Jot Jot

My dad turned the light back on.

It was just a few minutes since we had said goodnight, all five of us camped out in a small hotel room in Vancouver, BC.

My parents had come from Florida to hold their granddaughter for the first time and we had gone on an overnight excursion to Granville Island, my mom, my dad, Tanissa, her dad, and I.

The cozy room was clean and adequate, light years away from the five-star hotel rooms of my teenage years. I liked it.

Now sitting on the side of the bed he shared with my mom, my father got up and walked to his coat, hanging on a chair by a small desk just a few feet away. From the inside pocket, he pulled out a tiny notebook and a pen. He jotted down a few things and went back to bed.

I was now awake - and curious.

What was my dad writing that could not wait till the morning? Had he just received one of his creative ideas, possibly fueled by the Chinese food we had all devoured? My dad had many ideas, downloads one could say. They came from a seemingly unending source and while not all of them were good friends some of them had allowed him to enjoy almost two decades of great financial abundance, while my family lived in France. They had also greatly affected me and as a child I had drawn an invisible yet very strong connection between financial abundance and loneliness.

Since moving to the US ten years before, this had changed.

Maybe his Muse did not speak English, maybe these things come with an expiration date. Or maybe, just maybe, they ask for more on our part than receiving it and developing it. Maybe a respectful collaboration between the ethereal and the earthy was needed. For whatever reason, once my family was off the plane and moved into the Big Beautiful House on a Floridian canal, The Muse went radio silent. Forever.

Ensued years of challenges, first trying to hang on to the material bounty then choosing the least painful way to monetize it, then finally settling into a new life, eventually trying to hang on to the body’s health, finally letting that slip away too.

That night in the hotel room on Granville Island, my dad was in the beginning phase of his new life, and when I asked him what had made him get out of bed (was The Muse back??) he explained to me that he had started a new ritual. I think he may have called it a discipline.

“Every night before I go to bed,” he explained, “I write down every penny I have spent during the day.” Then he added: “If I had started doing this this years ago, things would be very different today.”

I felt a knot in my throat. Likely a reverberation from a knot in my heart.

My dad wasn’t big on talking about emotional stuff and to me, this was emotional stuff. He also wasn’t big on starting sentences with “If I had done things differently _________.” So while I knew not to ask for more, I also knew that he had just shared with me something big. A learning, a regret, a willingness to change. It is possible that the regret part took up a lot of room in the following years until it won and no notebook could heal that.

I had listened.

What I heard was that my dad thought that had he been more intentional in his spending, had he checked in regularly, and been more respectful (I am certainly inserting my own words, here), he may not have lost the fortune he had earned when The Muse was standing by him.

I filed this away, still too anchored in my “Money Destroys Families” phase to give it a place of honor.

The years passed.

With time and with work, I slowly healed my own relationship with money. I saw that I liked what happened when I had money, I liked the me that could afford to be comfortable, peaceful, and generous. I slowly, slowly learned to trust myself within that relationship, to trust that a few zeros at the end of my bank account balance would not turn me into an immoral person, or an a**hole. Then the big one: I learned that I could be financially comfortable and not lonely. This one was huge.

Also, I learned that I never wanted to be cavalier about financial abundance. I had lived through tens of thousands of dollars casually slipping by within days and I knew - for sure - that casual was not what I wanted.

So as I started to write my brand new, un-mentored Story of Money, I tried to never fall asleep at the wheel. I learned to create a budget, I fell in love with the peace it brought me and the playfulness of it, too. I even developed a software program called “The Money Playground,” which helped some of my clients find the sweet spot between joy and intentionality. I learned, I shared, I taught and I loved all of it.

I made some mistakes along the way and tried to be nice to me about it. I realized that there was the possibility this relationship was always going to require some extra attention on my part and I became ok with that. I grew some new layers of compassion for my father too, which was important.

I taught myself to dance on the sweet line where Joy, Freedom, and Caution live. Maybe someday Freedom will take even more space than Caution.

When I moved to Mexico, on January 1, 2021, I immediately set up a budget and a way to keep close to it.

It was easy, this stuff now comes naturally to me.

