The Great Unknowable Future

Inheritance Costs
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Inheritance Costs

Wow, I have written and rewritten the intro to this post five separate times and I cannot get the words to come out right! Partly, it’s because too many people reading this have lost someone dear, and I worry a topic that touches on losing loved ones might be triggering. If that sounds like you, please be gentle to yourself and feel free to check back in another day.

Partly, it’s because the topic of “inheritance” is so emotionally loaded. Right up front, you have a loss. So there are going to be all sorts of complicated feelings about an inheritance based on your relationship to the deceased. Maybe especially when that inheritance is not oodles of cash, but a baby grand piano, or a speedboat, or a timeshare in Argentina, or a collection of Meissen clowns, or a living, breathing lives-up-to-150-years tortoise.

(Perhaps the more logical minded among us have less of an issue with this than I do, but I am SO SENTIMENTAL. I cannot even THINK about inheriting anything without getting all teary and upset. I am pretty much banned from talking to my mother-in-law about things she wants to give away, because I will 100% take them, if only because they belonged to Great Aunt Hoosit. No thought to whether we need a six-feet-tall marble phonograph or a set of John Travolta-themed dishware. I get all wrapped up in the story behind the thing and can no longer see the thing itself.)

Once you get past the whole “someone I love has died” aspect of inheritance, you have the equally complicated issue of trying to fit someone else’s [heirloom] into your life. A life which may not have room for said [heirloom] for a wide range of reasons.

Finally, there’s the additional complexity of trying to navigate the inheritance of something precious to YOU when it may not be quite so precious to the person you share a life with. (I am not even going to get into the wildly complicated aspects of sharing an inheritance with a sibling, parent, step-sibling/parent, or other relative. That’s a different topic entirely.)

“What to do when your spouse inherits something you don’t care about” is what I most want to discuss today, although I 100% want to hear of any weird or unusual or particularly precious heirlooms in your own family lore.

Edited to add: Whoops! I forgot to mention that the below scenario is 100% FAKE. The watch is a stand-in for any heirloom. As you read, see if your calculus would change if [watch] were replaced by [sailboat], [lake house], [parrot], [pipe organ], or any other heirloom that would definitely incur costs. Would your response change if it were YOUR [heirloom] and not your spouse’s?

SCENARIO

Upon his death, a beloved grandfather bequeaths a very valuable antique watch to your spouse. The watch has both sentimental value (your spouse recalls seeing it on Grandfather’s wrist for the duration of his life; your spouse has fond memories of trying on the watch; your spouse can recite word for word the story of how Grandfather came to own this high-end timepiece) and financial value (the watch is nearly 60 years old and in perfect shape; it has an insurance value of $20,000).

When your spouse first takes possession of this watch, there are some initial costs. The watch requires insurance, which costs about $300 a year. To keep the watch safe from pets and children, your spouse purchases a watch box for about $100.

Your spouse wears the watch as often as possible. After all, the grandfather enjoyed the watch; so should your spouse.

Then you learn that the watch will require some routine maintenance. Maybe it needs a professional cleaning for around $50. Maybe it needs an annual water-resistance inspection for $50.

Okay, the annual costs are adding up a bit. But it’s not a ton of money. And surely there are costs that you incur that you don’t even think about.

Plus, the watch clearly brings your spouse joy. The grandfather’s memory proudly circles your spouse’s wrist. The feeling of closeness your spouse feels to the grandfather – well, that’s priceless.

Except… Now the watch needs a mainspring replacement for $150, which isn’t nothing, but… okay, fine. And then the winding mechanism fails and requires a $400 repair. And then one of the links becomes damaged, and now the watch repair people are quoting you $500 to repair the bracelet.

Suddenly, your spouse’s precious heirloom is costing some real money.

ASSUMPTIONS

Let’s assume, before you decide how you will respond, that:

  • you and your spouse share a primary bank account, but also have separate “personal expenses” accounts
  • you have ample money in your shared account to cover these costs with no problem, but the costs are more than your spouse’s “personal expenses” account could pay for without significant hardship (i.e., your spouse would not be able to buy you a birthday gift, or afford a NYT Games subscription, or whatever would constitute a “significant hardship” in this lack-of-actual-hardship situation)
  • you are not a “watch person” and do not care about watches beyond their ability to tell time
  • you love your spouse
  • you loved your spouse’s grandfather, even though you weren’t as close to him as your spouse was

YOUR RESPONSE

So what do you DO? I think we need another poll.

