in medias res

I am, roughly speaking, in the middle of my life. Middle aged. 47 years along. I am the same age my father was when I turned 30. By that point in time, my father had raised all three of his children, divorced my mother, remarried, retired. I, however, took a slightly different path through my life. My path goes like this...

I'm 47, still working at a job that seems more imperiled with each passing month. I have a wonderful wife (14 years and counting) and four children under the age of 11. My son Owen is almost 11. My daughter Emily is almost 8. My son Roby just turned 3 and my youngest, Ursula, will be two months old this week. We live in a modest home in a relatively modest suburban area, keep to ourselves as much as possible and try diligently to stay out of trouble. I work from home (though that is also currently imperiled). We homeschool our children, though not, as is most common these days, for religious reasons. We pay our taxes and vote regularly and try to help our families as much as we can. We do what we can to live within our means, though our means do not seem to be quite keeping pace with the cost of basic necessities, which don't seem to care whether or not my company has stopped giving raises and whether or not the bulk of the work my company does is now done in India.

Still, we do what we can, try to work hard, don't waste money on stupid things (neither my wife nor I drink, smoke dope, take pills, gamble, or in any way throw our hard-earned money down the drain.

Today, for example, I finally went out and bought a new toilet, to replace the one that has given us trouble (blockages, overflows, etc) for years. We're very excited about installing it tonight. Few things, really, say "living high on the hog" like getting a new toilet put in before nightfall.

Perhaps you can see already why this is an anxious age, both for me individually and for all of us collectively. I'm a 47 year old man trying to carve out a living in an increasingly hostile economic environment, with a passel of kids who will require maintenance for at least another 18 years. The future, more than ever before, is hard to predict, sometimes even to imagine, and as middle class Americans without high potency skills or rich family members, it sometimes seems as if we're constantly poised on the edge of a balancing beam. And the beam is being rocked maliciously by angry high schoolers who seem to take a perverse pleasure in the thought of watching us, collectively, fall. And there are alligators underneath the beam. Hungry alligators that, once we've fallen and they've eaten us, will themselves be captured by guys in muscle shirts and sold for their meat and glistening hide.

At times like these, or, even more to the point, at times like the times in the middle of the night when I wake up in a cold sweat, weighed down by fears that despite our best efforts my wife and I may not be able to provide for our children, I wonder how it is that I got here. How did I decide my way to this uncomfortable spot? Keep in mind that I love my life. I love my family, my wife, my modest suburban home in our modest suburban neighborhood, my back yard and my front yard, the trees along the property line and the lovely gardens my wife has created and filled with lovely growing things. I love my old car and my old pickup that I can't plug an iPad into (don't have one anyway) but that get me where I want to go and back again. I love everything we have and everything we've built and everything that seems just around the corner. What I don't love, and can't quite seem to escape, is the constant nagging fear that sooner or later, one way or another, someone is going to try to take it away from me, away from us. We suddenly find ourselves in a world where, even if we do nothing overtly wrong, we can end up bereft. We live in a time where the only rule, really, is that there are no longer any rules, and that you can do (and apparently should do) anything and everything that you can get away with.

Now, as a person who sincerely believes in fair play and integrity and honesty and so forth, I find myself more and more at a disadvantage. In a dog eat dog world, what happens to the folks who just don't like the taste of dog?

So let this be my inaugural post in what I hope will become an ongoing exploration of the state of the middle class from a viewpoint within that middle class, from someone who is actively and currently attempting to negotiate the choppy waters of modern economic and political life. I want to make sense of who I am, how I came to be here, and how I get to somewhere more secure for the sake of my wife and my children and, I guess, myself as well.