What the Lemonade Stand Taught me

by | Aug 9, 2017 | Money, Parenting & Co-Parenting

What the Lemonade Stand Taught Me

I used to go to camp with my kids a couple of weeks a year. A rustic, all-inclusive, moms and kids only, canoeing and swimming, alongside candlelight yoga and sessions on “living your authentic life.” Every year leading up to it, I’d feel a little “meh.” Every year, on the last night, we’d sit in a circle and share what we were grateful for, and every year I said some version of the same thing: no meal prep, no laundry, no grunt work, and a real reminder of how I wanted to live according to my own values.

Camp was a reset button, and reset buttons are hard to come by. Most of us live in reaction mode more than we’d admit. I certainly did, finishing one project only to realize there was no time to reflect before starting the next, mostly my own doing, since I tended to be a little too optimistic about what I could fit into a day.

So of course, at camp one year, I did it again. An email came in asking for help on a project I loved: building a spreadsheet to get someone real clarity on their finances. I said yes immediately. The only catch was a tight deadline, and with other people handling my kids and the day-to-day grind, that detail didn’t register.

It registered the moment I got home and was back to making lunch.

The kids left for their week with their dad, and I got real, focused work done, with no shopping or chores pulling at me. Then they came back, the project wasn’t finished, and I was suddenly working while arranging childcare, shopping, and cooking at the same time.

I sat at my desk building the spreadsheet while my kids entertained themselves nearby, occasionally getting a snack tossed their way or a yell to stop fighting.

They’d just come back from an entrepreneurship day camp their dad had signed them up for, and they were full of ideas about making money. Naturally, they landed on a lemonade stand.

“Can we walk to the store for supplies?” “Yes, yes, just be quiet, I’m working.”

They set it up. I paused to help carry a table and chairs and check that the lemonade was food-safe, then couldn’t resist inserting myself into their pricing. “How much are you charging?” I asked, though really I told them: seventy-five cents a cup. Last time, they’d made forty dollars in an hour, and instead of pride, I’d felt horrified, convinced they were overcharging.

They agreed, reluctantly, and went to sell.

I finished the spreadsheet, proud of it, sent it off, and went to check on them.

A couple of dads on bikes had stopped. “We always stop for these, gotta support the kids.” One added, “You guys need a better street, not much traffic here.” They handed over three fifty for two cups. “Don’t fill it too full.”

Later, the kids told me every customer that day had paid more than seventy-five cents.

That’s when it hit me. I’d just spent an entire project quietly finding ways to charge my client less, working extra hours unbilled, telling myself it didn’t count because I loved the work and was learning.

Turns out I needed the lesson from my own kids. They weren’t gouging anyone. Their customers wanted to pay more. Two kids selling lemonade from concentrate, on a low-traffic street, had tapped into something people were glad to pay for.

Do you do this too? Minimize what your own work is worth?

Learn from a ten- and eight-year-old with a card table: keep enjoying what you do, but don’t let that be the reason you give it away. Charge what it’s actually worth. Take on less. Keep making what you do better.

The Importance and Contradiction of Alone Time

by | Sep 18, 2016 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

A photo by Joshua Earle. unsplash.com/photos/ZMcLVBi9xx4

The Importance and Contradiction of Alone Time

School’s back, and so is the annual pressure to sign my kids up for everything. I’ve bought in, fully. My older son is resisting hard, and I need to let him win this one, right after I sign him up for swimming, choir, and cross country. Just for the bus ride after school to the park near us, obviously.

Dance is where I’m really stuck.

I put him in dance a couple of years ago because team sports never clicked for him, and because at the beach, a place he claims to hate, he’d break into dance completely unprompted. I decided that meant dance was his happy place. He did well. I loved the year-end concerts. His teacher told me he was a natural.

Now he tells me it’s boring. Same moves, over and over, one more obligation to please people, including me, including the woman who runs the studio. I still want to sign him back up anyway, because if he doesn’t keep at it, how will he ever know what he actually loves? He’ll fall behind. He’ll lose the thing that lit him up at the beach.

That’s the argument running in my head, the one currently badgering my kid into a dance class he’s already told me he hates.

This weekend gave me a clearer look at what’s actually going on.

My hiking trip got rained out. No kids; they were with their dad, no plans, an entire Saturday stretching out empty in front of me. I texted a friend to see if she still wanted to hike in the downpour. No. So I sat on my couch and felt the whole day loom.

I ran to my closet, put on my gear, and drove myself straight to the Grouse Grind. Came home, worked for a while, and when that wore off, I started beating myself up for having no life outside of work and exercise, so I started texting everyone I know. A friend offered to have me over to cook with her.