I’m pretty sure that most of the people in this little blogging community are Of The Age to have either dealt with this subject already, or who will likely be dealing with it in the not-too-distant future. Maybe it will cost us money or maybe it will cost us sleep. Maybe we will love the inheritance as much as our spouse does or maybe there will be a vast imbalance. Maybe – and this is my sincere, heartfelt, and impossible wish – we will all live forever with those we hold most dear.

I don’t know if we can necessarily predict our reaction to any sort of bequest until it happens. But I would love your thoughts anyway.

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Five for Friday: These Exquisite Endless Fleeting Days Edition

Last night was one of those nights: I woke up at two, could not fall back to sleep, and as I drew closer and closer to morning, my brain decided to amp up the anxiety. It went like this: Dinner party stress: I think I will do a Greek salad; I do want to grill the salmon/chicken beforehand, but that means I need to clean the grill today. Probably I should also make hummus today, too, so I can use tomorrow before our guests arrive to panic-clean everything in sight. Birthday party stress: the treasure hunt is still in progress, and I don’t yet know if we’ll have enough kids for teams which affects how I do the treasure hunt. I need to text a neighbor about using his mailbox as a clue location. And oh, since the resolution of the treasure hunt is going to be the big pink flamingo pool floatie, HOW am I going to do that if the kids swim before they treasure hunt? Maybe the kids should do the treasure hunt first, then dinner, then swim? But that means swimming later, and will we bother our neighbors? Upcoming travel stress: Ugh, I do not want to get on an airplane. Will the cat sitter be as good and trustworthy as my friend said she would be? Will the cat be too lonely? My husband will be here with him at night, but he is so used to people. Will he hate me and Carla when we return? Will my husband be lonely? I’ve never left HIM alone this long before, either. Social stress: I have one upcoming week during which I am Carla-free, and I’ve so far planned FOUR meetups with friends, and I want to do all of them, and at least three of them won’t happen this summer otherwise, and yet ACK. Upcoming sleepaway camp stress: Ugh. What will I do without my baby while she’s away? Will she be okay? What if she hates it? What if she gets poison ivy and can’t sleep and is as miserable as she was the first time she got poison ivy, and was more wretched and despondent than I’ve ever seen her? And of course the recent Texas tragedy is playing over and over in my head, God rest the souls of those poor children and soothe the hearts of their parents. What if… Not floods, probably, but fires or bears. How do I teach Carla to evade a bear without terrifying her? IS there a way to evade a bear? She’s so little. Does the summer camp have A Bear Plan? Should I call and ask or will they think I’m crazy? Apocalypse stress: All this flooding feels Biblical in nature. And the wars. And the news. Everything is hopeless. 

That was when I got OUT of bed, because being in bed was no longer going to lead to sleeping. I checked on my child, flopped across the entirety of her bed like a starfish, and stole the cat (also sleeping, also taking up as much bed as possible) (what? there’s no rule against waking sleeping cats), and went and sat in my office trying to hypnotize myself into sleeping via the motorcycle rev of the cat’s purr. 

The cat purred until he fell asleep, slept, and then – as usual – abruptly woke up and decided it was time to play. So I got out my laptop and wrote this post. 

I have been feeling guilty ALL summer about how constricted I feel with Carla around so much. Especially guilty now, as her sleepaway camp nears, and I won’t get to see her at all. I know in my heart that it’s not HER that I’m resisting; it’s the dearth of time alone, that’s all. Spending time with her is, in fact, so precious. Here are five of things I’m loving about our time together. 

  1. Mornings with Girl and Cat: Every morning, I either wake up and feed the cat and then take him up to Carla’s room, where he wakes her up with his purring. Or Carla wakes up first, feeds the cat, and I wake up on my own. Either way, we end up watching cat videos on Instagram for an unplanned amount of time. I hold the phone, she nestles into me, the cat lies somewhere between us, engine rumbling. It’s more comfortable so snuggle up in her bed – there’s more space. But I kind of love the mornings when the three of us gather in the armchair in my office. There’s nowhere near enough room for both of our rear ends in the chair, but Carla squishes herself in, half on top of me, anyway. We have so rarely had morning plans this summer that we take our time. Mostly I try to keep our reel-scrolling to ten or fifteen minutes, but one day we watched for a half hour. We’re in our pajamas. She leans her head against me. Her hair tickles my cheek. Her legs, coltish and long all of a sudden, overlap my own, her feet almost reaching mine.
  2. Car Rides: Now that I’m not driving two hours a day, every day, I’m no longer averse to going places. Carla gets to sit in the front seat now and she loves it. I am surprised by how much I love it, too. She chooses the music we listen to, she makes jokes, I can reach over and squeeze her knee. There’s this very subtle shift that’s happening – I suppose it’s been happening all along, and I only just noticed it – wherein she’s becoming less of a charge I am shuttling about and more of a companion; I’m not ferrying her places, we’re going on adventures together.
  3. Cat Obsession: I am almost embarrassed by how much time the two of us spend observing the cat. He is just so cute, Internet. And Carla and I fully and intensely agree that everything he does is cute, and we want to be informed of everything he is doing so we can take part in the cuteness. The two of us will stand on either side of the cat tower and pet him and comb him and rub his little feet (he loves to have his back feet rubbed and will splay his little toe beans so you can gently rub the webbing between his toes) and admire him and tell him how handsome he is. If he is doing something adorable (most recently he jumped onto my bathroom counter and “hid” in the sink), one of us will call out to the other so we can both bear witness. No one else in the world is as interested in his every whisker twitch as she and I are, not even my husband, and I love that we have this shared obsession. 
  4. Pool Time: Carla seems to have much more fun in the pool when she has a friend over, and I get that. Unless you are a boring adult and enjoy swimming laps, it’s a little lonely to play in the water by yourself. But friends cannot come over every day, and sometimes we just have each other. We play a game we came up with last summer, Water Spa, where one of us is the client and the other is the incompetent spa technician. The client lies down on the pool float and the technician drags her around the pool trying as hard as possible to dislodge her from the float. We practice handstands and Carla gives me tips about how to do mine better. We wave to the kitty, who watches us from the window. I don’t know that I’ve played with Carla all that often since she was a little kid. I was never great at it; I don’t enjoy it. But I’m learning to relish these playful hours in the pool, just the two of us. 
  5. Unexpected Undertakings: During the school year, our time together is fairly structured. Wake ups, breakfast, me cajoling Carla through getting dressed/brushed/out the door, car rides to and from school, me prodding Carla through her weeknight activities or homework, dinnertime, bedtime routine. This summer, with so much free time, we’ve ended up doing things I’d never anticipated. Playing Clue together, then watching the original Clue movie. Watching YouTube videos about how to give a cat a “hygiene cut” and then giving our cat a hygiene cut. Taking videos of the kitten and editing them together for his non-existent Instagram account. The other day, I was working on her treasure hunt and she wandered into my office and perched on the arm of the chair, curious about what I was doing. I didn’t give her a peek at the treasure hunt – she will not get an unfair advantage! – but I did show her my digital folder of birthday things. I’d created a Pool Party Scattergories last summer, in case we had rain and the pool wasn’t part of the party, and she was delighted. We played it together, just the two of us, sitting there on my chair, counting down “Three, two, one” and then saying our answers simultaneously. When the prompt was “things you find the fridge” and the letter was E, we both said “eggplant” at the exact same time and dissolved into giggles. Mundane things made magical.

This summer has reminded me of that feeling so familiar in Carla’s baby and toddler years, of being touched out and overstimulated and unable to have a moment to myself. It has reminded me of that first summer of Covid, when I was Carla’s sole friend, teacher, parent, and entertainment and I was ill-equipped for any of those roles and I felt like it was unfair that she was forced to have me as her mother when she deserved so much better. 

It has also reminded me of how joyful and creative Carla is: She is so full of laughter and singing and buoyant ebullient energy. She and a friend composed a song about potato chips, of all things, and it’s catchy and hilarious. She wrote a story (about the cat) for submission to Story Pirates. She created an absurd exercise routine she does in the pool, narrating herself spoof-gymfluencer style. She constructs elaborate lairs for the kitten out of boxes. She is a delight, still in many ways a little girl while in increasingly numerous ways a young woman, and I have a front row seat to the complexities and contradictions of this stage.

Right now, she wants to be with me. Yesterday, after we’d been looking up Truth or Dare questions for her sleepover (I’m writing them on slips of paper and putting them in a basket), and I needed to go do something, she called after me, “And then when you’re done, we’ll do something together!” As though we hadn’t been doing something together all day long. 

