The Tooth Fairy (or a tale of innocence lost)

I saw this writing prompt on Mama’s losing it and just had to tell this little nugget of my childhood. 

I was about 5-6 years old and I was in my mom’s bedroom for some reason and I found a little box with teeth in it.  At this point in time I was still a Tooth Fairy believer, so of course my first thought was whose teeth are these, and because I knew mine had been taken away by the Tooth Fairy.  I was totally freaked out and demanded to know whose teeth these were and how/why my mother had them.

My mom was in one of her long-term relationships, and the boyfriend in question saw this as a great opportunity for him to get more involved with me and proposed to my mom that he be the one to explain it to me.

So he took me to my mom’s room, where I had made the gruesome discovery, and started to explain to me about how the tooth fairy was made up by moms and dads, while my mom sat in the living room waiting apprehensively to see how this would go.

Next thing she knew, I was wailing and crying and running from the bedroom into her arms, the boyfriend following behind me totally confused by my reaction.  My mom couldn’t understand a word I was trying to say because of my big gulping sobs, so she asked him what had happened.

He told her that all he did was sit me down to explain that the Tooth Fairy was something that moms and dads made up to make things more fun for kids, just like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.

My mom looked at him, furious, and explained that I didn’t know that the other ones weren’t real, and that he should have just stuck to the Tooth Fairy.

Bam!…my childhood innocence shot to hell with one sentence.  All of the childhood mythology gone at once.  Now I laugh about it, and can imagine how horrible the guy felt, but I remember it took me a very very long time to get back to liking that particular boyfriend of my mom’s.

The money talk – part 1

This week, after almost a year of living together, my boyfriend and I had the money talk.  This is a talk that I have never had with anyone, never feeling the need or urge to show my finances to my significant other.

It started the other night, when my BF came home very discouraged about his finances. 

He makes a decent salary, but pays a hefty amount of child support, which gobbles up roughly 40% of his net income, meaning that when all is said and done, he takes home less than someone on minimum wage.

I had been aware of his income, and he of mine, because we did have a discussion at the beginning of our relationship about how we would handle the bills and whether or not he was ok with me bringing home more than him.  I earn an above average but not huge salary for an admin assistant.  At this discussion, he said that he would have to deal with it since pretty much any woman with any job was going to out earn him because of the child support.  We decided that we split everything 50/50, since he had already been in the situation of supporting someone else (the ex) and did not want to be on the receiving end of that.

There are only 4 areas where bills that are not divided evenly

·         Food – I am a vegetarian, so he pays 100% for all his meat, unless we are having guests over for dinner, in which case I pay half.

·         Apartment insurance – since I own more of the stuff in the apartment than he does, we based the bill on percentage of total value, with a stipulation that in case of a claim, we each receive that same percentage of the payout.  This bill is split 65/35

·         The cleaning lady – we both agree that she is a non-negotiable expense, and forego cable to pay her. She comes for 3 hours every 2 weeks, mostly doing the heavy duty cleaning, leaving us with laundry, dishes and general picking up.  In order to ease his finances a bit he pays 1/3 of the bill, but he does more of the day to day cleaning.  I do laundry.

·         Kids expenses – If the item is necessary to the kids (ie: food, clothes, primary bedding) he pays 100%.  If the item is optional (ie: toys, books, extra clothes, bedroom decorations) we pay 50/50.

As you can see, we already had a big part of the financial talk done, but we had kept two things private: debt and spending, and we realize now that it was very stupid of us to not have had this discussion.

Me, I’m about 9000$ in debt from various sources, with about 750$ in my accounts.  I’ve had this amount of debt for a while, and the main reason it hasn’t budged is that I would often buy something for the both of us and not ask for his part, because I felt guilty.  I’m not sure if I felt weird for earning more, or that it just felt so much like I was spending my hubby’s money like some 50s housewife, but in reality, I assumed way more expenses than I should have.

Him, well, he’s mostly been overspending and underplanning. He’s in debt around 2500$, but has about 1500$ in his bank account.  He makes enough money to pay all of the concrete bills, but doesn’t plan for any extras, even though he spends on those extras anyways.

So after he came home, the other night, worried about how he was gonna pull off living the lifestyle he wanted, paying his own way etc. I saw an opportunity and jumped on it.  I told him that I too was not in the best of circumstances, and that maybe we should just lay it all out in the open and hash it out.  Then work together on a plan to help us both gain a better financial stability.