I would basically summarize my approach to all practical money matters as some combination of hope and avoidance. I think I learned what a 529 savings plan was when my daughter went to college and I realized that I didn’t have one.
When I was growing up in a house full of books, my otherwise fantastic mother somehow conveyed the message that it was vulgar to talk or even really think about money. My mother cared more about a good sentence than anything you could buy. If something broke in our house with two dogs, two cats and five children, she would say, “It’s just a material object.”
Because of all this, I somehow missed the life lesson that in order to not think about money you have to have enough of it. Sometimes I worry about passing along these extraordinarily unhelpful attitudes to my own children. I worry that they are in the air in my household.
When I see a spreadsheet of any kind my mind blurs; the numbers dance uncooperatively on the page. On some deep, shameful, utterly irrational level, I think it is because I have been conditioned to think: Where is the man who will explain this to me? That was another one of my mother’s ideas—that there are certain aspects of life that men should take care of. I don’t know why I haven’t been able to transcend this with all the thinking I have done on sexual politics, but it is harder than it seems to tune out subliminal messages from your childhood.
e = get, head
Dive into said