Taxing

Marriage is a haven for the lazy.

Of all the things I forgot or never bothered to learn while married, I regret my financial incompetence the most. Unlike, say, fixing the tub (a piece of cake, it turns out) or mowing the lawn (not hard, but if your yard is huge and the local mow-for-hire guy is handsome and inexpensive, not worth the trouble) or, I don’t know, packing the car before a road trip (these are just my examples–every marriage has its own areas of specialty, little chores you do and feel smug about or don’t do and feel incompetent), managing my own money has yet to become rote. Two years post separation, I still quail at my bank statements and shudder at the thought of filing and organizing receipts. I routinely deposit checks weeks after I receive them–which suggests, to me, ill mental health, even though one could, I suppose, argue that it suggests robust financial health. (Hanging on to my child support checks absolutely infuriates my ex-husband, who mutters darkly that I must not really need the money after all. But this is not some new post-separation quirk, as anyone who ever sent me a birthday check knows well.) And I am sloppy about collecting payment for the work I do. I send invoices late, or not at all, with the bizarre result that accounts payable often ends up contacting me. I lose gift cards. I order things from catalogs and then fail to return them. I am, in short, an ass.

Since the separation, I’ve demystified most tasks simply by tackling them. Actually, most chores (no matter how unused you are to doing them) turn out to be like fixing the tub; laughably easy when you’re the only one in charge. I suppose it comes down to this: the energy wasted wishing someone else would do the dishes takes a toll. If you’re the only one who might do them, you stop thinking about it. And bigger chores can be turned into adventures, if met with the proper attitude. My consoling-window friend came over with a gigantic wrench one day and showed me how to fix a rusted pipe under my sink. Despite these minor triumphs, however, it distresses me to admit that my learning curve in financial matters has not been particularly steep.

My ex-husband and I didn’t have one of those hideous relationships where we kept track of who did what obsessively, but we did unconsciously divvy things up. And since I am vaguely neurotic about money and completely incompetent at math, he took over the finances. He wasn’t perfect at it either (we recently had to pay a distressingly large sum to the IRS, because he’d done our taxes incorrectly two years ago), but I didn’t care. Did I feel symbolically disenfranchised, did I worry I was powerless? Not really. I got up all night to nurse the babies, and he kept track of the bills. From each according to his or her abilities, as it is writ in the Marriage Manifesto. Right?

The problem with marrying your college boyfriend is that you don’t have much time out in the world to practice using your very own abilities to meet your needs. Looking back, I was far more independent at twenty than I was at thirty-five. When I was twenty, I moved to a foreign country where I had no working papers and didn’t speak the language. I had no money: I didn’t know a soul. But I found an under-the-table job and a place to live, and I learned how to talk, and I made friends. I had no idea what I was doing, but I kept on doing it. And then I went back to college and met my ex-husband, on whom I happily relied until we split up.

So I spent a very few years being bold and then hopped into a cozy domestic situation, which means that the qualities my kind friends and family often tell me I have–resilience, courage and so on–are precisely those that have never been truly tested. I know that bravado is a key part–perhaps the most important part–of bravery. Who doesn’t? But marriage is a nice soft landing if you happen to fall. Marriage means someone has always got your back. If your ship goes down, at least you all go down together. And so forth.

I’m exaggerating a little bit–a very little bit. Truth be told, these days I feel that every stupid financial gaffe–every unpaid parking ticket that metastasizes into a summons, every errand left undone, every deadline or dentist appointment missed, every overdue bill, every minor insurance fiasco, every botched bit of bureaucracy (it took me nearly seven months to renew the registration for my car)–is a signpost pointing straight toward disaster. In two years, despite all evidence to the contrary, I do not feel that I have, even remotely, managed to get my shit together. I pay bills with something of the blind insouciance I had during marriage–the money will come from somewhere! It always does! Again, this could be read as self-confidence–obviously, I have faith, or I would not be so carefree! One flip of the lens, however, and my life is a shambles. A smoking ruin. I fear my own incompetence like a phobic fears snakes. I worry that I will push my luck too far, that the mistakes will pile up, that I’ll finally go down in shameful, unnecessary flames.

My mother gave me software to help me figure out my income taxes, and I am afraid to open the box. I need to do them by Monday, so that I can send my older son’s school the forms, so that they will (one hopes) give us financial aid again. This is the first year I’ve been divorced, the first year I’ve tried to do my own taxes. What a terrible hardship! Look, I tell myself through clenched jaw, every other fucking person on the planet manages to do taxes; you could even have hired an accountant, if you’d managed to make one damned phone call when you were supposed to. And still I can’t get started. I have learned exactly nothing from all my previous mistakes.

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