How long will this last? It won’t last forever; it can’t. The point is not to hold her tightly to me, it’s to stay here as she leaves.  

I never learn; I seem destined to repeat this lesson again and again. There is exasperation but there is also an urgency to preserve these moments in amber. The push and pull of parenthood, the resistance to and longing for closeness, the need for separation and the anguish that separation leaves behind.

* * *

We go around the neighborhood together, me on foot, she in her new rollerblades. She’s still a little unsteady, so she holds my hand. It is so hot, as hot as the summer she was born, when I walked endlessly around the block trying to induce labor; sweat trickles down my back, her hand is damp in mine. When the road gets steep, I pull her, even as an ache spreads across my shoulders; on the downhill side, she grips tight to my waist, her arms hot, her weight setting me off balance. 

There are places where the road is flat and smooth, where she lets go and glides ahead of me. So far, there’s always been another tricky spot that causes her to stop, wait for me to catch up, thread her fingers through mine. Any day now, she’ll discover she’s fine on her own. I hope she always reaches for my hand. At the same time, I hope she doesn’t look back. 

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Eight

Near our house is a pond. On the pond lives a blue heron; Carla has named him Jeff. We drive a specific way home from camp these days, just so we can drive past the pond. We look for Jeff. Any time we are in the car, Carla asks if we can drive past Jeff’s pond – even if we are approaching home from the opposite direction.

This feels so very Carla, and I don’t know why. 

She loves birds. She has always loved animals in all forms, but this year a second-grade study of birds really brought her ornithological passion to the fore. She has a pair of binoculars and a bird book and loves to cart them around with her. She exclaims over every feathered friend we encounter, no matter how common: “Look! A robin!” “Mom, look, look! I think that’s a pigeon!” “Is that a mourning dove?” “A chickadee!!!!!” Her enthusiasm for birds is boundless. Her grandmother recently took her to the craft store and she bought a bunch of tiny birds – the kind you see on Easter wreaths – and she wore one in her ponytail for several days.

Every time we see a bird of prey, she speculates it is either a red-tailed hawk or a vulture. I was not aware that our suburban area features vultures, and remain convinced that they are hawks, even when Carla insists otherwise. But then again, I am not the bird lady in our family.

She is equally enamored of dinosaurs, and somehow deeply knowledgeable. She will spot a dinosaur in a book or on TV and will immediately notify me that it’s a Spinosaurus or a Plesiosaurus or a Triceratops. Except that she knows dozens and dozens of dinosaur classifications, while those three dino-types I just listed are among the maybe five or ten I know. Her dinosaur birthday party went over quite well, I thought. Just the right amount of dino-décor for her party, and I surprised her with a dinosaur balloon on the day of her actual birthday. It was such a nice way to memorialize this current fascination. 

Carla, of course, remains especially enchanted by dogs. New over the past year, she has been granted permission to ride her bike or scooter around our cul-de-sac (ringing her bell as she passes, so I can listen for her; and if she goes over the ten-minute mark, which is how long it takes her to make the circle, I go out and look for her; she is always petting a dog), looking for dogs to pet. (Only the dogs of neighbors, not stranger dogs.) 

She continues to love crafting, and it is fascinating how her brain works: she can see a collection of raw materials and envision their endpoint and then actually make it happen.  (She brought home a stack of foam sheets and a zipper and told me she was going to make a backpack for her Barbie… I could NOT see how that would work, but she DID IT. A wearable, fillable, zippable, recognizable backpack!) She is a Maker, through and through. We watch Making Ittogether, and I hope it inspires her, shows her a few of the many ways she can transform everyday materials into something new, gives her ideas for potential careers doing something she loves.

She is obsessed by candy and TV, two things I try (and often fail) to moderate. She loves all things sweet, like her father, and is always asking for ice cream and s’mores and cupcakes. We have had all three, plus cheesecake, in the days since she turned eight. 

The cheesecake, by the way, was okay. Not great, but not bad. I had A Crust Incident when I was making it, but it was easy enough to scrap the crust and start over. (Less easy was wiping all the leaked butter out of the bottom of my oven. You live and you learn.) 

Carla’s tastes are growing and changing. Instead of dresses every day, she gravitates toward jeans and t-shirts. She is newly scornful of her unicorn-and-rainbows backpack, and wants one that is ALL BLACK for third grade. (We did put a selection of backpacks in front of her the other day, in the form of a Lands End catalog, and she liked ones with stars and galaxies moreso than the all-black option, so we’ll see what we end up with.) She loves experimenting with makeup and tattoo pens and stick-on jewels. She loves asking me to do new things with her hair – small ponytails, high ponytails, braids. (I didn’t say my hairstyling repertoire was vast.)

She can read very well now, and is able to read almost anything, but it’s still not an activity she likes or chooses to undertake very often. Over the past year, she’s grown very fond of audiobooks and will listen to the same ones over and over until I request that she try something new, or at least something we haven’t heard in a while. She went through the entire Judy Blume catalog (well, the lower grade books) and most of Beverly Cleary’s books and a lot of the Lemony Snicket “Series of Unfortunate Events” books and whatever else I can persuade her to listen to. She has heard Socks probably a hundred times, I am not even kidding. Ribsy is not far behind. I kind of miss the days of podcasts (Wow in the World and Story Pirates were her favorites) but I love that she is enjoying books in any form. 

She has fallen in love with poetry, though. She found a battered copy of A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein and read it over and over and over, memorizing several of the poems. She often chose that book for us to read when we put her to bed, each of us picking a random page and reading, then handing the book to the next person. Some nights, she would help me memorize one favorite poem. Other nights, after we kissed her goodnight, she would continue reading long past bedtime. We got her Where the Sidewalk Ends and the Random House Book of Poetry for Children for her birthday. If Carla is in a phase of loving poetry, well, I want to stoke that fire. 

This year, she continued to excel at skiing. She needs lessons to help build skill, but she is an eager skier and has no trouble keeping up with her friends. She tried out ice skating, for the second time in her life, and I was very proud of her for keeping at it even though it did not come easily to her. She had a few days of feeling very insecure, but she really worked hard and I think she has a good foundation of balance. 

Second grade was Carla’s best academic year yet. Her class was small (only ten children) and her teacher was phenomenal, but I am so very proud of how hard Carla worked. Not only at math and reading, but at paying attention and staying focused on her work which do not come easily to her. I am also so incredibly proud of how well she did during Covid in general, and during remote schooling specifically. It was so hard. And she really powered through it all.  

She has a bunch of friends from school and loves them all. It was so fun to see her at her party, with all these other little girls who are all so different and who all, somehow, get along so well. One of her friends moved away and they bridge the distance by playing Animal Crossing together, over Facetime. At another friend’s birthday party, Carla led the entire group in a toast to the birthday girl. Her voice and her enthusiasm carry. She wore a rainbow dress with rainbow sandals to that same friend’s birthday party and one of the other mothers commented that it was so appropriate an outfit because that’s exactly what Carla is: a dazzling rainbow of a kid, who attracts people to her and makes them smile. What a compliment, right?! 

Carla is increasingly sassy and I have to remind her on occasion to be respectful and to rephrase things. She hates having her hair brushed. She dislikes cleaning her room (her coping method is to “plean” which is her word for playing and cleaning; I am not a fan because “pleaning” is at least 95% playing and often whatever small amount of cleaning that occurs is soon erased by the playing). But in the main, she is cheerful and friendly and kind. She is enthusiastic about nearly everything (except sleep) (except when we are about to be late for camp) and my husband and I comment frequently about what a happy kid she is. She still, sometimes, wakes up singing. We both hope she never loses that innate zest for life that lights up everything she sees, that draws people to her, that makes her glow from the inside out. Seven has been a surprisingly spectacular year and I can’t wait to see what Carla-as-an-eight-year-old is like. 

This year, I didn’t fall as deep into my annual “my baby is growing up too fast” pit of nostalgia and despair. Probably because the shiny rainbow lining of this awful pandemic year was that I got to spend more time with Carla than ever before. What a blessing. I feel less like my time with her is slipping through my fingers, more like we can find pleasurable time in one another’s company, more grateful than ever before for the things outside of me that help her thrive (school, camp, sports, playdates). I am so happy she is growing and I love being able to witness as she has changed from a squishy, spit-puppy baby to a toddler dynamo to a thoughtful, eager-to-learn, happy-about-life child. What a privilege it is, to be her mom.

Eight. Eight is going to be great, I just know it.