Recently I had a small windfall and decided to give it to the daughters.
As I won’t, eventually, be in a position to leave them either land or loot I like to
dish up a little something as I go along. This is to our mutual advantage. Daughters
don’t have to wait and mother’s still around to receive their grateful thanks,
preferably on bended knee.
How do you divide it?
 Previous
windfalls have been divided equally but this was not a large amount. I was presented with
a dilemma: should all of it go to one
daughter and if so how did I decide which one? I found I was assessing who was the most
needy and who the most deserving, which made my decision a choice between a prize for hard
work or thrift or a handout for poverty or neediness.
Of course I wanted to avoid any whiff of favouritism, but the choice was
hard, and became not a gift that I would delight in giving, but an award. I was playing
lady bountiful in a blue suit and I became aware that the process was influenced by my own
attitude to money, an attitude derived from my parents and from my own life experience.
Coming from a background that was a mix of ‘old money’ and
‘trade’ there always seemed enough loot for house and boat and gin and jaguar
but not for shiny new clothes or treats. And talking about the stuff was frowned on. How
confusing was that?
As a married adult, money became important chiefly because
there wasn’t enough to go round so saving became a priority. But eventually, I began
to earn my own living, and having control over the purse strings was like manna from
heaven, still not a lot but my own.
Meeting of minds
Thinking about all this made me, for the first time, curious about the
daughters’ take on money. I gathered them
around with food and drink, put on my interviewer’s hat and asked them who should hit
the jackpot. A serious discussion lasted two minutes while they conceded that giving it
all to one was OK.
But wouldn’t the favoured one feel
guilty? It was the inevitable question and somehow
everything suddenly seemed so simple. My writer’s hat slipped as I became mum and my
self esteem rose.
I learnt about their lack of paranoia and saw myself in a new light.
‘Mum looks at the overall picture. She spends time, gives money or worries about us
when we need it’. They were admiring and generous with each other ‘you’re
not a spend thrift, you’re just very generous’, ‘you’re brilliant with
money, even on the dole you managed to save’, ‘you’re not mean, you’re
just being careful’.
I was reassured by the absence
of heavy-duty scarring on account of their ‘poverty stricken’ childhood.
‘It just seemed normal, all our friends were in the same boat’, they said. And
charity shop clothes were cool even then.
Too good to be true?
Not really. This getting together was different. It was not about partying or
problem
solving, it was about ideas. It sparked an interest in each other’s viewpoint and
blotted out tacky old ways of responding. I learnt a little about the genesis of their
attitudes to money. But it was the buzz of discovering stuff about each other that made
the evening. They are keen to do it again.
So am I. And having
learned a thing or two, my decision seemed so easy. Of
course I was going down the ‘Equal Smarties’ road, and on presentation of the
cheques they were suitably grateful.
The sum may not have been so useful halved, but undoubtedly, even if one was
more needy, both were equally deserving, though in their different ways.
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