The Balance Sheet
The good, the bad, the frivolous
The Good: +$430.00, mutual aid
I've tried to make parent friends so many times since becoming a mom. I signed up for a Bumble account when I still had a newborn and went through the horror of describing my interests in three emojis only for no one to ever contact me. I've tried multiple local parenting Facebook groups and quietly left once drama that I didn’t care about eventually bubbled up and exploded in long threads. I'm part of a special needs parenting group that occasionally meets in person but I haven't really been able to make deeper connections there, either. But I finally found my people in a parenting thread on a Discord server that has nothing to do with parenting.
Cold and flu season was really rough for us almost the second it kicked off in September. School started and both kids were instantly sick, then my husband got sick, then I got sick. Then the kids were well enough to go out into the world again and the cycle started all over. By mid-October I was just about broken. I was the last household member standing when my husband started getting painful blisters on the bottoms of his feet and the palms of his hands. Apparently adults aren’t immune to hand foot and mouth disease? And like chickenpox, the older you are when you get it, the worse the symptoms are. He couldn’t walk or use his hands to do something as simple as open a jar for over a week.
I was commiserating in the parenting thread and idly mentioned that I might take money out of savings to send all the dirty laundry that had piled up to the wash and fold. Unexpectedly, this led to mass encouragement to drop my Venmo. When I checked my balance that night, I was blown away at how many people had crowdsourced my comfort. (And then to be totally honest I felt a tiny bit guilty!)
The money enabled me to do some things that I’m not usually able to do. I was able to order meals for pickup, tip well, and not look at my bank account balance before or after. I got myself fancy coffee which offered not only a caffeine boost but quiet time in the car by myself. I got to see the very bottom of my laundry room floor for the first time in months.
What surprised me, though, was how much of an emotional burden it lifted. I’d been a little sulking thundercloud for at least a month. I was down to one sick day at work and it felt like no one was ever going to be healthy again. But looking at all the encouraging notes and laundry emojis on my Venmo feed made it feel like everyone was cheering me on. It gave me a boost to keep going when I didn’t think I could.
The Bad: -$237.90, stolen stroller / -$289.90, replacement stroller
Less than a week after that beautiful show of support, we had a bike trailer stolen from our patio. We were home at the time. In fact, thanks to a weird quirk in timing, my husband saw the person speed by him as he was loading our kids into their grandmother’s car before he fully put together what was happening. I was so angry I got in my car and made a loop around the neighborhood, half expecting to see it being pulled down the sidewalk.
I thought I was angry at the person who stole the trailer, but upon further reflection I realized I was angry about three things:
(1) I felt incredibly stupid for letting it happen. So many of the beliefs I was raised with about money and class are rooted in the idea of meritocracy. If you were really smart, you wouldn’t be struggling. If you were really smart, no one is going to steal something off your porch.
(2) A great deal of research went into purchasing it. Autistic kids can have challenges in all kinds of areas, and one that we deal with is that our children don’t walk well. Like physically, yes, they’re fine. But they don’t reliably listen to requests; they don’t have a good sense of danger from things like moving cars; they can bolt or refuse to move or some combination of the two. Hence our need for a double stroller even though they’re 4 and 5 now.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to find an affordable double stroller that has a high enough weight limit for two school-aged kids? It took creative thinking on my husband’s part to arrive at a double bike trailer with a stroller adapter as the solution. We got a Black Friday deal and after two months of supply chain weirdness it was finally delivered to us. At which point we realized it was too wide to get out of our front door. Or our patio door. So we had to store it outside.
(3) The stroller was a safe place for our kids. They loved to sit in it with their books and their Kindles on the patio. When we walked them to the park my son would get in it if he was overwhelmed. It had a lovely rain cover so my husband could pick up my daughter from school and she and her brother would stay dry the whole way back to the apartment. It let us take family walks which became impossible once it was gone.
After really wrestling with the choice, I filed a report with the police so that I could file a claim on our renters insurance. I went through the whole arduous process, including recording a video narrative for an AI to analyze. When I hit the submit button a little pop up box came up and reminded me that my deductible is $1,000 and my rates were going to go up if I continued and was I sure I wanted to? I was not sure, thank you so much.
My husband got back on his research grind and found a stroller that was recommended by parents with older kids with accessibility needs. It was on sale on Amazon so we just went for it. We’re hoping this one lasts a few years. It’s not a double, but my son is really the one who needs a stroller at this point. My daughter has become much better at following rules and holding hands thanks to school. More importantly it can fit through our front door so we don’t have to worry about some desperate person taking it off our porch.
The Frivolous: -$5.99, pom pom keychain phone charger
Speaking from past experience, the path to both household peace and my sanity is having three working charging cables for my phone: One at home, one at work, and one in the car. The easy-to-spot pink cable I kept at home recently broke, so the long boring white one at work got promoted. I was browsing for a replacement for my office at Target when I found possibly the least practical option in the clearance rack. I had to get it, though. It was too fun (and cheap) to pass up. I can’t use my phone when it’s plugged in, but I know no one is going to end up with my charger by mistake.
PS: Twitter is dead but I can’t stop thinking about this tweet:
