Photos by Jeanna Duerscherl | The Roanoke Times

Ivy Lupacchino watches her daughter, Elena, cut carrots for dinner. The mother of five has learned to survive on little, and piece together jobs.

Ivy Lupacchino brings food to customers at Three Li'l Pigs in Daleville. In the past Lupacchino juggled several jobs at once; today she is down to two.

Ivy Lupacchino helps Jesse Wood with his piano lesson at her small business, called Eighty-eight Keys, in her Daleville home.

DALEVILLE -- Ivy Lupacchino has a message for all the families out there suffering from the recession blues: there's hope.

The mother of five had her own economic reckoning in 1996 when her marriage imploded and she found herself drowning in a $3,300-a-month mortgage, multiple car payments and unreliable -- usually nonexistent -- child support.

Three of her children, including infant twins, were still in diapers. Foreclosure was impending, and the vehicles were about to be repossessed.

It would have been easy to spend her energy fighting her ex-husband in court, fretting about all that had gone wrong. But with five hungry mouths to feed, Lupacchino took a different tack.

She asked herself: What can I do to support my family?

With more than 2,000 layoffs in the Roanoke and New River valleys announced since October and foreclosures up 262 percent last year, Lupacchino wants to share some survival strategies she forged by trial and error, her own talent, the kindness of others and sheer dumb luck.

"Right now I see people in these big subdivision homes and they're going through hard times and I feel for them," the 46-year-old mom says. "But I'm also like, 'Thank God we're already poor.' "

'What can I do?'

Lupacchino was 5 when she started piano lessons. By the time she was 12, she was so accomplished that she took piano classes at Hollins University.

What does a longtime homemaker who can't afford day care for five children do?

Lupacchino set up a small piano studio in the basement of her Daleville rental house and recruited four students -- children of friends. Word spread, and within a year her business, Eighty-eight Keys, was serving 47 students a week.

"I bought a big Crock-Pot," she says, and spent most of her after-school hours in the basement, teaching piano. The older children looked after the younger ones -- in theory -- along with some teenage baby sitters in the neighborhood.

"I'll never forget the time Eli walked in on a lesson with an obviously dead hamster in his hand and said, 'Mommy, it broke!' The poor kid on the piano bench was traumatized," Lupacchino recalls.

She also picked up other odd jobs to pay the bills, recalls her neighbor, Betty Arbogast. Lupacchino cleaned houses, did bookkeeping, mowed lawns and worked part time as a cashier at Kroger.

"Her kids were always in sports and did everything all the other kids did," Arbogast says.

"Ivy just kind of takes it one day at a time. She's got the best personality; you can't help but love her."

Let's make a deal

The grocery bill was $250 a week. The kids went through a gallon of milk a day.

Roanoke's First Baptist Church helped Lupacchino buy a used van and paid some of her bills. She swallowed her pride and turned to Botetourt County Social Services for food stamps and Medicaid for the children. She signed up for the schools' free lunch program -- a process that was less embarrassing once the schools began using student account numbers at the lunchroom cash register (so no one knew).

She coped with her seven-day work schedule by dividing her days into sections -- a practice she continues today, even though she is down to just two jobs: teaching piano and waiting tables on weekends at Three Li'l Pigs, a Daleville barbecue restaurant.

When she has a three-hour break during the day, she psychs herself up by thinking of that chunk as a "day off."

Her worst moment of the ordeal: the day they auctioned her foreclosed house at the courthouse in Fincastle -- a few weeks before Christmas. Before she moved her furniture into the new rental house, she made sure the family's Christmas tree was up.

"It was an adventure," she recalls. "They may end up in therapy one day, but I've tried to keep everybody looking forward, not backward."

No one ever gets new clothes at her house, but Lupacchino has become such a good consignment store and yard sale shopper that it doesn't matter. "When they were little, I bought the kids brand-name stuff at Goodwill and acted like I got it new."

Now she frequents Plato's Closet, a consignment store popular with teenagers.

"People are stupid to buy new," she says. She bartered piano lessons in exchange for a friend's newly re-upholstered living room set.

"I've bartered for child care before," she says. "Bartering among single moms should be mandatory."

Of the praise heaped on first lady Michelle Obama for buying her daughters' inauguration outfits at the nondesigner J. Crew, Lupacchino says: "Michelle could've gone to the J. Crew Outlet [in Lynchburg] and done better."

She approaches yard sales with laserlike precision, shopping only in high-end South Roanoke and around Daleville because it's close -- and not far from the Ashley Plantation subdivision.

"I like neighborhoods where people don't know the value, and also they have cooler stuff," she says, opening a kitchen cabinet to reveal a large Calphalon frying pan. "This was a dollar!"

Her best find: a 50-cent pair of like-new Dansko clogs, nailed at a South Roanoke yard sale. She now has eight pairs.

She has only paid full price once -- for a $110 pair of zebra-striped Danskos -- when her tax-return check arrived last year. "I felt guilty about that, but I also thought I deserved it."

'Denial is handy'

Lupacchino's advice for the newly unemployed: Strike the word "can't" from your vocabulary.

"You can either stay in bed crying, or you can come up with something you can do to keep yourself from starving."

Maybe it's baby-sitting. Maybe it's feeding people's dogs when they're on vacation or selling Silpada jewelry from home.

Also: Never, ever admit you can't do a prospective job. Lupacchino recalls interviewing for a part-time bookkeeping job a few years ago; the interviewer wanted to know if she knew the computer programs Excel and WordPerfect.

"I'm like, 'Yeah, of course,' and then I immediately drove to Books-a-Million and bought two books ... and she never knew."

"Denial is handy," she adds. "A good therapist will tell you not to be in denial, but I think it can be a great survival technique."

Last week, her seventh-grade twins came home from school announcing they'd been assigned to write a paper about the most inspiring person in their life. They're writing about their mom, of course: about how hard she's worked to keep a roof over their heads.

"I didn't even know if they really noticed," Lupacchino says, choking up.

But she plans to frame those papers when they bring them home -- with a yard-sale frame. A buck, max.