Money has become the first thought behind too many of my sentences

Dear Delyara, A child asks for something and my mind goes to cost before joy. My husband mentions a plan and my body tightens before my mouth answers. The car makes a sound and my heart reacts before I know what the actual problem is. I open the fridge and think in weeks, not meals. That is what financial stress has done. Not only to the bank balance. To language, mood, marriage, parenting, imagination, breath. I hate how quickly money now occupies the warmest spaces of family life. How it arrives in school conversations, bedtime decisions, supermarket aisles, clothing choices, future plans, and small ordinary pleasures that should have remained innocent but did not survive adulthood intact. I am tired of the whole emotional atmosphere of the house bending around numbers that no one even says aloud sometimes.