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What my mom taught me about money and generosity
My mom never once sat me down and told me how to handle money. She just did it in front of me, constantly, for about eighteen years, and I absorbed it the way you absorb the smell of your childhood kitchen.
She kept a little spiral notebook in the drawer by the phone. (We had a phone attached to the wall. I’m that old.) Most of it was grocery lists and the number for the guy who fixed the furnace. But toward the back there were a few pages with names and dollar amounts. “Carol, $60, carpool gas.” “Mr. Ortiz, $25, Little League snacks.”
I found it when I was maybe twelve and asked her if those people owed her money. She said, “Some of them. Some of them I owe.” And then she said something I’ve thought about a lot since. “The notebook’s so I don’t have to think about it.”
At the time that made no sense to me. Why write money down if you don’t want to think about it? I get it now. Writing it down was how she let it go. Once it was on paper, it wasn’t rattling around in her head while she tried to fall asleep, and it wasn’t standing between her and Carol at the bus stop.
The other thing she did, and this took me a lot longer to notice, was keep two very different kinds of money in her life. There was lending money, which went in the notebook. And there was giving money, which never did.
When our neighbor’s husband got laid off one winter, my mom brought groceries over every week for a while. I asked once if Mrs. Kowalski was going to pay her back, because I was a kid and kids are tiny accountants. My mom looked at me like I’d asked whether the sun was going to pay us back for daylight. “That’s not a loan, honey. That’s just what you do.”
She was clear in her own head about which was which, and I think she was clear with other people too. If she lent you $40, she’d say, kind of breezily, “pay me back whenever, I’ll put it in the book.” If she was giving it, she’d say nothing at all, or she’d invent a reason it was no big deal. “I made too much lasagna anyway.” She did not make too much lasagna. She made exactly enough lasagna for the Kowalskis.
I’ve messed this up as an adult more times than I’d like to admit. I’ve lent money and then quietly decided, months later, to treat it as a gift without telling the other person, and then felt a little bitter about it anyway. Which is honestly the worst of both worlds. You don’t get the money back, and you don’t get to feel generous either. My mom would’ve called that “being a martyr about it,” with one eyebrow up.
What I think she understood is that generosity and lending aren’t enemies. You can be a deeply generous person and still want your $60 back from the carpool. Asking for it doesn’t make you stingy. If anything it protects the friendship, because the alternative is a slow little resentment that nobody else even knows is there.
And she was gentle when she asked. I remember her on the phone with Carol once, cord stretched across the kitchen, saying something like, “Hey, I’m tidying up my little book and I think I’ve still got $60 down for the carpool gas in March?” Totally light, like she was asking about a recipe. Carol laughed and brought a check over that weekend with a loaf of banana bread sitting on top of it.
That banana bread comes back to me a lot. The money came home and something extra came with it, because nobody felt cornered.
I called her this morning to say happy Mother’s Day, and I asked if she still keeps the notebook. She does. “Different notebook,” she said. “Same drawer.”
The OweMate blog is written by the people who make OweMate, a simple way to keep track of money between friends and family.