Part Three: The Arithmetic

Six children, one income, and a two-bedroom apartment.

I made forty-one thousand dollars in 2011.

I want to put the actual number down because people say I worked double shifts in these stories and it sounds heroic and what it actually is, is arithmetic.

Rent was nine hundred and forty.

Childcare was impossible — I priced it in the October of 2010 for a nine-month-old and a pair of five-year-olds and it came to more than I earned, which is a sentence that a great many people in this country have said out loud in a kitchen.

So we did the thing that everybody does, which is the shift jigsaw.