I hate cooking, always have, despite coming from a family of genuine foodies. When she asked, I realized what I actually wanted was to stay home, alone. She heard that in my voice, laughed, and told me to make a to-do list instead, something to distract myself from the “I’m alone” thoughts.

So I made the list. I’m a very dutiful friend, and as I started writing things down, I felt a small flicker of panic that the list was eating into my alone time. Which was absurd the moment I noticed it. I’d been upset about having alone time in the first place, wanting to fill it, and the second I actually started filling it, I missed the alone time instead.

I went to yoga instead. Then that same friend, the one who years ago introduced herself by randomly offering pizza to strangers walking past her house, invited me over for exactly that: bacon and potato pizza. I said yes. I came home that night, still alone, and it was fine. Completely fine. I went to bed happy and woke up happy.

Which brought me back to my son and his dance class.

Filling up every hour of a kid’s schedule teaches them that being alone, or bored, is a problem to be solved rather than a state worth sitting in. My son is an introvert, and he’s also a rule-follower, which means he does the thing he’s told even when he’s already said he doesn’t want to. I’ve been telling him he’s wrong to want out of dance, while insisting, in the same breath, that all I want for him is his own happiness. Those two things don’t actually fit together.

He needs time that isn’t scheduled toward anything, the same kind of time I finally gave myself this weekend, if he’s ever going to find out on his own what actually lights him up. Not because someone signed him up for it. Because he found it, the way he found the beach dancing nobody asked him to do.

How do You Know When to Pull the Plug on Your Marriage?

by | Sep 13, 2016 | Divorce and Separation, Money, Parenting & Co-Parenting

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The Two Fears That Almost Kept Me Married

When do you decide to give up on a marriage, actually call it quits, and ask for a divorce?

I ask because I honestly don’t know the answer. I never made that decision myself; my ex made it for both of us. Left to my own devices, I probably would have stayed until death do us part. I have a high tolerance for pain, and I’ve always preferred trying to fix things over walking away from them. I still want an answer, even though I’m slowly learning there isn’t a clean one, which is basically why I’m writing this at all. When do you actually call it quits?

Put another way: what’s actually stopping you from initiating a divorce, if part of you wants to?

From what I’ve seen, mostly fear. Two fears in particular tend to do the heaviest lifting: money and the kids.

Let’s take them head-on.

Fear One: You’ll Be Much Worse Off Financially

Being poor was one of my fears too. Combined, my husband and I could live comfortably in an expensive city on one income. Divorced, that math falls apart. I’d need a job, we’d need childcare, we’d need to split assets and fund two households instead of one. Both our standards of living would drop. That was a genuinely depressing thought, enough on its own to keep divorce off the table. I’d rather be unhappy and financially stable than happy and broke, or so I believed at the time.

My divorce happened anyway, and yes, my net worth dropped. My cash flow took a real hit. That brought real anxiety with it. I used to build monthly budgets just to confirm, yet again, that there wasn’t enough coming in to cover what was going out, which only fed the anxiety further, until I finally made the connection that stressing myself into a spiral wasn’t actually accomplishing anything.

Eventually I realized I’d always managed, one way or another. I cut my spending, found ways to bring in more money, made decisions, and kept moving forward in a direction that matched what I wanted for my life. For some people that means earning more. For others, it means spending less. Either way, there’s usually a path through.

Three years out, I can say plainly: being happier on my own is worth far more than what the divorce cost me financially.

Fear Two: The Kids Will Suffer

I’d been the primary caregiver for our two kids, four and six at the time we separated. I genuinely couldn’t picture their dad managing them alone for half their lives. Surely they’d go unfed, unbathed, put to bed late, and laundry would pile up forever. And beyond the logistics: my kids wouldn’t be with me for half their lives. They were four and six. They needed their mother. I needed them. They were, in a lot of ways, my whole purpose.

To be clear, my kids wanted us to stay together. My youngest once cooked up a plan where I’d rent an apartment in the same building as his dad, so we could live down the hall from each other. Adjusting to only having one parent around at a time was hard on them at first. But they adjusted. Honestly, it wasn’t even that different from before; my ex and I had barely occupied the same room together for the two years leading up to our separation anyway. They still have to manage two different sets of house rules, switching gears twice a week, but that’s just life. We all have to manage shifting expectations across different parts of our lives, jobs, family, everything. Kids of divorce just get more practice at it earlier than most.

It was harder on us, the parents, I think. I missed my kids desperately for a full three years after the divorce; I have the blog posts to prove it. It took my mom asking me this past summer, while the kids were away for their two-week stretch with their dad, “Do you miss your kids?” for me to actually notice something had shifted. I said, “No, I don’t miss them,” and then really sat with what I’d just said. The old version of me would have felt like a traitor for saying that out loud, wondering what kind of mother doesn’t miss her kids. Instead, I recognized it for what it actually was: a real milestone, for me, for their dad, and for them.

