My Project: 365 Creative Writing Prompts
Day 166: Think before you pull out your wallet parents
My friends and I got
together the other day. Alice was not in a good mood, in fact, she was fuming
mad.
“Get this,” she came
straight to the point, “Margaret’s maternity leave is almost finished, and she
doesn’t want to go back to work. She wants to be a stay at home mom. She’s a
qualified chartered accountant and now she wants to quit her job!”
“Do what I did,”
Victoria said, placing a calming hand on Alice’s arm. “The very same thing
happened with my eldest daughter Cindy. She studied law, passed the bar exam and
got hired by one of the big law firms of Toronto. A month later she and Eric
got married and three months after that she got pregnant. When it was almost
time to go back to work, she announced that she wasn’t going to, that she was
going to be a stay at home mom.”
I said “That’s fine
honey, but I invested in your future by paying your tuition, amounting to close
to $200,000. Now you have a choice, you either go back to work or you are going
to pay me back. I won’t charge you interest, but if you’re gonna throw your
future away, I want that $200,000 to be paid back to me. And not with $20 a
month, we’ll set up a payment plan. We make the amount payable over 10 years, which
will amount to $1,666 per month.”
She started laughing
and wondered where in the world she was going to get $1,666 a month. I said, “Well
honey, that’s your problem. But that’s how it is.”
When she saw I wasn’t
joking, that I was in fact deadly serious she wasn’t laughing anymore. When her
maternity leave finished, she returned to work. Problem solved.”
I don’t have that problem
with my daughter, Angela,” Maggie piped up. “I wouldn’t mind a grandchild, but
when I talked to Ruby about it she was having none of it. “Do you think I put
myself through university, studied my ass off and worked two jobs just to chuck
it all away in a kid?” she said. “Forget it, mom.”
It seems to me that
the problem lies with the parents. If mommy and daddy pay for tuition the son
or daughter is more likely to chuck their career at the first opportunity than
if the student pays out of his or her own pocket. They know what it took to get
where they are and are more likely to appreciate it.
Think before you pull out
your wallet parents!
