Writing as I have lately about grandparents raising grandchildren ... and gratitude toward parents, as well ... this seems a good time to share some of my personal experience as it relates to both issues.

I'll have to go back in time, thirty-something years should about do it, to when I was single-parenting my now-grown children after their father and I divorced.

I was in my early twenties and my kids were 5-ish and 3-ish when I found myself alone and without financial support. I'd not worked any real job, having discovered that I was pregnant at 17, and my education had been interrupted, then erratic and nowhere near complete. I had no salable skills at all and lived in a small Northern California town with few opportunities available for anyone, much less for an unproved single mom with no experience in anything other than faithless husbands, laundry and diaper changing.

I needed a job right away, so I was desperate to find a quick way to learn enough of something to get one.

I had an idea: I could move to a city a few hours away and enroll in a program that would teach me a trade in a few months, then come back to Small Town, CA and support my little family.

Not a bad plan given the time and the circumstance, but with at least one hitch: I couldn't I manage to do this with my kids in tow.

I simply couldn't. I couldn't afford to work, pass through the program and pay for childcare at the same time. The program itself would be costly, and I had little in savings ... certainly not enough to cover expenses we'd need to survive for months in another city.

There was only one way I could grasp at this straw ... and that was most certainly what this would be -- a desperate, do-or-die grasp at a fragile and tentative straw ... and that would involve my mother helping me out in a couple of ways. First, I needed some financial assistance. Second, I needed her to take my kids in for the time I'd be away.

Continued in the next post.

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