Juggling
My family is considered middle class in Brazil. Bear in mind that middle class down there can go from "someone scraping by, but not going hungry" to "someone who can travel to other countries, but not without burning a hole in their pocket". My family would sit right in between these two extremes. There were good times and there were bad times, but there was always food on the table. That's one of the things my parents were ever proud of.
My father is a mechanic who owns his own repair shop. He inherited it from his father, my grandfather. It's his wish that somebody in the family would inherit it from him, but I was never interested in cars - something I've come to regret recently - and my brother was never interested in working at all.
My grandfather was an engineer, having established the repair shop after some stunts that gave him a lot of money. He bought land in what was then the outskirts of town - nowadays, funny enough, part of the downtown area. He bought a whole block, and sold small parcels of land over time. By the time I was born, he only had the place where his house was built, where an aunt lives now by herself. It's a big house, by Brazilian standards.
My father was not an engineer. My father barely finished high school. At 13, he was already working in the shop with my grandfather. He was terrible at school, and was very bad at math, which is funny considering he is a damn good mechanic, who later spun the shop to work only with pneumatics and hydraulics, his specialization (which means: the job a mechanic could do that would bring the most money). He's so good that he used to be one of the few people in town who could fix heavy machinery. Funny how things go.
Bear in mind that, in Brazil, if you are from a simple family and own your business, you still don't dictate the price. It's not like in other places. There, labor is always cheap, because merchandise is already too expensive.
Now, my mother really did not finish high school - she was only able to get her diploma in her 30s. Then, she said she would like to get into a university someday, try to be something other than a clerk in my father's shop. She got into a private university - which is an easy thing to do in Brazil, if you have the money to pay the monthly fees - in her 50s. A year and a half later, she was diagnosed with ALS and her body started to slowly wither away. Her mind, though, remained sharp until the end. After two and a half years - almost three times the average life expectancy of someone with ALS - she got covid and passed away within 3 days. I don't know how she got covid, as she lost movement of her whole body many months before and couldn't walk around or leave the house anymore. Nobody gave me any explanation when asked about it. It is what it is, I guess.
At the time, my father was relying on help from family and money from friends to pay the bills and everything else. Brazil has a universal healthcare system. Free universal healthcare system. But, sometimes, bureaucracy is just too slow, so he had to rely on private healthcare, which was not cheap.
My mother only started working with my father after they were already together together and I was born. Unexpected pregnancy in the 80s in a catholic country and all that jazz. But they rose up to the challenge. They loved each other and they did their best to raise their two kids. Having a stable environment without abusive parents was already a victory in Brazil, even considering how their parents were. They were not perfect, but it was definitely better than what most other Brazilians had.
It took them 33 years to build their dream house, little by little, saving up here and there to pay for renovations, or to add a new room. Houses in Brazil are made of bricks and cement. When we first moved in, the house didn't have doors inside or flooring. The walls would only be painted 24 years later.
Things weren't bad, but it wasn't easy for them. They did their best to keep everything afloat, juggling their dreams with whatever hand life gave them, trying to keep things up in the air. There are never enough arms to hold everything that's thrown at you. Sometimes, some things might fall, but it's not for the lack of trying.
I always try to keep that in mind.