Daily Archives: December 13, 2025

When Independence Cost a Dollar and a Dream

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There are moments in motherhood that arrive quietly but land like thunder.

This was one of them.

My youngest twin—twenty-seven years old—has purchased a home. In this economy. In a time so unforgiving that even the word starter feels like a relic from another century. It is an accomplishment that deserves to be spoken aloud, admired, honored. I am proud of her in the way that fills the chest and tightens the throat at the same time.

And yet—there it is—the ache.

Because pride and grief sometimes share the same chair.

This economy is ruthless. Not difficult. Not inconvenient. Ruthless. It does not reward youth the way it once did. It does not offer freedom cheaply. It does not allow mistakes without punishment. Housing is no longer a milestone—it is a miracle. And watching your child secure something so rare feels like witnessing both victory and loss in a single breath.

When I was sixteen, I left home.

Not dramatically. Not ceremoniously. I simply went. I had my own apartment. A used car. Paid my electric bill. My car insurance. My groceries. I even attended community college. I was free in the way only the young and unafraid can be—free because the world had not yet learned how to price every inch of air.

It wasn’t because I was wealthy. It wasn’t because I was protected. It was because the numbers made sense back then. They no longer do.

Today, a young person can work endlessly and still remain trapped. Rent devours paychecks. Insurance eats ambition. Groceries demand negotiation. Independence has been turned into a luxury item, and no one pretends otherwise.

So her father and I did what parents are rarely praised for doing anymore—we let our children stay.

No rent. No utilities. No pressure—except the kind that builds, not breaks. The only bills they paid were the ones they chose. The rest went into savings. Into preparation. Into a future we knew the world would not hand them gently.

They also went to work where their father works—a union job that pays more than most four-year degrees promise anymore. Thirty-five dollars an hour. Time-and-a-half after eight hours in a day, not forty in a week. Double time after ten. Triple pay on holidays. The kind of structure that once built the middle class and now survives like a rare species.

And because of that—because of planning, patience, and opportunity—she bought a home.

I should be celebrating without pause.

But there’s a part of me that wishes she would stay just a little longer. Stay in the good life. The one I never had offered to me, even though I somehow managed to afford it anyway. Stay in the safety that took generations of trial and error to learn how to provide.

My childhood was… complicated.

My mother was a single parent doing the best she could with the tools she had. But there were too many men passing through the house. Too much instability. Too much responsibility placed on shoulders still learning how to carry themselves. By the time I was ten, I was caring for my younger sister—five years my junior—cleaning the house, feeding her, managing tasks that children should not have to manage.

If I failed, I was punished. If I succeeded, it was expected.

And yet—those years shaped me.

They gave me skills. Grit. Awareness. Independence sharpened early. I learned how to survive before I learned how to rest. I became a true Gen Xer—resourceful, skeptical, self-reliant, allergic to nonsense.

A Scorpio. A free spirit. A wild child who wasn’t taking anyone’s shit.

And I wouldn’t trade it. Not for anything.

How many people can say they were sixteen in the 1980s, paying their own bills, driving their own car, answering to no one but themselves—and still felt free? The eighties were a strange kind of golden hour. Not perfect. Not fair. But possible.

That world is gone.

So when my daughter closes the door on her own home, I stand in the doorway of memory. Proud beyond words. Tender beyond reason. Grateful that she has what I never did—and quietly mourning the simplicity of a time when independence didn’t require permission from a bank, a union contract, and perfect timing.

This is what parenting looks like in an unforgiving economy.

You don’t push them out.
You build a runway.
You give them what you never had.
And when they finally fly, you wave—even as your heart asks them to circle once more.

Disclaimer

This blog reflects personal experience and generational observation. It is not intended to diminish the struggles of any generation or romanticize hardship. Economic conditions vary widely, and individual outcomes are shaped by many factors. This piece is offered as reflection, not prescription.

