Tuesday, December 4, 2007

The Poor Widow

You know those stories you always used to hear--back in the day of the Husband Who Worked and the Wife Who Stayed Home Because No Wife of MINE is Going to Work Damnit--about the woman whose husband either died suddenly or left her for his secretary, and the woman didn't know how to write a check or even where the checkbook WAS?

That would be me. If Baroy dies, I am so screwed. (In ADDITION to being bereaved, I mean. I would care! Really I would! Don't look at me like that! I'm just making a point here.) Luckily, being chronically unemployed means he doesn't have a secretary for whom he can leave me. I knew there was an upside to his job situation if only I looked long enough.

I realized this today when I needed to find my passport in order to fill out a bunch of paperwork I have to redo for no reason for ParentsConnect. (Don't ask. No, really, don't. It just makes my head explode in anger and frustration, and then the walls get messy.)

The good news is that I know where the Super Secret Hiding Spot for Important Papers is. (Well, OK. I knew about where it was, and I only looked in three wrong places before hitting the right one. Don't burst my bubble, people.) The bad news? Is that there's a lock box in that location. And that lock box requires a key. And I hadn't the faintest idea where that key was or might be. I didn't even know what KIND of key it was. And since my head was already exploding from the frustration of having to fill out this paperwork in the first place...well, let's just say that then having to try to track down my husband (at the gym/not answering his cell phone for the first hour I tried it over and over again) to find out where the key was made me just the eeeeeeeeniest bit angry. Angrier, I mean. The walls, they are plenty messy now.

I hate feeling like a stranger in my own home. I've abdicated responsibility for most financial/paperwork/legal stuff to Baroy, for very good reasons, most of which fall either under "He's really good at it" or "I'm exceptionally bad at it." But that's no excuse for me having let things get so far away from me that I'm not sure what banks we do business with or who holds our mortgage or how much we have in our investment accounts. (Or is it account, singular? I'm not sure.) And there's no excuse for me not to know where the frickin' key is. Any frickin' key, to any part of this house or our lives.

He just better not die, is all I can say. At least not until I make a copy of that key.

4 comments:

po said...

Hope you have the walls wiped down by now :)

See, I absolutely must die first, because I don't want to be left behind. I made Ross promise me like 20 years ago that I get to die first. If he finds out he has an incurable disease, he has to kill me before he dies.

Maddy said...

Grieving widow / merry widow? It would be a toss up around here too!
Cheers

This is my calling card or link"Whittereronautism"until blogger comments get themselves sorted out.

Green said...

Umm... as a legal secretary who's worked for matrimonial attorneys, I have to tell you it totally still happens all the time. In case he does god forbid drop dead, please have him write down where everything is, all the accounts and passwords, and put that in your jewelry box or someplace.

I spent a lot of time sitting with women, helping them figure out budgets for their families - a mother of three would have no idea how much grocery money she'd need, for example. Or that her husband had a retirement account.

Interestingly, it was never ever the other way around.

Anonymous said...

That's me at our house (I mean the one who knows where all the money is stashed and documents are). Poor Doug if I die before him, that's all I've got to say! Hopefully he can at least find the file on the computer helpfully labeled "ACCOUNTS" and put it all together ;)

S.