"Now, you give me $20 for a game that costs $12.50. How much change would you get back?" I asked my daughter, the flower of my
heart. "What kind of game?" she responded. I resisted the urge to throw her out the window. Forcing myself to remain calm, I went back over it again. And again.
"Now," I asked, perhaps a bit
more forcefully than I should have, "How much would you have left over?"
"From what?" she asked, surveying her fingernails.
"From the twenty, Elizabeth, from the &%$(*&#@*
twenty!" I yelled. The door creaked as my husband waltzed in, sort of bouncy and cheerful, an irritating ray of sunshine in my dark and gloomy life.
"Whatever are you doing in here? I could hear you all the
way out in the street," he observed as he loosened his tie.
"Here," I replied, thrusting her math worksheet at him. "You do this. My head hurts. I need oxygen. I need to get away from here."
He regarded me with pity. I admit it wasn't a pretty sight -- a 47-year-old woman reduced to nonsensical babbling. I didn't want to spend the next hour of my life making change from $20 with a kid who thinks the
object to Monopoly is declaring bankruptcy.
I made this discovery when Elizabeth's friend Katie asked my daughter if she wanted $200 for passing "Go". Elizabeth was horrified at the prospect and when I
questioned why she'd turned the money down, Katie told me the object of the game was to lose all your money. I understand she's already been offered a high-level job in the federal government.
So I grabbed what
sanity I had left and went for my walk. I fed the ducks and they did not ask me how to make change from a twenty, which is why they've still got feathers. Eventually, albeit reluctantly, I found my way back home, only
to hear my calm and usually reasonable husband yelling, "How can you take $15 away from $22 and get 7-cents?"
He hung over the table like a maddened buzzard, waiting for movement to cease so he could swoop
down and finish her off. I cleared my throat.
