I told Lily I had to do my taxes.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you like to do your taxes Mommy?\u201d \u00a0she asked.<\/p>\n
Wow. What should I tell her?<\/p>\n
I have always loved numbers and counting. As a child I watched people coming on and off the subway and kept a tally of them, how many women were there and how many men. For some reason this really delighted me.\u00a0\u00a0Numbers add up, and give me a feeling of perfection about the world. As an adult, like most of us, I feel dread when I think about taxes. I generally have to pay more than I want to, and might be financially prepared or unprepared to do so. This does not create the same satisfying feeling I had as a kid counting.<\/p>\n
Yet when I look at Lily\u2019s face she genuinely tries to learn from me about the world,\u00a0so I decided to create a new intention. Regardless of what the numbers turned out to be, I decided I would enjoy the process of looking at the numbers.<\/p>\n
I set my Pandora station to \u201cThe Black-Eyed Peas\u201d and looked at taxes and just saw them as numbers. I bopped to the music. I worked the calculator. I tabulated all income and expenses, and enjoyed the process of coming up with totals in every category. The numbers accompanied the melodies, and I entered a space where the various sections had a different theme song. I was done in two hours. It turned out to be a bit more than I’d expected to pay, but the process did not cost me the way it has in the past. I wasn’t drained or defeated. \u00a0It all just became numbers and music.<\/p>\n
Now I can honestly tell Lily, \u201cYes, I do like to do my taxes.\u201d This year I will pay my taxes like everyone else, but did not dread the process. I am grateful that my daughter gets to see that sometimes even \u201chave-tos\u201d can have a theme song we can somehow enjoy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I told Lily I had to do my taxes. \u201cDo you like to do your taxes Mommy?\u201d \u00a0she asked. Wow. What should I tell her? I have always loved numbers and counting. As a child I watched people coming on and off the subway and kept a tally of them, how many women were there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jenniferblaine.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jenniferblaine.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jenniferblaine.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jenniferblaine.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jenniferblaine.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jenniferblaine.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jenniferblaine.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jenniferblaine.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jenniferblaine.com\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}