It took three years to build a life that could actually make me happy while my kids were away, and three years to genuinely trust they’d be fine with their dad. What I’ve come to believe, in that time, is that kids do better with two parents who are both actually capable of caring for them. Yes, it takes more coordination, and the back-and-forth between households is tiring, sometimes a little painful. But now they have two parents who can feed them, get them to school, sign them up for activities, and arrange their own plans. Two parents genuinely involved in their lives. I probably still do more, if I’m honest, but their dad is doing far more than he ever did while we were together. If we’d stayed married, I’d likely still be doing everything, and he’d likely still be on the sidelines. Now I have my own life, and a life as a mom, both. Time for my own things, my own work, my own growth, alongside real trust that my kids are being cared for by someone who loves them. That’s a genuinely good outcome.

It took three years to get here, though. Three years to understand that their dad does love them, and that doing things differently than I would isn’t the same as doing them worse. It’s just different. How do you even judge what good parenting looks like? The best I’ve landed on: a good parent is someone who loves their kids and is genuinely trying to do right by them.

Three years out, the fears that kept me in my marriage turned out to be mostly unfounded. I’m grateful my ex worked through his own version of those same fears and finally ended things. The marriage had run its course. We were done. We’re better for being divorced.

Divorced and Still on the Hook

by | Sep 15, 2015 | Divorce and Separation, Money, Parenting & Co-Parenting

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Divorced and still on the hook

Growing up, I was always told I’d be responsible for paying my own way through university. My parents wanted me to go, but they also wanted me to learn financial independence early. I’m honestly not sure if that was a deliberate philosophy or just how things had always been done in the family; both of my parents had paid their own way through school too, and my dad had sold his beloved ’57 Chevy Bel Air to cover his tuition. There might have been a little martyrdom baked in: I sacrificed my car, so you can sacrifice too.

I lived at home during university and paid tuition out of my summer job earnings. My parents helped some, covering half a car and its insurance for the years I was in school, and living at home saved me a considerable amount on its own.

So when I think about my own kids and university, I don’t automatically feel obligated to fund it. That said, things cost a lot more now. My tuition ran about $2,000 a year. Today it’s closer to ten thousand, and minimum wage hasn’t come close to keeping pace with that jump. I’ve also always felt like I missed out on something by staying home for school. So I’ve been going back and forth, leaning more toward wanting to help fund my kids’ education if I can, while still believing that support at that stage is a choice, not an obligation.

Then I learned something that reframed the whole question. A friend of mine was still paying child support for a stepdaughter in her late twenties. It turns out parents remain financially responsible for a child pursuing their first university degree, unmarried, essentially regardless of age.

That got confirmed again during my own divorce, when my lawyer walked me through it directly: under the Divorce Act, child support obligations end when a child marries, becomes self-supporting, or turns nineteen, unless that child remains a “child of the marriage” because they’re unable to become self-supporting due to illness, disability, pursuing an education, or another qualifying reason.

Here’s the interesting part: divorcing your spouse can actually leave you with a greater ongoing financial obligation to your kids than staying married would have. Married parents can simply agree together that their adult child is on their own now. Divorced parents, if a child chooses university, generally can’t make that same call unilaterally.

I understand why the law exists. I’ve seen how badly things can go without it: a parent encourages the kids toward a school far from home, then refuses to help pay once they’re there, leaving the other parent to fund the bulk of it alone, occasionally with some help from the kids themselves. I’ve watched a situation like this play out over several years, court decisions repeatedly siding with the parent seeking support, and payment still not materializing. The frustration of getting a ruling in your favour and still not seeing the money is its own particular kind of exhausting.

Even with the law clearly on your side, enforcing it can turn into a long, draining process. Much of the difficulty lies in the details: figuring out exactly what amounts should be split and tracking and accounting for them over years.

The way to avoid landing there yourself is communication, early and often. Talk to your spouse about what you both envision for your kids’ education. If you’re separating, get clear, specific language about postsecondary funding written directly into your agreement, not vague gestures at “supporting education,” but actual clarity on amounts and how they’ll be calculated and tracked. If your current agreement is silent on this, start that conversation with your co-parent now, ideally before your kids have already set their hearts on a school far from home.

If your co-parent genuinely isn’t on board with sharing the cost, that’s worth a hard, honest conversation with yourself: can you fund it alone, or do you need to start helping your kids adjust their expectations of what this stage of their life is actually going to look like?

And if you do decide funding their education matters enough to you to do it regardless, take a real look at your financial situation to see whether it’s actually possible, and if it’s not yet, what would need to change to get there.