What do you do when you work more than you do anything?

[ILoveUMama]

I work full-time at a preschool 8am-5pm Mon-Fri, 10:30pm-7am Fri & Sat. and Clean my family church 4 hours Sat. On top of that there is the taking care of the children, dog, house, and car chores. By the time all is said and done all I want to do is sleep. I feel I am working and never able to enjoy the life I am working so hard to support. My fiance works full-time and goes to school full-time going from 6am-12pm Mon-Fri and has to take care of yard work and house maintenance on Sat & Sun so he feels the same way I do. We have been together for 5 years and have 2 boys and can not even get married because it will hurt us financialy causeing him to lose is grant for school because we make to much money together even though our expenses are literally right in line with our income leaving no wiggle room. Neither of us can quit our current jobs unless we fine one better paying job. Jobs are hard to come by in general and finding one that pays more than we currently make is almost impossible. We live basicly too. No cable TV, no internet, no extra fun anything money wise simply because we can't afford it we barely make the bills. Any suggestions on how to get assistance or do we have to just struggle like this forever?

Am I clear in thinking the cleaning you do for the church is voluntary i.e. not paid employment?

Also "8am-5pm Mon-Fri, 10:30pm-7am Fri & Sat".. do you mean you finish work at 5pm Fridays, then go back out for a 10.30pm start and work until Saturday morning at 7am or is that a typo?

There's a few things to clear up but from what I can tell any normal person would find the above hard to manage with - you need to start paring down anything which isn't absolutely needed for your family's survival and be ruthless about cutting some of it down to reclaim some of your time. E.g. I went through a mini tantrum when we both started back fulltime (so less time than I'd been used to for sorting kids, housework around paid work), I found that I was the one driving a lot of the chores that I was getting stressed about.

Some examples off the top of my head:

I don't iron anything other than shirts, which H does when he does his. Sure, the bedsheets are wrinkled and perhaps my clothes don't have that lovely pressed feeling, but doing 4hrs of ironing every week meant it was 4 hrs less for doing the really much more important stuff like cleaning the bathroom or taking the kids to the park.

I also cut out some of the meals that were taking too much faff to prepare - told you I was ruthless! A great excuse to cut out some of the regular crap from the diet too. Salads can be literally thrown together with a tin of tuna on very busy nights, and fruit is a lovely dessert. We eat a lot of salad in this house! Also batch cooking at the weekends makes life much easier.

I'm sure someone else will come up with better tips, e.g. more flylady stuff but those give you a start on what to look for - maybe another tip is to learn to say No to things if some people are asking favours of you, like minding their kids after school regularly, or dropping them off somewhere - learn to avoid people who are time vampires! the same goes for school volunteering stuff - i could cope with this when i was part time but i felt very guilty when i went back fulltime.... saying no... so i didn't, ended up running myself ragged. I've cut back on all that stuff, because i've had to. it's just life

No there are unfortuanatly no typos. I work from 8am-5pm get my kids home and fed then daddy takes them to do something fun and gets them ready for bed while I nap for a few hours then I go into work at 10:30pm-7am at Children's Hospital. Then come home and sleep about 6 hours and clean the church for pay.

The problem is I have school loans, medical bills from both me and my boys, a house payment and a car payment not to mention gas prices being so high and they total up to almost as much as we make. I get alot of our food from our church food pantry and from our small garden. I get all our clothes and toys and such from friends and family to help out and only buy stuff from consignment stores when needed. I basically feed my family uncooked foods like sandwiches and salads that are easily prepared or microwaveable dishes that do not take long if I had to really cook a meal I might break down and cry. My chores consist of doing dishes, laundry, changing beds, and keeping bathrooms and kitchen clean. My husband takes care of the yard work and trash along with vacuming and mopping so our chores are pretty evenly devided. My boys, bless them help keep their rooms clean but they are 3 and 1 so they still need my help. Beleive me we have cut back more than we ever wanted and my husband hates that we have to accept charity from others instead of being able to do it all alone.

Luckly his schooling is not going to cost us because he got a grant that pays for it all. I am not even working in the field that I worked so hard to get a degree in because the jobs in the field do not pay much. I feel I wasted those 6 yrs.

I know things will be better after my fiance gets done with school, but that is 2 years away as well as my oldest son starting school which will help with not needing daycare for him. Until then though I feel stuck and overwhelmed.

The only reason I can talk to you now is that a friend gave me a laptop she was going to throw out and my fiance fixed it and my job allows us to use their wireless on our lunch breaks. With everything going to the internet it would be helpful to have access at our home, but it doesn't fit the buget.