By 2013, I was struggling badly. I had gotten myself into a horrendous amount of debt. Every single month, checks were bouncing, and the balance in my bank accounts were in the red. I was behind on those two mortgages I had. Debt collectors were constantly calling me demanding their money. I was desperate and depressed. Particularly when I went to the grocery store. I calculated every single dollar in my head and made myself so anxious, I was actually shaking at the checkout. My credit union was advertising free financial counseling, so I made an appointment to see this financial planner. She told me to declare bankruptcy. Even the financial planner had no hope for me. I was in ruin – a financial failure.
My financial salvation came not from Bankruptcy but from a most unlikely of sources. My son’s father was begrudgingly paying for private Montessori education for our son. He had argued to the courts to no avail to force me to pay for part of the tuition, but the courts agreed – I simply did not have the funds. So, it was either public education, or his Dad would have to pay for the private school alone. My son’s father has no idea how grateful I am that he fronted the bill for the Montessori education. Public education has its merits, I’m sure, but it does not have the Montessori Fundamental Needs.
The Fundamental Needs is a learning tool within the Montessori educational system that allows students to analyze and learn about culture. The basic premise is that all cultures share some basic concepts – fundamental needs that reoccur throughout all humanity. These needs are first broken down into two main categories: Material Needs and Spiritual Needs. Material needs are readily identifiable; under this umbrella are the needs of Food, Shelter, Clothing, Transportation and Defense. Applying the word “spiritual” before “needs” is likely to bring out the skeptics, however if you think about the study of culture, Spiritual Needs are often readily identifiable as well. Under the Spiritual Needs are Religion, Culture and Vanity.
I learned about these Fundamental Needs from my son as he prepared a homework assignment. The assignment had a simple premise: in order to understand and connect to other cultures, one first has to understand their own culture. He had to look at his own world and assemble a chart with photographs of him and by him that captured the essence of what he thought these Fundamental Needs meant in his own personal environment. As he began the assignment, I was fascinated with how personal and unique his choices were.
My son chose to begin with transportation. In a split family, that makes sense, transportation between households is such a frequent and prominent event. He defined transportation with a photograph of my car but he also wanted to include an airplane and a picture of a boat ride we had once taken. I was surprised by the boat ride, because I was unaware that it had made such an impression on him. But it was also interesting because it was an indigenous mode of transportation in our city of Chicago.
Defense was next. For this he chose some pictures of his martial arts class. He apparently associated defense as a physical idea. Not all of the children in his class thought this way. I realized that I take physical health and strength very seriously and I had imparted that to my son. Not that it was bad, it was just an interesting observation of our microcosm.
Shelter was a no brainier for my son. He took a picture of our house; but that had a telling backstory though, because he did not include a picture of his Dad’s apartment. Perhaps it was a simple oversight, but maybe not. Maybe the concept of shelter to my son was the permanence and consistency of a house rather than the more mobile life of his father.
For clothing my son photographed his favorite t-shirt. It had some cool cartoon characters on it that he liked but more importantly, it had a hood attached with long sleeves that matched. He loved that thing. Another unique observation was that he included his last Halloween costume as well. It was a very glamorous vampire costume with a vest of red fabric with diamond buttons and of course a velvet cape. He sported a dapper top hat as well. All of it I had sewn myself to his specifications. Clothing for him was about customization.
Food was what you might expect from a seven-year-old – pictures of pizza and spaghetti (what young child doesn’t like pizza and spaghetti) but he also included a picture of a birthday cake that I had made for him. I like to bake, so it wasn’t a box mix, and it was a shared process – he got to stir and more importantly – lick the spoon. To him, food wasn’t just nourishment, it was family time.
You might think that the subcategories under the spiritual needs would stump a 7-year-old, but my son knew immediately how he would define them. He placed culture first. He chose pictures from outings to his two favorite museums: The Chicago Children’s Museum and The Museum of Science and Industry.
Religion was next. He had drawn a classic pagan pentacle long before this project, labeling each spire of the star with the elements. He knew he’d be the only Pagan at school, but it wasn’t an issue for him. Children, if left alone, are far more accepting than adults give them credit. They are really only judgmental if an adult has diligently taught them to be so. That reality was probably beyond what my son was trying to convey, and yet was clearly part of the statement he made with his religious symbol.
Finally, for vanity, he chose a picture of himself with a chess trophy he had won. He was one of the youngest in the chess class and it wasn’t a participation trophy. He had meticulously collected the necessary points to place first in the class. He was proud of his accomplishment and he really liked chess. That was vanity to him – passionate effort and pride. I have to say, I think I admire that definition most.
The truth was, I admired his whole assignment. I still have it to this day! When he brought it to school I watched him carry it in with that clear passionate effort and pride on his face. My son was so confident in our little world. He was walking into school with a huge poster of proof that all of his fundamental needs were being met. Meanwhile, I was shaking at the grocery store checkout. Did that mean that my needs were not being met?
I thought long and hard about that. I began to think that maybe I was missing a few needs and I wondered if there was anything to be done about that. Money, was not on the fundamental needs, but money was my obsession. Didn’t money fund the needs? Certainly, I needed money to purchase food and pay the mortgage. But when my son assembled his homework project, at no time did he struggle, for him money was not an issue, it was irrelevant to his Fundamental Needs. It dawned on me that many of his depictions of his Fundamental Needs had cost me nothing. I had used library passes for the museums, the costumes and the cakes were more labor than dollars - I was actually pretty savvy and frugal when I thought about it. My son was in fact getting all of his needs met, some with no financial cost at all. Was money as important as I had made it?
So often I laid in bed awake with my stress and worries over money, or my lack of it. I had always thought that if I could just find a way to make more money that my problems would simply vanish. But making more money wasn’t so simple. Overtime at my current work was somewhat available for me to work but working overtime came with even more problems. Overtime meant overtime for the babysitter – extra hours were not allowed by the service I was using. That meant hiring a second babysitter and since I was already borrowing money to pay for the first, it didn’t seem realistic to borrow more to work overtime. But more importantly, overtime meant sacrificing time spent at museums and baking cakes with my son. My son lived in a world where despite his mother’s money issues, all of his fundamental needs were being met. Did I really want to sacrifice his needs for overtime dollars? No, I simply did not.
I went back to my worries and I lost more sleep. I replayed in my head the advice given from so many well-meaning people that I should cut back on my expenses. What expenses could logistically be cut? I was already dangerously stretching our food supply. I bought almost all of my son’s clothes second hand and I hadn’t purchased new clothing for myself possibly since my son was born. Canceling my car insurance was reckless and irresponsible. There were just no expenses to cut! Did that mean that bankruptcy really was my only option? But I just couldn’t see how bankruptcy was an option. Bankruptcy wasn’t going to buy food, clothing, gas or any of the fundamental needs. That was just it, I didn’t have expenses to be cut, I had fundamental needs I needed to figure out how to purchase without going further and further into debt.
In addition to all the anxiety and depression I was frustrated at myself! My friends and people in the magical community kept flattering me by telling me over and over again how powerful a witch I was. I was the real deal apparently, my spells worked. I had results I could not only articulate, but I had tracked tangible results. I suddenly knew I needed to write a spell, but it had to incorporate the Fundamental Needs which had been taught to me by my seven year old son.
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I will be back with another article with details from that spell.
