Pop. Pop. Pop.
My 2 year-old daughter was sitting in my lap as I leaned down to pop puffs of air into her ears. The room was quiet and so was I as I went back and forth, left ear to right ear, as he shrugged with a "Stop..." and "Do it again..."
My wife sat next to me as we both looked at the stack of white paper in front of us. Punctuated with labels that stuck out like fringes, X marking the exact spot where we were supposed to sign, being instructed to initial every page (I ended up initializing completely blank pages in the rage to push this process as fast as I could to its end) and at one point I just laughed to myself. It wasn't a real laugh if we're comparing laughs I give to a comedian versus the kind of laugh that you see in the movies, the Dark Knight has a good example, when someone who has been caught up in tomfoolery is caught but can't help but to let out a few feel good titters. I wasn't a bad guy but I sure felt like one. Our entire lives, everything that we owned, was inventoried, accounted for, written down, budgeted, marked, notated and reflected back to us in black and white honesty. Some people talk about the fragility of life and how weird that the contents of your life could fit inside a truck but it's an entirely different thing to think how your entire life could fit even easier on a pile of 8.5"x 11" squares. The mound of paperwork, on which I would later reflect, reminded me of when I had to sign a similar mountain of white goodness when I refinanced my "second" home in 2006.
It'll take a little while for me to explain why it will always be the "second" home but here is the point: I need an outlet, a semi-permeable, quasi-private forum in which to talk about where me and my family went wrong. This is a story of how we found ourselves in Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Where we're, literally, headed, what I've learned and what it's like to say, "I can't afford to be in my life anymore."
