Monday, August 23, 2010

Car Woes

I'm a little reluctant to write this post because I know it's going to sound whiney and "poor me". That's not really how I mean it to be, but I am very frustrated right now.

Chris and I own two cars: a 2004 Honda Civic named Celeste and a 2005 Chrysler Crossfire named Mona. I've written several times before how we are trying to sell Mona. She is a two-seater and is just not practical for us right now. In fact, she's pretty useless since we can't fit all 3 of us in her.

Mona was really an unwise purchase in the first place, but it's too late to change that now. She was an emotional purchase for me. It pretty much went like this: We had just been through 8 failed cycles on Clomid, we were taking a year off of fertility treatments to save money for more in-depth testing, treatments, and surgery, and we needed a new car. For whatever reason, I decided that if I couldn't have a baby, I wanted a ridiculous (but very fun) two-seater car that I would never be able to have if I was going to have a baby. So, we bought Mona and now we can't sell her. We owe more than she's worth and would be upside-down if we traded her in. We actually don't owe a terrible amount on her, but she's worth surprisingly little (the value of Chrysler tanked plus people aren't buying sports cars much in this economy).

Since B was born, Chris has driven Mona to work about half the time, and Celeste about half the time. He commutes about 25 miles one way, and we want to avoid putting too many miles on Mona. When he drives Celeste, that leaves me stuck at home, but I don't mind. We have just been dealing with it until we could afford to do something else. We were the ones who made the foolish purchase, so we are dealing with it.

For about the past month, we have been having problems with Celeste... which brings me to today. Right now, we have one car that we can't put baby in, and one car that keeps breaking down. It has broken down 6 times in the past month. We keep fixing this and that on it, and it will run for a few days (or maybe even a week), then develop another problem. This means that we don't have a car that we can put Brianna in at all, which is obviously not working for us.

Which means... we are going to have to buy another car. We can't really afford another car without selling Mona. We can't seem to sell Mona. See our dilemma?

Now, when I say we can't afford another car, I should probably clarify a little more. We have the money to buy another car, but we don't want to use that money. Why? Because we want to use that money to have another baby.

Which brings me to what is really bothering me about this whole situation: If my baby-maker wasn't so broken, we wouldn't be in this predicament. We could just use the money to buy another car and still have a baby. It just stinks that we have to go through such expensive treatments to build our family. I know that we all have issues that we have to deal with, and I know that this is one of mine. Infertility is part of my life, and I've really come to terms with that. But, that doesn't mean that it doesn't make me really sad sometimes.

I should also mention that this is all coming on the tail-end of complicated A/C problems on our house (that was built in 2006) that we've recently spent over $700 to fix. Frustrated? Yeah, more than a little.

Oh, and none of this means that I regret quitting my job to stay home with Brianna. We'll just have to figure out a creative way to finance treatments again... something I wish we didn't have to think about.

2 comments:

Elana Kahn said...

I really hope you find someone to buy Mona soon! Or you could always move to Massachusetts where you can have fertility treatments covered by medical insurance and therefore have money to buy a new car. :-)

asg said...

I know how you feel. I have a dozen things on my car that need fixed, but don't have the money to fix them or buy a new car. My expenses for Nathan's school just doubled as he prepares for Kindergarten next year.