References & Context

  • U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics – Historical wage comparisons
  • Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) – Housing affordability index
  • Pew Research Center – Generational economic mobility
  • National Association of Realtors – First-time homebuyer trends
  • Economic Policy Institute – Wage growth vs. cost of living (1980s–present)

About the Author

A.L. Childers is a Gen X writer, researcher, and storyteller whose work blends lived experience with cultural reflection. Raised in an era of latchkeys and learned independence, she writes about family, economics, power systems, and the quiet emotional truths that live beneath major life transitions. Her work honors resilience without glorifying struggle and believes deeply in giving the next generation what many never received.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR — A.L. Childers

Audrey Childers is a published author, thyroid advocate, wellness writer, and founder of TheHypothyroidismChick.com.
After years of misdiagnosis, exhaustion, weight gain, and “your labs are normal,” she rebuilt her health — and now helps other women do the same.

Books include:

The Keto Autoimmune Protocol Healing Book for Women

Hashimoto’s Crock-Pot Recipes

 Reset Your Thyroid: 21-Day Meal Plan

A Women’s Holistic Holy Grail Handbook for Hypothyroidism

Fresh & Fabulous Hypothyroidism Body Balance

The Witch’s Almanac Cookbook (2026)

The Lamp of Christmas Eve

The Lamp at the End of the Corridor: A Story of Rejection, Redirection, and Resurrection for the Misfit Soul

The Girl the Darkness Raised: A Memoir of Scarcity, Survival, and Becoming

The Girl in the Mirror Is Thirteen Again: The House That Yelled and the Woman Who Finally Heard Herself 

 Healing Stews & Enchanted Brews (Original Edition)

Healing Stews & Enchanted Brews: Holiday Magic

My Grandmother’s Witchy Medicine Cabinet

Enchanted Realms: A Comprehensive Guide to Witchcraft & Sorcery

Enchanted Realms: A Comprehensive Guide to Witchcraft & Sorcery

Hashimoto’s Crock-Pot Recipes

 Reset Your Thyroid: 21-Day Meal Plan

A Women’s Holistic Holy Grail Handbook for Hypothyroidism

Fresh & Fabulous Hypothyroidism Body Balance

The Lies We Loved : How Advertising Invented America

Archons: Unveiling the Parasitic Entities Shaping Human Thoughts

The Hidden Empire

Nightmare Legends
The Girl the Darkness Raised: A Memoir of Scarcity, Survival, and Becoming

Whispers in the Wires

The Making of the “Broken Child”: A System Built Before Diagnosis

Born Into the Ledger—Where It Was Best — and Worst — to Be Born Black or White in the 1800s

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Where It Was Best — and Worst — to Be Born Black or White in the 1800s (And Why It Was Never About Color)

This was never a race war.
It was always a class war.
And the elites wrote the story to keep us from noticing.

Born Into the Ledger

There is a certain lie that settles into a society the way dust settles into floorboards — quietly, patiently, until no one remembers what the room looked like before it arrived. It is the lie that suffering has a color, that freedom is inherited through skin, and that history can be cleanly divided into villains and victims based on appearance alone. The 1800s tell a different story, if one is willing to read it slowly, by candlelight rather than headline.

In that century, the most dangerous thing a human being could be was not Black or white — it was poor.

To be born Black in the American Deep South was to be born already counted, already priced, already owned. From the moment breath entered the lungs, it belonged to someone else. Families were dismantled as easily as furniture rearranged. Education was forbidden not because it was useless, but because it was powerful. Bodies were worked until they failed, and when they did, they were replaced without ceremony. This was racialized chattel slavery — brutal, unmistakable, and engineered to strip a person not only of freedom, but of identity itself.

And yet, while this form of slavery was among the most visible and violently enforced, it was not the only system of human ownership operating in the 1800s.

Across the ocean, in the vast cold stretches of the Russian Empire, millions of white peasants were born into serfdom — a word softened by distance, but sharpened by reality. They could be bought and sold with the land they worked, traded between nobles, beaten legally, separated from their families, conscripted into military service, and barred from leaving the estate of their birth. Over a third of Russia lived this way until emancipation arrived in 1861, long after the damage had already been written into bone and blood. They were white. They were Christian. They were owned.

