My mom is trying to make up for years of being a shitty mom by offering me (and my sister) money or to pay for various things. I’m often declining offers to pay for something that I bought and letting her know that, “No, I don’t need anything. I’m fine.” I take pride in supporting myself nowadays and I figure that money will be better off staying in her bank account for now and what the hell, I’ll end up sharing it with my sister one day anyway.
What interesting timing in reading this thread, as it’s a similar situation with my mother.
Not so much making up for being a shitty mom as much as what seems like an attempt to assuage guilt over constantly requesting ( and mostly getting ) money from her offspring owing to her lacking much in sensibility while living on a retired income, though she always just squeaked by while working, even though earning a very good salary.
Out of the blue she’d hand me a wad of cash ( several hundred ) which I decline, or offers to pay for a meal, accompanied by overtones of admitting she can’t really afford it but feels she must because she feels bad about being largely supported by us.
My cynicism tells me this “free money” would be short lived anyway since another financial micro-crisis would have me ( or us ) handing it over to her to cover her poor budgeting.
Not me, but just about everyone else. One time, just for fun, I sat in the downtown plaza full of tourists with about 40 or 50 dollars in ones and a crude cardboard sign that said “FREE DOLLARS.” I silently held the sign in one hand and the dollars in another. The only restriction was one per person. No talking about Jesus or anything like that. You think that would be easy. It’s not. I remember a young, apparently homeless, man on a bicycle and his dog came by and said he had thirteen dollars to last till the end of the month, which was at least a week away, and so he would be OK and wouldn’t need one. The funniest part was when a family with small children walked by. More than once I heard parents whisper to their children, “Don’t look at him. Don’t look at him.” It took about two hours to give away the money and there were lots of people there that day.