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Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Motherhood: Mom finds economic relief in sons’ piggy banks
I am a total pushover.
Ask any child — especially a Girl Scout — if I have the backbone to say, “no” when asked to buy something for a fund-raiser. The only time I ever refuse a sales pitch is if another neighborhood child has already duped me into more wrapping paper.
After all, I did my time selling bows and Christmas tins, softball candy and, of course, Girl Scout cookies — my personal weakness.
The problem I have is keeping the cash on hand to pay for them when they arrive. I am always caught off guard and unprepared.
Having bought at least 10 boxes of cookies this year from four different Scouts, I owed a few dollars here and a few dollars there. But who wants to write a check for $3?
Recently, during a rare “girl’s night out,” a friend delivered a box of cookies I had ordered from her daughter. Cashless I was, as is usual in this convenient debit card world we live in. So, I did what any mother would do. I raided my sons’ piggy bank for the greenbacks I needed.
My friends stared at me as I sat the jingling bank on the counter and popped the plug out of the bottom. They didn’t say much — at first. Then longtime friend, mother and apparently fellow conspirator, Erin, broke the ice. “Don’t you put an IOU inside? I always do,” she said.
Then the confessions came rolling out. Apparently, I am not the only one who uses her child’s piggy bank as an at-home ATM machine.
My own mother may have been able to get by “borrowing” cash from me as a child, and maybe she did, I don’t remember. But before the age of 5, my brother had earned himself the nickname of “Alex P. Keaton” — the tightwad, money-mongering son on the TV series “Family Ties.” Mom wasn’t getting anything past him.
Aware of my little secret, when the boys’ deposits are made at the bank, Daddy always compensates for my depletions. Not to mention, the boys won’t let me forget about my “loan,” so they are getting their money back … eventually.
Once I handed the money over for the cookies that day, I brought out Noah’s box of irresistible candy bars he had to sell for T-ball this year. The cash I handed over for cookies was returned to me for a couple of Hershey bars, because fellow mom, Nicole, didn’t have any paper money with her.
So my IOU to my son also became an IOU to my friend’s daughter — from her mother — for the cookies I bought. Make sense?
It’s a vicious cycle, but I’m sure we will all break even in the end somehow.
Moms - are you guilty of snagging a few bucks here and there from your kids’ piggy banks? How do you compensate?
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0356 or dmjordan@coxohio.com.
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