In Ireland, also white and Christian, the chains were quieter but no less lethal. Land was taken, rented back at impossible prices, and governed by absentee landlords who lived comfortably elsewhere. When the potato failed, food continued to be exported while people starved. One million died. Another million fled. It was not slavery by name, but it was domination by design — engineered scarcity enforced by empire.

In England’s industrial cities, white children disappeared into coal mines before they learned their letters. Women stood at looms until their fingers failed. Men breathed in poison until their lungs surrendered. This was called progress. This was called employment. The people living it called it survival. “Wage slavery” entered the language not as metaphor, but as recognition — because freedom that leads only to starvation is not freedom at all.

And still, above all of this, sat the elites.

They wore different coats depending on the country — powdered wigs, military uniforms, tailored suits — but their interests aligned perfectly. British aristocrats, plantation owners, Russian nobles, industrial magnates, colonial governors, banking families, merchant elites. They owned land. They owned factories. They owned ships. They owned laws. They owned people — whether those people were called slaves, serfs, tenants, apprentices, or laborers.

When chattel slavery became inconvenient, they rebranded it. Sharecropping replaced chains. Debt replaced whips. Company towns replaced plantations. The ledger remained.

There were, of course, places where the burden of birth was lighter. To be born Black in Canada in the 1800s was to step into a world without legal chains. Slavery had been abolished. Fugitive slave laws did not reach across the border. Black communities governed themselves, owned land, educated their children, and lived with a degree of safety unimaginable just a few miles south. Racism did not vanish — but ownership did.

In Haiti, newly freed from French rule, Black people governed themselves entirely. It was imperfect, punished economically by the same European powers who claimed enlightenment, but it stood as a living contradiction to the lie that Black freedom required white oversight.

For white people, the safest births occurred not in empires, but in places that had dismantled inherited domination. Switzerland, neutral and decentralized, offered legal personhood even to the poor. Canada and the northern United States offered land, mobility, and political participation unavailable to Europe’s peasantry. Not equality — but protection.

The pattern is impossible to ignore once seen: where elites held unchecked power, everyone beneath them suffered — regardless of color. Race shaped the method. Class decided the fate.

This is why the oldest trick in the book has always been division. When poor Black laborers and poor white laborers began to notice they were trapped in the same machinery, the elites rewrote the narrative. They taught people to argue over skin instead of systems, identity instead of income, ancestry instead of access. Because a divided working class never looks up. It never storms the manor. It never questions who owns the ledger.

The 1800s were not a morality play of color alone. They were a warning — one we are still ignoring.

Different skin. Same chains. Different century. Same elites.

Disclaimer

This article is intended for historical education and social analysis. It does not minimize or deny the unique brutality of racialized chattel slavery, nor does it seek to compare suffering competitively. Its purpose is to examine systems of power and exploitation across race and class to reveal how elites historically maintained control by dividing the poor — a strategy that continues today.

References & Resources

  • Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death
  • Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty
  • Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom
  • Sheila Fitzpatrick, Russian Serfdom
  • Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains
  • C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins
  • British National Archives (Industrial labor records)
  • Library and Archives Canada (Black settlements and abolition records)

About the Author

A.L. Childers is a writer and historical researcher focused on power systems, suppressed histories, and the narratives elites rely on to maintain control. Her work challenges simplified versions of the past and asks readers to look beyond identity-driven divisions to the structures that shape human lives across centuries.

What Winter Once Asked of the Human Mind

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A Fireside Chapter

Before winter became decorative, it was demanding.

It did not arrive with twinkling lights or the promise of cheer. It came with weight. With a darkness that lingered at the edges of daylight and pressed itself into the corners of the mind. It came with cold that did not merely chill the skin but seeped inward, settling into joints, lungs, and thought alike. Food stores thinned. Candles burned shorter. Silence, once comforting, grew louder — and in that silence, the mind, if left untended, could wander into fear just as easily as the body could wander into danger.

Winter did not ask whether one felt ready.

It asked whether one was.

