Your Money, My Money
My husband looked me in the eye and said, “Your parents are your problem. Your money is yours, and my money is mine.” So I smiled, accepted his rule, and the next morning I stopped sending his family twenty five hundred dollars a month.
Thirty days later, they were all in a panic.
When my husband, Daniel Whitaker, said, “Your parents are your responsibility, your money belongs to you and mine belongs to me,” he said it the way a judge reads a sentence, as though the matter were now settled and I had simply been informed of the outcome.
We were standing in the kitchen of our house in Portland with my mother’s medical bill on the counter between us.
My father had retired early after a stroke the year before. My mother, Elaine, had just come through a heart procedure that her insurance covered only partly, and the bill on the counter was the part it didn’t. It was not an enormous amount. It was the kind of amount that a household sending twenty five hundred dollars a month to relatives could absorb without blinking, if the household were willing.
I had asked Daniel a simple question. I had asked whether we could reduce, temporarily, just for a few months, the money we sent to his family, so that we could help mine through a hard stretch.
For three years I had quietly transferred twenty five hundred dollars every month to his parents, his younger sister, and occasionally his cousin. His mother, Linda, called it supporting the family. Daniel called it being a good wife. I called it, privately, exhausting, and I had never once said so out loud until that evening in the kitchen.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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