As I watch the dinner
scene on Tuesday night’s Being Mary Jane
unfold – the one where MJ educates her family on money management – I smirk.
Here’s the family, finally happy together in one room (with the exception of
PJ, who’s back in LA price-rigging on his new job) and MJ feels it’s the best
time to tell her folks how to spend and save their dollars courtesy of Suze
Orman.
MJ
has no chill, I initially
say to myself.
But I can’t get
annoyed with her – this time – even when she tells her dad that he isn’t buying
Niecy or anybody else a car, because something about the whole situation
suddenly seems so familiar.
At 15, my mother
succumbed to metastasized breast cancer and instead of me continuing to be a teenager,
I immediately assumed responsibility for my family’s business affairs. I was
the one to interpret the fine print on documents and balance accounts and dispute
and negotiate bill errors.
I vividly remember calling Verizon several times on my grandmother’s behalf over some Miss
Cleo-typed calls a relative had placed on my grandmother’s phone. For at least
three months, these charges appeared on her bill.
“But she didn’t make
them and we called about them last month, too,” I’d cry to the customer
service rep.
Finally someone initiated a block and authorized a credit but it
didn’t cover what I had combed through the multi-paged bills and calculated as
the “fraudulent” charges, maybe because of taxes and all those additional fees.
“There’s still $27!” I
say, exasperated, to the rep.