He Buys the Lumber and I Buy the Butter

"Your dad bought a riding mower yesterday, and he called me from the parking lot to tell me." That was my mother on Sunday's call, and she said it the way you'd report a small fire. "I had my hands full of dahlias. The bride's mother was standing right there waiting on her bouquets, and he said, Diane, it's twenty-one hundred and I'm buying it. I said fine. I did not say it nicely."

I've thought about that call all week, because David and I have a version of it. My parents' rule is that anything over four hundred dollars gets said out loud before the card comes out, and my father kept it. He said it from the checkout line, with the mower already on a cart, so she was informed and hadn't been asked anything. She texted me Monday.

"We talked. He was proud he picked the middle price of three. I told him I was proud of him too, and that I was mad about the parking lot, and he heard both."

How do you spend so differently from your husband?

David spends rarely, and when he does it's one piece he has already priced in the little notebook he keeps in his shirt pocket. In June he bought walnut for the shop, $340, worked out board foot by board foot, and in his mind all that figuring counted as telling me. I found out from the charge. I got the number before I got the reasoning, and it landed in my stomach before I'd even put the groceries down.

I spend in trips, and what goes in the cart is butter when it's marked down, a bunch of cilantro for a recipe I'm testing, and in May a pair of sheet pans for $48 that I filed under groceries because food would touch them. I can explain every bag while it's still on my arm. A month of those trips can add up to more than a walnut board, and I feel responsible the whole time, which is the part that makes me unfair.

We aren't behind on anything, and I want to say that plainly so nobody reads this as a post about people who can't pay their bills. The fight is smaller and more stubborn than that. Our grocery week runs about $150, and I hold that number so tightly that anything outside it feels like it came from David. To me a board that costs more than a food week looks wild. To him a third grocery run in a week looks like I can't leave a number alone. On a generous day I call him the careful one, and he would hand me the same word right back, which tells you how well that argument ends.

Last winter I suggested forty dollars each a month to spend on anything that isn't food or the kids or the house. His forty mostly piles up. Mine is gone by the fifteenth, and I could convince you half of it is the house if you gave me a minute with the receipts.

What does a twenty-minute money meeting look like?

We sit down the first Sunday of the month, after Ben is asleep and Caleb and Lily are in their rooms, and David sets the timer on his phone for twenty minutes. When it rings we stop, even if a line on the card has no name yet. With no edge on the clock he goes quiet and I get sharp, and nobody should be holding a bank statement in that condition. The timer is for both of us.

We tried weekly years ago and it died on a permission slip that got dragged in with the bills, so I'm not rebuilding it. Money stays off the Thursday walk, which is about the only hour David and I have to ourselves. Tuesday is a bad night too, with Caleb's ball practice at 5:30 and homework crowding the hour before, and on the afternoons my sixth grader cries over math I've used up whatever patience I had. Sunday, once the house is down, is when we have anything left.

A template I found online opens by celebrating a financial win. I couldn't picture David doing that at our table, so we start with what's coming instead. For this Sunday that means Emma's term starting tomorrow at BYU, which costs us nothing new and the drive down to Provo on the 19th for her birthday dinner. Gas and a restaurant meal are small enough to fight over in the car if we leave them until then, so they get a line on the card now. The Provo drives are part of how we keep her close to a brother who's almost three, which I wrote about in how we keep Emma close to Ben, and I'd like those drives to be something nobody's tense about. October's first Sunday lands on general conference weekend, so that meeting moves to the 11th, and I write the date down today so we don't trust ourselves to remember.

After that we go down the card, one wince at a time. Whoever winced gets one sentence, and the other person says it back before any explaining starts. I resisted this because it sounds like a class I'd teach, and I did teach third grade, so I know exactly how it sounds. In July David said he wanted our grocery week to stay the week we'd already named. I said that sentence back to him, word for word and only after that did the cilantro shrink to what it was, which was a bunch of cilantro.

If the timer goes and something can't wait, we book a second twenty minutes on a weeknight, because the hallway isn't a second meeting.

The card lives on the fridge under a magnet shaped like a peach, and David copies it into his notebook first, because paper left near the jam has already lost once to Ben.

What's the one rule that made it bearable?

You can notice a charge any day you like, and you write it on the card, and then you're done until Sunday.

That's the whole rule. It sounds small, and for me it took the most effort of anything we do, because my instinct when something stings is to say so while David is standing in the kitchen in his work boots with sawdust on his sleeve. I did exactly that the evening the walnut charge showed up. He hadn't set his keys down. We had an argument about butter, which was never what it was about.

For anything over a hundred dollars we send a text before the money leaves. The June text never got sent. It would have said walnut, about $340, Thursday, and I would have had an answer to give. My mother's story is the same problem from the other direction. Telling her was not enough, because the telling came with the mower already paid for. She needed to be asked while a no was still possible, and she needed it somewhere that wasn't a flower shop with a bride's mother waiting.

I'm the harder case, since the sheet pans cost under a hundred dollars and were still the third kitchen purchase of the month, and the line didn't catch them. A cart that has quietly stopped being food gets a text too, and I usually only notice once I'm home with the bags on the counter. Then it goes on the card, and I tell David on Sunday with the timer running. I've gotten better at it, although I'd call my record about two weeks in three.

Why can't I find the verse that settles this?

I went looking in D&C 104 for one line I could point at a receipt, and it doesn't work that way. The section is a commandment to a particular group about the properties of a united order. It starts hard on covetousness and moves on to the poor and how they were to be provided for. A mild sentence doesn't come loose from all of that.

I, the Lord, stretched out the heavens, and built the earth, my very handiwork; and all things therein are mine.

D&C 104:14

Verse 56 follows from that: "if the properties are mine, then ye are stewards." Verse 17 says "there is enough and to spare" and that we were given "to be agents unto themselves." I keep reading verse 14 alongside the word my. The grocery money isn't mine and the shop isn't his, which is an odd claim to make about cilantro, and I do believe it. Having enough is why the herbs aren't a moral failure. Being agents is why David is allowed to choose the walnut at all, and why I'm allowed to hear about it before it posts. Tithing isn't on the card, because it's paid first.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should a money meeting be?

Twenty minutes, on a timer you can both see. If it needs an hour, name a different night before you sit down and put it on the calendar the same minute.

What if each of us thinks the other one overspends?

Read the month's purchases out loud, all of them. I'd give you my flattering version, where the grocery total is my virtue and the board is his lapse, and David has one ready too. With the actual list on the table, neither version holds up very long.

We each have money to spend alone. Why are we still fighting?

Because the pile was never the whole fight. Ours is forty dollars, and I've been calling a pan personal until David squints at it. The part that mattered more was agreeing when we'd talk about it.

What do you say when the money is already spent?

"I bought it and I didn't tell you." Then stop talking and let the reasons wait for the card on Sunday. If it was over a hundred, add that the text never went. David has said that sentence about lumber, and I've said it about a cart I called mostly food while I was still unloading the bags.

I would really like an answer from the kitchen where your bills get paid. What rule have you actually kept? If there's a dollar number attached to it I'd like the number, and if it's a sentence you've both agreed to stop saying, I'd like that too.

with love, Melissa