This summer I had to do something that went against one of my most dearly held desires: I asked my ex-husband if he could pay for the full cost of our daughter’s summer camp. I even said please.
It’s important to understand that only a few years ago, I stood in my apartment and raised my clenched fist to the sky à la Scarlett O’Hara digging a carrot from the scorched earth of Tara and hoisting it to the tune of “With God as my witness, I’ll never go hungry again!”—only the tune I sang was “I’ll never depend on that man for money again!”
Of course my ex-husband and I share child-rearing costs. Somewhere in the legalese of my divorce agreement lies a frighteningly specific account of exactly what percentage each of us must contribute for which expenses, with details that cover every contingency from college tuition to outgrown pants. The amounts are calibrated to reflect the amount of time my ex, the non-custodial parent, theoretically spends with our daughter worked through the lens of the differential between our projected earning potential for the next twelve years.
We spent months arriving at these figures. Now, three years later, they couldn’t be more irrelevant. In the interim, my remarriage has eliminated alimony, I added a stepdaughter, I returned to full-time employment, and my daughter left private pre-school for public elementary school. Using prior income calculations to determine who pays for what is as precise as a game of blind man’s bluff.
My current husband and his ex-wife use a completely different set of measures to determine how they pay for my stepdaughter’s expenses. They have joint physical custody, 50/50 down the line, and they have a separate bank account into which they each contribute a monthly sum and from which all expenses are supposed to be made. But with a blended family, how can we reasonably expect that a trip to the supermarket in which we buy food for a week, school supplies for each child, new socks for one, an alarm clock for the other, will result in an accurate tabulation of which account the socks go into and how much food fits into child support calculations? If I manage to slip my cell phone bill into an envelope marked “Work: Tax Deductions” more than once a year, I consider it a financial miracle. I really don’t know whether I’m paying out of my salary for expenses that should come out of my husband and his ex-wife’s separate account, nor can I bring myself to care. We’re a family. Families pay for socks.
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