As I was starting to jot down ideas for the following post something interesting happened to me while at work. This woman came in with her child who needed to do a report. He was about 10 years old and his report was about sea creatures. I got him several books and let him know that if he needed anything else to come and ask and I would help him find it. He was sitting at a table with his mother and she starts to get upset with him and tells him that he can’t just copy out of the book because that is plagiarism. I don’t think that he has any idea what this means, but he isn’t focusing, and I understand how frustrating that can be. After several minutes of them bickering back and forth the mother drags the child into the bathroom and starts screaming at him, which everyone can hear. They finally come out of the bathroom and the boy is in tears and the mother tells him that she is done with him and that she can’t be around him anymore and walks out of the library. Our security guard was absolutely amazing in this situation. He came over to the kid and squatted down to talk to him. He got him calmed down and back into the children’s area and started helping him with his report. I told my supervisor what had happened and my coworker in adult services went to see if our branch manager was still here. I was getting ready to call the police for child abandonment, but thankfully our branch manager was still here. She came out and asked me to go with her to speak with the mother who was outside of the library on her phone. I went with our branch manager and she told the mother that she couldn’t leave her child unattended in the library and she would have to come back inside. The mother complied and told us that her son had called her a bad mother and that’s why she was so upset with him. She came in and sat near her son and the security guard. I printed off a few of our Homework Help flyers and gave one to her. I told her that the program is specifically for parents in her situation. Her son was doing great with our security guard but wouldn’t listen to his mother when she was telling him the same things. Our Homework Help program is for kids’ kindergarten through 8th grade and high school honors students volunteer to help the kids with their homework. The mother started crying and told me that was exactly what she needed because she tries but her son just doesn’t listen to her. I told her she wasn’t alone because I have seen many parents in that same situation. After the library closed my branch manager came and told me how much she appreciated me keeping my cool and not lashing out at that mother the way that she wanted to. Sometimes that’s all it takes to be an adult. It’s kinda funny how sometimes when you’re contemplating about something it will come and smack you right in the face!
Adulting is difficult. I wish that I could say that you reach a certain age and it all get easier, but it doesn’t. I very much blame my parents for not teaching me things that they should have before I became an adult and I know that there are many people that are in my shoes. I don’t know if at one-point schools were better and actually taught you about things like how to do your taxes, student loan repayment, interest rates (which would have been VERY helpful) but I doubt it. One reason that parents don’t teach you these things is because they either don’t think you’ll understand, or they don’t understand themselves and they just hire someone to take care of things like that for them.
I haven’t always been responsible with money. Actually, when I graduated from college and started working for Cirque du Soleil and was making more money than I knew what to do with I bought a house with my boyfriend, at the time, and ended up foreclosing on it after he started beating me and ended up leaving me with the house that I couldn’t pay for by myself. I knew when we were looking for a house that it wasn’t going to work out between us and I should have listened to my gut. I bought this house in 2006 when the prices were through the roof, so it wasn’t like I could have saved it even if I wanted to. I wish I would have trusted my initial instinct and not bought that house, but I learned from that situation… is what I have to keep telling myself.
One of my friends is going through a situation right now with his student loans. Fortunately for him his parents have agreed to repay them for him, HOWEVER during the past year they weren’t paying the right amount. They were paying quite a bit less than the minimum amount. Of course, by the time he realized this thousands of dollars were owed and not only that, but it tanked his credit. The situation has been corrected now, but since he is only 25 and didn’t have very much credit to begin with having only negative marks on your credit isn’t great and it will take him quite a while to rebuild.
My husband is amazing and has parents that actually taught him the importance of financially responsible. Not to say that he doesn’t splurge once in a while, but he doesn’t get too carried away with it. I wish that there were more people like him out there to help people like me be more responsible with my finances. I feel like there aren’t many like him, though, and I really lucked out. One of the things that he does that I appreciate is that he puts all of the due dates for the bills on our shared Google calendar. While he is the one that pays most of the bills out of our shared checking account, I know that if I’m going to be paying for something soon, I can look at the calendar to see what else is due around that time to see if I should pay for it them or wait a couple weeks.
For the past couple years, I have been the Treasurer for the Nevada Library Association and my husband has been a life saver with that too. I’m not sure I would have made it through if I hadn’t had his support. I had never had to do the taxes for a nonprofit organization before. While I had worked for several nonprofits for years there was always someone that was a CPA on the board that would do them. All I had to do was turn in my receipts. Whenever I had done my taxes when I was single, I would use an online tax service like Turbo Tax and call it a day. I didn’t mind paying the $25 a year to make sure that everything was in and I had done it correctly. Zach does our taxes himself and sometimes it is rather complicated. I sometimes wonder if “real adults” level up in the adulting experience points with they do things like doing their taxes on their own and not pay a person or a service to do these things from them, because I think that they should. These would be badges or levels that I would never get. Maybe a husband wife team could combine experience points and get to new levels. He is much more of an adult than I am in some respects, but I’m better in others and that is exactly the way it should be.