And so, winter asked something of people.

Not politely — but persistently.

It asked for preparation.
It asked for memory.
It asked for ritual.
It asked for community.

And when those answers were not given, winter took its payment anyway.

Long before psychology named the nervous system or mapped the pathways of fear and reassurance, people understood something elemental: the human mind could fracture under prolonged cold, darkness, and isolation. Spirits dimmed as quickly as hearth fires. Children, sensing uncertainty, required structure. Adults, facing scarcity and mortality, required meaning. Communities, pressed inward by snow and storm, required reminders of who they were to one another when survival ceased to be effortless.

So stories became tools.

Not entertainment — instruction wrapped in wonder.

They were spoken aloud when the wind rattled shutters and the scent of smoke clung to woolen clothes drying near the fire. They were told by elders whose voices carried the grain of winters survived, whose hands bore the quiet testimony of work finished before the cold arrived. These stories were passed not to frighten, but to focus — to anchor the mind when the world grew hostile.

A cat that punished the unprepared, its eyes glowing beyond the threshold, reminding families that warmth was earned long before it was worn.
A wanderer who tested hospitality, arriving hungry and cold to see whether kindness remained when abundance did not.
A bell that rang when people forgot one another, its sound cutting through snow and complacency alike.
A candle lit for the dead, so grief would not turn feral in the dark.

These were not fantasies.
They were psychological anchors.

Fear, when shaped into story, became manageable. Consequence, when personified, became memorable. Hope, when ritualized, became repeatable. Folklore taught the mind how to endure when the environment turned against it — how to regulate emotion, reinforce behavior, and preserve cohesion without written rules or formal theory.

Children learned without lectures.
Adults remembered without being confronted.

And the stories worked — because they survived.

This story comes from an old winter folk belief once shared around fires and candlelight. Families told these stories long ago to teach kindness, care, and preparation during the darkest months of the year.

These are traditional winter folk beliefs retold for modern readers.
The core legends predate 1900 and were passed down through oral tradition.

The stories in this collection are not modern inventions. They are retellings of traditional winter folk beliefs — passed down through oral tradition long before the 1900s, when survival depended on memory, ritual, and shared wisdom.

To dismiss these tales as superstition is to misunderstand their purpose. They were never meant to explain the world; they were meant to steady the mind within it. They functioned as early psychology — regulating fear, reinforcing social bonds, and offering the nervous system something solid to hold when uncertainty pressed in from all sides.

Even now, when homes are warm and shelves are full, winter still asks its questions.

We feel them when the days shorten and the year closes in on itself. We inventory what we finished and what we avoided. We seek light instinctively — candles, trees, fires, songs — repeating rituals we barely remember choosing. We gather when we can, and ache when we cannot, because the mind still fears abandonment in the dark.

The modern mind is not as different as we pretend.

It still needs rhythm.
It still responds to story.
It still requires meaning when control slips away.

Folklore did not disappear because it was childish. It faded because comfort made us forget why it existed. But the instinct remains — resurfacing every December, disguised as tradition, nostalgia, or an unexplainable pull toward old stories told slowly, by firelight.

Winter once asked the human mind to stay awake, stay connected, and stay prepared.

The stories were the answers.

About the Author

A.L. Childers is a writer and cultural preservationist whose work explores folklore, memory, and the psychological wisdom embedded in pre-industrial traditions. With a voice rooted in old-world storytelling and modern reflection, she writes to honor the stories that once kept communities steady through darkness, scarcity, and silence.

Disclaimer

This chapter is a literary retelling and interpretive exploration of traditional winter folk beliefs. While grounded in documented oral traditions and historical practices predating the 1900s, it is presented for educational, cultural, and artistic purposes. Variations of folklore exist across regions and eras.

