 9 hours per week in order to make enough money to just cover my bills plus the cell phones and Internet because that's my contribution. I was breaking up my hours and doing a couple each night but that wasn't working because I never felt like I got any nights off and then it really interrupted the middle of the evening. Also, a lot of time I would get stuck tutoring longer so I decided to change my schedule. Now I work one hour on Sunday nights and then 6-10 on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The time goes by much quicker doing 4 hour blocks and then I'm only really tied up 2 nights out of the week.

The new schedule is working much better for me but it seems like no matter what schedule I have it never works for R. That's where the feeling of being between a rock and a hard place comes into light. Last night he asked me if I was going to keep tutoring after I get a teaching job???? Are you kidding, do you think I want to torture myself. The only reason I tutored when I worked before was because I knew that I needed the job in the future, e.g. now when I'm unemployed. I had to keep it up or else I would have been let go and I knew that I didn't want to go through the hiring process again. In fact I thought that I would have been promoted by now and that's another reason I wanted to keep going because I could work less because I would make more money.

This month finally I am done barely getting by because I got my student loan refund. This just means that I have a little cushion so that I don't have to worry that my tutoring check won't get into my account in enough time to pay my bills on time. I'm not spending it on anything for myself or using it for anything other than to sit in my account and just be there in case of an emergency or to help me get by during the summer when my tutoring hours are cut significantly. Now, R wants me to use it for groceries, which is fine except he insists on buying expensive food items each week to sustain this diet that he is trying to follow (e.g. $5 cartons of egg whites, $4 cartons of V8 juice, $9 bottles of wine, etc....) I don't really want to agree to cover groceries when he's buying a ton of stuff that I don't use, which just so happen to be the most expensive items on our shopping list. I know this sounds selfish but I can just see my money dwindling down to nothing very quickly and I'm going to be cut down to 5 hours if I'm lucky this summer which means that I'm going to be about $200 short for my bills. Then come fall I'm going to have to start paying back my student loans. This is a big pressure weighing on my shoulders. It's not like R can cover my bills because he simply doesn't make enough money. That student loan money is going to have to last me during times where I can't raise enough from tutoring.

Well that's enough venting for now.