The Family Budget

This column wins for "random fact" of the week. Just when I thought Margo was being, um, normal, she tosses this in!:

Dear Margo: I am 20 and have been lucky in life ... growing up in nice neighborhoods, going to good schools, having parents who were successful financially. I am about to get my B.A. and then work full time at a good job. My wonderful boyfriend is 22 and has been less fortunate. He was raised by an amazing single mother who worked two jobs to support four children. They are from a low-income, mostly Latino community, where the schools were poor. As a result, life has been harder for him. Unlike my parents, who have given me money to save, he's had to work full time, living paycheck to paycheck. Because of this, he'd been out of school for a short while, but has started working on his degree again. The problem is my parents. They say he's riding my coattails and taking advantage of me, and that once we've been cohabiting long enough, he's going to take half of what I have. The things they say come off as classist and even racist, and they both know that their remarks offend and hurt me deeply. Should I tell my parents to take a hike? I want to maintain a good relationship with them and my boyfriend, but they're making it difficult. In some ways, I feel that they should have a say in what I do because much of the money I have saved came from them. What can I do?

— Head Over Heels in Phoenix

Dear Head: I, too, think parents should have a say in a child's life (and not because they have supplied money), but any child who is a reasonably mature 20 should be allowed to evaluate what it is the parents have to say. I suspect you have things pegged right. Your beau sounds as though he was well, if not lavishly, raised, and your relationship sounds like perfection. I suspect your parents are using stereotypical prejudices to deduce that your young man will never amount to anything. I don't have to look very far to counter their thinking.

My own father had to work from the age of 13 and dropped out of school in the 10th grade. With smarts and drive and no higher education, his life worked out; he was the founder of Budget Rent A Car. So go with your gut and stick with your fella. — Margo, intuitively

Yes, yes, yes, yes, um.....what?

Ann Landers and Mr. Budget: America's top 1950s power couple?

SK adds, with great contempt for Margo:
"[snort] Speaking of riding on coattails...."

Looking for Trouble?

Today's totally random post of the day comes from Dear Abby:

DEAR ABBY: I have a friend who leaves full bottles of liquor on her kitchen table for days at a time. She has an 8-year-old son who eats at the table. Is this good for the boy, or can it affect him in any way? I need to know if I should say something. -- RUTH IN DAYTONA BEACH

and Abby says:

DEAR RUTH: Unless you have reason to think that your friend's son is sampling the booze, I see no reason for you to interfere. You did say they were FULL bottles of liquor, didn't you?

What? What is this? Is she concerned about the image, that the child will come to associate booze with breakfast cereal? Or that the toxic liquor will leach through the glass, through the table, and into his undeveloped bones? Or that he's being invited/encouraged/tempted to sample? Or perhaps that he's learning it's OK not to put groceries away promptly? I don't understand the aim of her question. And since Abby doesn't seem to either, I'm not really sure why she opted to publish this one out of the thousands of letters written to her each week by people who actually have problems.

**Upon reflection and discussion** I have decided that if you keep alcohol in your house and are concerned that your child may get into it, the kitchen table is the BEST place to keep it. It's much harder for them to snitch it in broad daylight/the middle of the house than it would be from a cupboard under the sink or above the fridge. And locking it up? That only makes it more "forbidden." When you eat your cereal and read the label of the vodka bottle, the mystery and romance is gone. And you also see the surgeon general's warnings.

A Message from the Great Beyond....

A gentleman wrote in to Amy today to ask a question on behalf of himself and his 85-year-old mother. They were finding that many of the older widows they knew were not re-recording the outgoing message on their answering machines, but rather leaving their husbands' voice as the greeting. The writer found this "disconcerting" and wondered, "Does hearing the voice when screening calls offer some form of solace?"

I highly doubt it's anywhere near that complicated. My first thought, keeping my own grandma--and her rather flustered outgoing answering machine message--in mind, was that these women simply couldn't figure out how to re-record the message. Amy suggested the same:

I can think of two explanations — either hearing their husband's voice from time to time brings solace, or they can't quite figure out how to rerecord an outgoing message (I would join them in this frustration).

To me, it also seems likely that the ladies forget that they "need" to change the message (if they do in fact want to.) It may be almost as much a surprise to them to hear their husband's voice on the machine each time it plays as to anyone else. Likely they make a mental note to change it, or ask someone to help them change it, but in the long run, it's not so important, or it's not part of the daily routine, and it gets dropped, only to resurface the next time it happens.

I'm not trying to be age-ist, or assume that every woman in her eighties is in her dotage, as that's certainly not the case. But, like I said, I have a grandma, and that grandma has an answering machine....I'm speaking from a certain amount of personal experience.

Another odd twist in the letter....I'm not really sure that many older ladies "screen" their calls. Again, maybe I'm just narrowing my perspective to my own grandparent experiences, and maybe it would be a good idea if they DID screen more often, rather than rushing to pick up the phone, or getting caught by solicitors or even scam artists. But from what I've seen of this generation, they are unlikely to use the machine to distance themselves from interaction with others. To me it seems sort of suspicious to assume that they're sitting there screening...but maybe I associate a stigma with call screening that no longer exists.

The original writer wrote in mainly because he and his 85-year-old mother found the situation "disconcerting." My guess is that when she calls her friends or family and gets a voice from beyond, she is either upset by it, or confused and can't remember a) that the person has died or b) the opposite--how they could possibly be speaking to her.

This is just sucky all around....it's very hard to watch your parents or grandparents lose their confidence and their sense of security and awareness about their environment. This sort of thing really could throw a person, and either be quite upsetting, or in the passing of time and activity, get jumbled to the extent that she believes she really did speak with the person who owns the voice. Unfortunately, I don't know that there's much to do about it. If the other ladies are close friends or relatives (or at least know the son), he might ask them if they would like or need some help re-recording their message to "keep current." They might be pleased and grateful, they might wonder why he's asking, or they might not want to change it at all, and that's all fine.

More internally, if it is his mother who is having trouble calling her friends and getting the voice of a dead husband, perhaps he could create a list and post it near her emergency numbers, to remind her that Fred's voice is still on Ethel's answering machine message, and not to be alarmed. It sounds odd, and might look odd to others (would those numbers hang neatly inside a kitchen cabinet door?) but might be helpful, and prevent one more episode of disconcertedness in the march towards aging (and death...um, sorry, this is morbid for a Friday morning) that disconcerts us all.