References & Resources

• Simpson, Jacqueline & Roud, Steve – A Dictionary of English Folklore
• Hutton, Ronald – The Stations of the Sun
• Eliade, Mircea – Myth and Reality
• Dundes, Alan – Interpreting Folklore
• Frazer, James George – The Golden Bough
• Scandinavian Yule and Solstice oral traditions (pre-industrial Europe)

The Yule Cat: A Winter Tale of Wool, Worth, and Watching Eyes

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There are winters that arrive politely, knocking before they enter, and then there are winters that descend without apology — the kind that sharpen the air, hush the earth, and remind humanity that comfort is earned, not promised. In Iceland, when the snow begins to stitch the land into silence and daylight thins to a pale memory, the elders say the Yule Cat wakes.

Not stretches.
Not stirs.
Wakes.

You can feel it before you ever see it — a pressure in the cold itself, as though the darkness has weight. The wind carries a faint scent of iron and wool, raw and unfinished, mingled with pine smoke curling from chimneys where families huddle close. Somewhere beyond the last lantern-lit window, something larger than any house moves across the frozen countryside, its paws silent, its breath slow and patient.

They call it Jólakötturinn — The Yule Cat.

By the time the snow crunches beneath its step, Christmas Eve has arrived.

The Yule Cat is not merely black; it is winter-black — the deep, swallowing shade of a night with no moon, fur dusted with snowflakes that cling like stars. Its eyes glow not with rage, but with judgment, old and unblinking. This is no wild beast of hunger alone. This is a creature born of necessity, woven from folklore, labor, and survival itself.

In the old days — before supermarkets and soft excess — wool was life. Autumn meant shearing, carding, spinning. Fingers cracked from cold. Shoulders ached from long days bent over work that never seemed finished. Children learned early that warmth was not gifted; it was made. Socks stitched by candlelight. Coats passed down and mended again and again. To finish your wool before Christmas was not tradition — it was protection.

And those who did not?

The Yule Cat knew.

They say it prowled past farms and villages, its massive tail sweeping snow into whispering drifts. It peered through windows fogged with breath and hope. Inside, laughter might ring, bread might bake, bells might sing — but the Cat did not care for songs. It looked only at what you wore.

New clothes meant effort.
Effort meant survival.
And survival meant you belonged among the living.

The Cat’s presence was felt in the skin first — a prickle along the arms, the sudden awareness of bare ankles or thin sleeves. The sound came next: a low vibration, like a distant purr carried through ice and bone. Not threatening. Assessing.

Those who had done their part felt the warmth of wool hug closer, as though the garments themselves stood witness on their behalf. Those who had not — well, the stories grow quieter there, as if even memory refuses to linger too long.

Parents whispered the tale not to frighten, but to prepare. Children learned that diligence was a kindness to oneself. The Yule Cat was not cruel — it was honest. Winter does not spare the unready. Neither does life.

Even now, long after factories replaced spinning wheels and store-bought coats hang heavy in closets, something of the Yule Cat remains. You feel it when the year turns cold and you take stock of what you’ve finished — and what you’ve avoided. When the holidays arrive and demand reflection, not just celebration. When the dark presses close and asks, quietly but firmly: Did you do the work that mattered?

The Yule Cat still walks in these moments.

Not as a beast in the snow, but as a presence in the conscience. A reminder that comfort is built. That warmth comes from effort. That preparation is love wearing practical clothes.

And if, on some winter night, you swear you see golden eyes glinting just beyond the porch light — do not panic. Simply look down at what you’re wearing. Look at what you’ve made of the year behind you.

The Cat has always been watching.
Not to punish.
But to remind us that survival, dignity, and warmth have always belonged to those willing to finish what the cold demands.

About the Author

A.L. Childers is a storyteller drawn to forgotten folklore, hidden histories, and the quiet truths buried beneath tradition. With a voice that blends old-world atmosphere and modern reflection, she writes to preserve the stories meant to prepare us — not scare us — for the darker seasons of life. Her work explores myth, memory, survival, and the unseen rules that once kept communities alive through long winters and longer nights.

Disclaimer

This story is a creative interpretation of traditional Icelandic folklore. While inspired by historical legend, it is written for educational and artistic purposes and should not be considered a literal account. Cultural myths vary by region and era, and this retelling honors the spirit rather than strict historical record.