At age twenty, it finally came out that I had gotten secretly married the year before and my husband had finally joined the military like he said he would and he would be starting basic training shortly.
I very suddenly had a job and an apartment almost immediately with minimal effort on my part after years of failing to arrange to move out on my own. My parents fixed me up with a job, helped me get an apartment and may have moved my furniture for me while I was at work.
Prior to that, I had been job hunting, without good results, having dropped out of college to avoid committing fraud on the financial aid forms my father filled out or inform him I was technically married. But I didn't know how to job hunt and no one was really helping me figure it out.
In contrast, I got endless help with homework and establishing good study habits and my dad filled out the financial aid paperwork for college -- not all parents do that. I and a friend tried to come up with her tuition out of pocket when she filed late because she had to do it herself and didn't want her mom to find out.
I had paid a job-hunting service to help me find a job because I didn't know how to do that part. I briefly worked in a restaurant and the manager immediately wanted to groom me to replace his assistant manager because I had some college etc. and then he changed his mind. I was let go after a week or two when the two of them decided to kiss and make up.
I worked for one day in a phone sales job, sold nothing and was told I wasn't going to work out. I had previously considered dropping out of the twelfth grade and entering some kind of technical job training program that supposedly led to well paid work. Ultimately, I didn't go that route.
But once my parents knew I was married, mom called one of her German friends whose husband was a manager or something at Kmart and I had an entry level job as a cashier at Kmart in short order.
My brother began working in high school. He also had his own car at age sixteen.
Our mother insisted on buying my sister a car. After the car was delivered, my sister pointed out she still didn't have a driver's license and would need one to actually legally drive the car she now owned.
After I suddenly had a job and an apartment, my husband and I bought a truck together. Like my sister before me, after we owned a truck together, I got a driver's license.
The future ex started basic training in January. We moved to Texas in May. I think I had to get a Texas driver's license because I still only had my paper license and the actual one never arrived before we moved and they don't forward such things.
So at twenty, I briefly had a part-time job making a nickel better than minimum wage, an apartment I could afford out of my wages and I was walking to work.
And I had plenty of discretionary funds for sending care packages to my ungrateful husband in basic training who took my doting for granted. My apartment, my meals and his care packages were all paid for out of my earnings at my barely above minimum wage job. His entire income from basic training was in the bank at the end of basic, which got used for a down payment on that truck.
That experience informs a lot of my opinions and the kinds of solutions I would like to see in this world.
These days, it's not very likely you can get a part-time minimum wage job and a cheap apartment in walking distance and live without a car in the US. But you could forty-one years ago and I briefly had that arrangement.
Unfortunately, no one thought to help me arrange that until they learned I was married already. No one was helping me job hunt or learn to drive or telling me it's okay I can't drive because it's possible to live without a car.
And it's especially crazy making because my mother made a lot of noises about women's rights and then didn't really follow through to the logical conclusions.
My dad was twelve years older than my mother and when they were first together, he took the wheels off his car and put it on blocks anytime he left for a few weeks because she had no driver's license.
She was German and Germany has better public transportation and it's substantially harder to get a driver's license there, so people don't all get them at age sixteen like they typically do in the US. Like you typically spend a bunch of money on a training program.
So mom paid for instruction behind Dad's back while he was away and got her license behind his back. And she talked endlessly my entire childhood about how important it was for a woman to be able to drive and then didn't insist her daughters have driver's licenses the nanosecond they turned sixteen, though my brother did get not only a driver's license but his own car at sixteen.
If my family had actually helped me get a job and figure out how to live on my own as an adult when I became an adult, my life might have gone very differently.
The majority of the barriers to making my life work at age eighteen was my dysfunctional family. They didn't really want me to have a driver's license or a job and they wanted me in college and continuing to be financially dependent on my parents for some reason.
They already knew my brother had molested me. If they imagined they were protecting me from predators, this is along the lines of the fox guarding the hen house.
I felt my single biggest security need was getting the hell away from my brother. Instead of offering me a lock for my bedroom door -- which I turned down -- they should have been offering me all the help I wanted to MOVE OUT, like I had been trying to figure out how to arrange starting at age fourteen.
The reason I went to visit my sister at college in Athens, Georgia the summer I turned fourteen was to try to convince her and my parents to let me take part-time college in ninth grade to prove I could do it and apply to UGA in Athens, Georgia at fifteen and leave home and go to college full time.
My sister introduced me to Alex to set him up as a pervert to cut him out of her boyfriend's life, but probably also to sabotage any hope of our parents supporting my goal of early college. My sister nominally agreed to let me live with her, but I now suspect she got her National Merit scholarship fraudulently and didn't really want me to live with her.
She was at school in the summer to visit because she had already started working summers, possibly to break into the computers and change her grades to keep her scholarship. Presumably, she believed I could successfully pass college classes while going to high school full time and thereby prove myself and get accepted to UGA.
And that was a problem for her. She felt like she probably couldn't fool me into thinking she was making good grades if I lived with her and went to college myself at fifteen.
At fourteen, I was scheming to move out at age fifteen. At seventeen, I was scheming to drop out of high school and get job training for a well-paid job and get a job.
I wanted out and persisted for years in trying to figure out how to get out and away from my abusive brother while my parents were seemingly trying to "protect" me from a big scary world by keeping me home, the one place I didn't want to be.
At age twenty, I briefly had a part-time job that was barely above minimum wage. I briefly supported myself entirely on my own. I had no vehicle and no driver's license and I walked to work and stopped at some eatery along the way and I had money to spare for frivolous expenditures.
If you want abused kids to have a shot at leaving home and getting away from their dysfunctional family, that's the world you should be trying to build. So it's common knowledge you can just get a job -- ANY part-time minimum wage job -- and an apartment and make life work.
If you are pro LGBTQ rights, that's the world you should be trying to build. So it's common knowledge you can just get a job -- ANY job -- and live on your own without pursuing a heteronormative marriage as a desperate survival strategy.
If you are pro women's lib, that's the world you should be trying to build. So it's common knowledge you can get a job -- ANY job, even without any career prospects or any hope of ever making money like a man -- and successfully live on your own, even if you have no hope of affording a car.
Not everyone can afford a sprawling house in the 'burbs and car-centric, nuclear family lifestyle. Not everyone wants that and even the people who do shouldn't have a gun to their head to get it NOW without ever living on their own beforehand.
And even if you want it and can afford it, you inevitably get older, you stop having children, the kids grow up and probably move out, at which point you and the kids both probably need a smaller, cheaper home and probably one not in the suburbs.