u/LadyMoonstone

I’m using the no advice needed tag because I don’t want advice regarding my children’s father. I am aware of the problems and that this is not an ideal situation. I do want advice on how to do 2 under 2 as a single mom.

My daughter will be 8 months on Friday. I found out Saturday that I’m pregnant. I’m about a month along. My second baby is due late January. My children’s father and I haven’t been in the best place, but we care about each other, or at least I thought we did. He keeps saying I’m selfish and ruining everyone’s lives and if I won’t terminate, he won’t be having any involvement with our second child and will be gone.

I will do what I have to in order to try to make this work on my own, but I don’t know how to right now. I’m scared. I don’t have family support. I do have some other support. But I want my children’s father to stop being horrible and to not walk out on his family. He has his issues but he always wanted children and to have an actual family. This isn’t like him.

I have an M4 iPad Pro and an old MacBook Pro. I want to say I bought it back in 2018 or 2019. I am thinking of finally going back to college (at 33) to try to finish my degree and move into something more aligned with my career field that I’m taking a break from. I am trying to figure out if my old MBP and/or iPad Pro will be sufficient while I’m at the campus (it’s not too far from my house) or if I should just get a MacBook Neo.

I also have a great desktop PC that I built a couple years ago, so I will probably do more work on that when I’m home or if I do any fully online classes unless I need to work downstairs while the baby is up if her dad is working. I am thinking I will be moving into doing business this time around. My college background is in art, psychology, and some neuroscience. Business is more in line with what I want to do long term. I think if I did any art classes requiring a PC or a Mac, I’d do more of the work at home or at a school PC.

For more (theoretically) basic schooling, which is the better choice? I’m not sure how much longer my MBP is even supported at this point and I am pretty sure I haven’t turned it on in at least a year or more.

Came across this today. I signed up. Not sure if anyone else here used Talkspace but this seemed like a good place to post this.

Because of some unrelated family stuff, I did not have access to my car today. I walked 45 minutes/2 miles with my daughter in her stroller and her big diaper bag on my back to a food bank. I was feeling really ashamed because I’m in my 30s and I went from making really good money at my old job to making minimum wage in my state which is just over $17 an hour at a new job with less hours, and I can’t pay all my bills right now. I know a few different people that work very close by the food bank, and I was so afraid that somebody I knew would see me and I was going to have to lie and say I was picking stuff up for one of the relatives that’s going through a separate difficult time.

Going there, nobody judged me, which was awesome and it felt nice to be able to get things that I could throw together for lunches for work easily or just in general. They have an area that you shop once a month, and then a separate area that you can come shop every week. I did not grab as much stuff as I probably could have because I had to walk home again, and could only carry what would fit in her stroller, in whatever space was left in the diaper bag, and in the one reusable bag I brought with me, but I still got a lot of great things that were really helpful.

And actually when I was getting close to being done somebody that worked there came up to me and was like. “Did anybody give you diapers and wipes? Do you need any formula for her???” and I was like “no I didn’t know you had those, but I would love some and if you have sensitive formula, I would absolutely love to have some of that for her. She can’t have regular formula.” They found a big can of organic sensitive formula which was amazing and they asked what size diaper she wears and I told them that she’s moving into a size 3 and so they gave me a package of diapers for her and a package of wipes and apparently every week you can get another package of diapers, which is so great.

And then on the 2 mile walk back, which was difficult because it was surprisingly hot today and I had a lot of extra weight going back up the hill, I went from feeling relieved to feeling ashamed again because it makes me feel like I’m taking away from others and because right now I’m sort of starting over parts of my life again, it makes me feel worse about where I am at at the moment. Hopefully I’ll have my car next week to be able to go again, but if not, I’ll try to walk there again.

I believe there is another food bank that has different hours and days where operates that is truly within walking distance of my house, so I will check that out at some point, but yeah. I know the shame feeling will ease up, and I’m so grateful for the help, but I hate that I feel so badly right now about it.

I’m honestly the happiest about the diapers, formula, and wipes though. While I try to find a different job again, all of this helps take a little bit off of my plate and makes me feel a little bit less like I’m failing. We are in a high cost of living area unfortunately. It was more within my means, but still expensive before the major job change happened. Currently, I cannot move to a lower cost area and a lot of those lower cost areas out here would make my job options even more difficult. I know this is just a bump in the road and I’ll get back to where I was eventually, but it still just feels so strange to me right now.

Yesterday I don’t recall the little icon popping up in the corner with the daily streak going up any of the times I went on Reddit. It’s now 2:50am Monday and it still isn’t changing. On Reddit it still shows my streak active at 643/700 but I’m worried there’s a problem?