Sorry about what you're going through man(girl?). Best of luck getting a job for you and your family, it can be tough.
Themes: I am not sure if these themes are paid or not, I've had most of them for a while, so I apologize in advance if you're only looking for free themes.
If you have a simple/colorful background on your home screen, I would recommend Nanna 8. It doesn't look too great with a gray background IMO because there is a gray fade to the apps. I think the grayish tint to the apps and a colorful/blurred background looks great together. That is my current setup (I'm thinking about posting on /r/iOSThemes soon).
I also really like Enlightened IOS8, it's a glyph styled theme. Pretty simple/minimal and goes well with a neutral colored background. Since the glyphs are white, it can be difficult to see them or read the app name if there is a lot of white/bright colors in your background.
Odin is a beautiful theme; it has a medieval style IMO. I think that would go well with a simple gray or neutral colored background.
Solstice8 keeps to a style similar to the stock icons, but it has more "pop" (best way I could describe it). By pop, I mean the theme is NOT a flat theme like the others I suggested. Solstice8 also comes with a status bar redesign, meaning the cellular data dots and wifi bar are redesigned (I'm using the status bar redesign Solstice8 comes with along with the Nanna 8 theme).
enkel was a theme I used for a while; it is another "flat" theme. It gives off a "creamy" vice to me because it seems like the icons have an off-white tint. enkel comes with a BUNCH of options along with just changing the app icons. They have a redesigned Control Center (not a huge change, but I think it is absolutely amazing), different masks for the icons, and it comes with Iconomatic with a mask, round mask, and non-mask. This is probably one of my favorite themes I've ever used (as you can tell I really enjoy flat themes haha).
I believe all these themes are on the default repos, but if they aren't just comment which theme isn't and I'll check and give you the repo. I also think you need IconBundles for some of the themes to work, and that is free on BigBoss repo; you don't have to do anything to IconBundles like change settings or anything, it does whatever it does automatically.
Along with themes, the tweak "Homescreen Designer" allows you to change the layout of your apps. So instead of a 4x4 icon grid (or what ever the default layout is), you can change it to pretty much anything you like. I currently have a 3x4 icon grid and I think it looks pretty cool.
I use LittleBrother (Upscale is the free option, just be careful because I don't think Upscale uses Mobile Substrate, but I might be wrong) to change my iPhone 5S resolution to the iPhone 6 resolution.
I have Crash Reporter and Battery Life (I think both are free, but not 100% sure). Crash Reporter to tell me what is causes crashes to safe mode, which is usually a tweak that was recently installed that causes a conflict with another tweak. Battery Life to (obviously) monitor my battery usage and what is using the battery. If I install a tweak and my battery life instantly drops, I check the Battery Life app to figure out what is causing the battery drain.
ColorFlow is one of my favorite tweaks ($1.99 on BigBoss). It changes the background color, slider color, and the rewind/fast forward/play/pause button color to blend well with the album art of the song you're listening to! It works with the music apps, Spotify, SoundCloud and probably more music apps that I don't use.
I have to leave in a few minutes, but I think messing around with the Control Center is fun. Tweaks like CCControls or something similar (just use the sidebar search bar for control center tweaks; there are s bunch of tweaks to choose from).
LockHTML (get LockHTML 4 if you're on iOS 8) is a cool tweak to spice up your lock screen. If you use the search bar on the sidebar, a lot of people have made some pretty cool things for the lock screen! You could also use Homescreen Designer to leave some space at the top or bottom of your home page to put a widget there if you're interested in that kind of thing. Let me know if you like any of the themes/tweaks I suggested!
P.S. sorry for any typos, I wrote this on mobile.