Money comes and money goes, where it stops nobody knows.
Okay, enough with the rhyming. I wish I knew who created the Money Worry Gene and more importantly, how I could remove it from my body. I know I got it from my parents. You can decide the nature vs. nurture part for yourself. I worry. About money. A lot. Before you get out your checkbooks, don't - except you Gram - your money is always good here. BH is employed and makes what I would call, especially in this economy, very decent money. We're decades away from that Net Jets membership he wants, but I don't even know if, country-wide, we'd even be considered middle-class anymore. So why do I worry about money and why do I worry about it now? Here's my answer to myself.
1. Control. Like so many things, money is about control. Knowing when it's coming and when and where it's going is very important to me. BH recently became a full-time contractor, which means he has to bill his employers to get paid. This seems simple, and I think it will be, but he sometimes has a hard time submitting things to get paid and submitting in general - wait, no, that's me. BH does not have the Money Worry Gene. I think he might actually prefer if the world worked without money so he could just do what he loves at work, buy what he wants at the store, and call it a day. I think he would really prefer it more because it would mean I would stop worrying about money AT him.
2. No income. So, while BH's income is very decent, when we had HD a year ago, we went from DINKs (Double Income No Kids) to OIOKs (One Income One Kid - I think I made this acronym up; nice ring to it though, right?). I am now considered a SWAT (Smart Woman with Available Time), but I'm not actually sure what "available" is supposed to mean or I how I can better capitalize on that, so I'm mostly a SAHM (Stay At Home Mom) who doesn't spend a ton of time at home. I have done a few consulting projects over the past several months, which should cover at least a dozen trips to Whole Foods and diapers for a while, but we had gotten to a point as DINKs where we could make choices to eat out, travel, buy gifts, and get our hair cut without thinking about it. I had finally allowed myself in the year before we became parents to let the Money Worry Gene take a vacation for a while. Now I need a vacation from him - yes, the Money Worry Gene is a boy. A girl would never passively make me this angry repeatedly and get away with it.
3. Change. Change of any kind is hard. Apparently, having a baby enter your household is one of the hardest kinds of change, so much so that on Dr. Oz's (and Dr. Roizen's - who is maybe even cooler than Dr. Oz, but doesn't get the same publicity) RealAge test, they ask if you've had a baby in the last year on a list of traumatic events that could impact your health in a psychologically negative way. I think that's pretty progressive and awesome of them. Anyways, our new money situation, though not dire at all, is definitely new, which makes it scary.
4. The Economy. I don't watch much TV. Okay, that's a lie, but I don't watch real TV a lot, the kind with news on it, and a chyron running across the bottom of the screen. I used to have a job where I had to watch that stuff all the time and then actually went to work at a cable news network for a while, and I'm not sure I'll ever recover. Plus, my BH is kind of like a chyron for me sometimes (I mean that in the best possible way). But I do read. And I do talk to people. And I don't live under a rock, even though I am a SAHM. So, I know about the economy is tanking, and even though it has not resulted in anything dramatic in my family yet, I'm scared somehow it's like a monster that attacks in a movie, and the people who think the attack is over and go on living their lives like the monster is dead, get killed in the last scene. And you're sitting there screaming at them through the screen to pay attention, but they can't hear you. I don't want to be one of those people - so I'm constantly looking for the monster. And it's exhausting.
5. Nurture. Mom, you should stop reading now. So, I'm sure there's a little bit of nature in here too: I am extremely detail oriented, all my ducks in a row, don't want to miss a thing kind of girl. But, I have very vivid memories of my mom's enormous desks at home in our basement, right next to our play area, where she seemed to spend a LOT of time "doing" money. My dad was (and is) self-employed most of my life and that created some extra work for sure, as well as some extra anxiety about money - I didn't realize until I was much older why some Christmases were like the heavens opened up and rained down on us and others were, um, not like that. My mom was always very organized, but it definitely seemed to stress her out and definitely caused bunches of arguments between my parents. And could you blame them? They had both come from less than we ever had, worked their arses off to make ends meet, and when they started to be comfortable, she didn't want it all to go away, and knew, like all of us with the Money Worry Gene do, that it could all be gone in an instant. And he didn't want them not to enjoy it. Sound familiar? I only wish they had enough now, or we did, so they could retire the nasty MW Gene for good in their house. They deserve at least that.
So, do you have the Gene? If so, what do you do to control it? If you don't have the Gene, do you have any advice for me or did you not even get this far in the post because I'm speaking another language? If you have REAL money trouble, do I sound like a big baby? Okay, actually, don't answer that.
I'm off to go prepare a healthy dinner for my family that I bought during a $100, 2 bag shopping trip to Whole Foods, which I refuse to call Whole Paycheck, but man.
Now, forget about this post, and worry about people who really don't have money and need our help to make it. Here are some ideas:
Modest Needs: Give small grants to individuals in need to help keep them out of the cycle of poverty, or to a small nonprofit or community organization that just needs an extra hand to help others.
USA Service: Answer President-elect and Michelle Obama's call to service for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Want to serve another day? Check out Volunteer Match. Visit AmeriCorps if you want to serve for more than a day. I was an AmeriCorps VISTA for a year ten years ago and it changed my life forever.
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