EEDA Newsletter Vol 5, Iss 17: Inheriting Generational Debt
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Hi friends! I first want to make sure that you all know that if you were excited by the recent Olympics, we should be keeping the party going by cheering on the Paralympics, also in Paris, starting on August 28th. I think Peacock is going to have the same coverage, which is new. I don’t think viewing the Paralympics has ever been this accessible before. The Paralympics have a bunch of sports that the Olympics have as well as others that many of us may have never seen. I’m really looking forward to cheering on these athletes as well.
This past Sunday, Nicole took me on a multi-hour culinary side-quest. I had asked her to cut back my basil plants, which keep flowering and not producing hearty leaves. In the process, she was able to harvest enough leaves for me to make pesto. I prefer to eat pesto with a long pasta and because of a recent pantry cleanout, we had no long pasta. “We’ll make pasta!” says my wife, as I’m already preparing to make pesto from scratch. While there were many other things I needed to get done, there wasn’t anything so dire that I couldn’t take the time to spend the next five hours in the kitchen, cooking with Nicole. So that’s what we did. We had all the ingredients and kitchen devices we needed and “Getting good at pasta” is actually one of my 2024 goals that I haven’t really dug into yet, so I said, “Devil take the hindmost!” and we made far too much pasta. I regret nothing and I look forward to our next pasta adventure.
Content warning: grief, parent death
Many years ago, well over a decade at this point, my mother was forced to lose our family home. That is a story for another time. When she did, she had become a bit of a drifter, always having a place to land with family and friends. Because of this, the majority of her belongings, including thousands of pictures, family heirlooms, and my entire childhood, went into a storage unit in our hometown. This is the tale of many in her generation. If it’s not a storage they’re paying for, it’s a packed garage or basement or home. When they pass away, it’s up to their adult children to deal with.
So, I’ve inherited the storage and the debt that comes with paying hundreds of dollars a month for it. We rent and have no garage or anything of our own to move the things into and have our own piles of things to deal with. So we continue to get charged for the storage until we have the space and emotional/psychological bandwidth to deal with it.
The idea of this has overwhelmed me to the point of paralysis. While it’s been seventeen months since my mom died and our credit card continues to get charged, I have been too anxious and ashamed to even go out to our hometown and put the storage in my name.
We finally did the first part of that process this past Saturday. The people at the storage place were incredibly kind and understanding. Once the district manager reviews the paperwork, we’ll have to go back and complete the process. When we do that, I could possibly cut down the charge by hundreds of dollars a month.
Do I have any takeaways from this? I guess I do. There’s the ol’ “everyone is dealing with things you don’t even know about.” I’ll also throw out that for a lot of my public persona, it looks like I have my shit together and for some things that’s totally true and for other things, well, not so much. I think one of the things that helped me take this step (aside from external forces) is an extension of my “do it scared” ethos, which came down to telling myself that I can totally cry the whole time I’m doing this. For real. If there is any reason that someone gets full, unlimited permission to cry, it’s because their mom died. Shockingly, I didn’t cry but I could have and it would have been totally valid.
There’s another lesson in here about building things up in my mind to be worse or more difficult than they actually are but that’s a lesson for future Patricia to probably never learn.
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