Almost four years later, I can tell you exactly how much money I have spent on food in any given month or year since I arrived. Side note: my food expenses are now twice what they were when I arrived. I can tell you how much gas money I have spent, play money too. Pretty much to the peso.

The process is simple, it’s easy, it takes very little time and I love sitting down at the end of each month and “seeing where I am.” There are usually very few surprises and I start the new month ready to go with a brand new page in front of me, reassured.

I can do this forever. I buy coconut water, and I jot it down on my phone. No big deal. I think it drives my daughter crazy (she has lived the flip side of my childhood story, as sometimes happens, and her healing lessons are very different than mine)
But two days ago, something happened.

On the phone with a dear dear friend, we are catching up, from each side of the border. So much to share, and joint plans to make too. We take turns as good friends do and because we have years and years of doing this, we hear each other. The slight pauses, the nuances in our voices, the slight bumps. We share the funny, the heartbreaking, the mundane.

At one point in the conversation, she tells me: “you are talking a lot about money.”

Uff.

Instant Lizard reaction.

I want to tell her that she’s wrong. I want her to know that no, I don’t think about money, that I have healed all of this, that I am at peace now, free. I want to be mad at her for even bringing it up. And there is no way I am going to be mad at her, not “honestly” mad at her because 1) I know she would never ever say anything to hurt me and 2) darn it, she knows me so well, I am pretty sure she has caught something I haven’t. Yet.

Off the phone, I sense that the “something” is on its way to the surface. I let it. I give it space. I know it’s coming.

I go to the village that night to get some groceries and put some gas in the tank of my car. I jot it down: four hundred pesos, a thousand pesos, jot jot.

It’s the first day of the month and I have just finished the delicious exercise of balancing my August books. I see that it has been an expensive month (car transmission repair, house roof stuff, fumigation, a small trip, and more) and I see I will want to offset things in the new month. I also know that whereas I have spent many years juggling electric bills and backpacks and groceries, I am in a much different place right now and really, I am just fine. A small side step is NOT going to launch me into a ravine. I am fine.

And still, jot jot.
My friend’s words.
The jot jot habit.
Something coming to the surface.

Stay there for it.
Don’t chase it, don’t avoid it either.

And of course, it arrives. Gently, earth-shakingly, on the bumpy muddy road back home.
A question: “What if you needed a break from the jot jot?” Followed by: “What if what has brought you freedom was now taking it away?”

Good god.

No way to tell it to get lost. No way to pretend that this is silly and irrelevant. I FEEL it in my body. The rightness of it, the wisdom too. And oh the rebellion, I feel that one big time.
I want to fight it: “What??? Have you seen what happened to my family when my dad took his hands off the wheel?? Have you seen the stress, the despair, the guilt for having lost it all through a lack of attention?” Then the dramatic: “Do you know that this s*** killed him?” Finally: “Did you not see The Little Notebook??”

But we know when an invitation is right. When we must say Yes. Especially when we want to scream No out of fear.

By the time we are home, I have pretty much agreed. A month. A month without jot jotting anything down. UNLESS I am traveling, because that’s a different folder. UNLESS it’s my work bookkeeping because that’s just sane.

“But what will happen to the month of September?” I hear myself ask, knowing very well that nothing at all will happen. “This will mess up MY WHOLE 2024 budget!” I still want to argue.
I watch this resisting. I am surprised by its strength.

I am scared. I am going to do it and I am scared. These five hundred pesos I just spent on Marley yesterday, I did not jot jot them down. They still itch. I am going to let them itch. Feel the itch, breathe through it. I’m okay.

Maybe sometimes the medicine becomes the poison, maybe sometimes healing asks for a new potion, signaling to us that we have done well, that, as my friend Joanie used to say: “We are now healing the deeper layers, fine-tuning.”


Can I do this? Can I fly letting go of what I thought were my wings but might have just been my training wheels?
I am going to find out. For just one month.

Today I invite you to take a peek at places that have freed you, delighted you, and supported you, and give them a little looksie, to make sure they are still doing what you asked them to do.

I also invite you to consider taking a break from a habit, a tool, or a protocol. Just a break, not forever. A fast of sorts. Just to see.

And of course, I invite you to get on the phone with a good friend and listen.