It’s only fair. My mom is a seventy-two-year-old widow who lives in a basement apartment and drives a car with no shocks, making riding over potholes something to be avoided. She rarely buys new clothes and her habit of saving leftovers—even a tablespoon of mashed potatoes—is legendary. “I’ll save any ole dib-dab,” she is known for saying.
Still, she is not poor. Her thrifty lifestyle enabled her to amass an impressive array of retirement accounts. Her mother, also a frugal and savvy woman, died in 2005, leaving my mother and her siblings a tidy sum.
Even so, Jason and I would never have asked for a gift. First, we live a more decadent lifestyle, and it would just be wrong to take money from someone who has exercised such discipline over the years. If she gave us the money, she would give my two sisters equal amounts. This has always been her way, especially with Christmas gifts. Everyone gets the same amount. And that would have left her significantly poorer.
Also, women in my mother’s family have a history of almost making it to the Big One Hundred. My grandmother died at ninety-seven and her mother died at ninety-six. It’s a club no one wants to join, especially after seeing her mother struggle to put a thought together at such an advanced age. But my mother expects to outlive her money, and the stress weighs on her.
So, finally, the hardest part. I just blurted it out. We needed the money for the adoption. We’d pay her back. She agreed without hesitation, barely looking at the proposed terms.
She had just gotten her inheritance, but she didn’t withdraw money from that account, as her stockbroker would have had to sell stocks and pass along the fees. Instead she sifted through her mutual funds and found some barely earning any interest. She wrote me several checks, which I deposited.
The hardest thing about asking my mother for money was my pride. Mine and Jason’s. But in the end, it made financial sense. When we make our final payment in October, 2008, we will have paid $29,550, just over $1,000 in interest. Money doesn’t come any cheaper.
