Mom Tax
Tax Season Hits Everyone Differently
I no longer do my own taxes. I could not tell you, under any circumstances, what my tax situation is. This is not a responsible hill to be standing on. I am neither bragging nor proud. But it is the hill I find myself on. My husband is the family accountant and for everyone’s health and safety, it shall remain thus. If the worst should happen to our family and my husband is rendered incapable of doing our taxes and accounting, I will either be hiring someone else to do it or reconciling myself to going to prison for tax evasion. There’s no middle ground. I no longer do my own taxes.
This is a privileged position I haven’t always enjoyed. Until the last five or so years, my husband and I did our taxes together. We didn’t make very much and it wasn’t that hard. It wasn’t until I started a business and started writing words for a living that it got complicated, the math started to hurt my head, and I dipped. Before I married my husband, I did my own taxes. Just me and TurboTax and a pile of receipts and a laundry list of curse words. And before that, before everything went digital and we could fill out tax form PDFs, I sat at my living room table, hunched over a paper copy of a 1040EZ, a handful of W2s clutched in one hand and a dose of “adulthood actually kind of sucks” burning down my throat.
This year I had to reenter the tax conversation, however. Not to do our taxes. No no. I no longer do my own taxes. This year I was right back to a 1040EZ form, though. Why? Because my eldest daughter had to file her taxes for the first time.
Spoiler: She fucking hated it.
We clicked the buttons. We answered the questions. We filled in the correct boxes. It did magic tax math and lots of thinking and processing and then it happened.
Your tax bill is $53.
My daughter had to pay the federal government of the United States $53. And she was pissed about it. Because one of her various jobs paid her as an independent contractor and didn’t deduct any taxes at all, my kid had to pay a tax bill the very first time she ever filed taxes. And then, because of how her taxes broke out, she had to pay TurboTax to help her file them. And yes. I made her pay both the taxes and fees. (I also confirmed I’d definitely hired her for enough odd jobs and even tasks to be sure she had the fees as well as what my husband had already estimated as her tax bill in her bank account. I want her to be fiscally educated and feel the weight of financial responsibility. I’m not trying to put her in debt before she graduates high school.)
She mumbled and grumbled and groaned as she pulled out her bank card. She whined and bitched and kvetched as she plugged in the numbers and hit submit. She closed her laptop and moped out of the room, just a little less enamored with the idea of becoming an adult. An hour later she runs back in the room in tears.
“They rejected my taxes!” And then she turned into a vaguely teenage-shaped puddle. After scooping her up off the ground and finding the spigot to turn off the waterworks, we got back into TurboTax and figured out where we’d gone wrong. At one point she, my husband, and I were all leaning over the laptop, comparing it to various sources on our phones trying to make sense of what form number meant what thing. My daughter looked up and said,
“Is it always like this?”
“Like how?” my husband mumbled, half distracted, looking up Form 8652.
“Like…” The girl leaned back in her chair, eyes cast to the ceiling, lips pinched with the effort of trying not to puddle again. “…hard and confusing?”
“Yeah. Pretty much,” my husband mumbled, fully distracted now, still looking up Form 8652. I poked him. He grunted.
“I would have said it nicer,” I offered, glaring directly at my husband. He didn’t notice as he was fully in the weeds with Form 8652. “But truth is, yeah. It’s always confusing at least. With time it gets less hard, though. You kind of get used to being confused.”
And that’s when it happened. That’s when I saw a spark of reality ignite behind my naive and eager kid’s eyes. She has been, like all the rest of us once were, so excited to “be grown.” So excited for all the freedom and autonomy. As her parents, it’s been our job to temper expectations without being too jaded. Potential balanced with reality. Opportunity balanced with available resources.
Yes, you can do anything you want as an adult. As long as you can afford it. And it doesn’t hurt you. Or anyone else. And is not illegal. And also within the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. And again, we have to swing right back around to affording it. You’d think the safety and legality of a choice would be questioned first. Nope. It’s actually, can I afford to do this? Can I successfully capitalism hard enough to use my free will to make this choice?
So, when I offered my daughter that little, constant truth of being an adult in “You get used to being confused” a tiny little bubble burst in her optimistic view of ‘growing up’ and ‘figuring it out.’ I remember when I really thought adults had it figured out. Now on the other side of my childhood, I can see through the hazy veil of naivete I wore. I’ve made no bones that I don’t know what I’m doing. To my children. I’ve straight up confessed to my oldest kid’s face, sometimes with an apology, that my best is what I’m doing. It’s all I can do. Sometimes I have enough access to information to make a really, really educated guess. Sometimes I guess well. Sometimes I’ve seen this scenario before so this time I can guess better. But I’m still guessing a lot more than I’m knowing.
She did not like doing her taxes one bit. And I don’t think it’s ALL about having to pay her tax bill. I think it’s that she’s realizing the truth of that Spider-Man quote “With great power, comes great responsibility.” And also “Two things in life are certain: death & taxes.” That’s a heady concept to reconcile at seventeen. I know she’ll have more of those sort of disheartening moments. Things we warned her about but she didn’t believe until they actually came to fruition. We’ve warned her about taxes. I’ve been charging her a Mom Tax for years. And every time she cried “That’s unfair!” I’d explain again, mouth full of cookie I just took a bite out of before handing it to her “This is how taxes work.”
The day after my child filed her taxes and took one step closer to adulthood, my youngest daughter asked for an apple. My eldest, who happened to be standing next to the apples at the time, grabbed one, took a bite out of it and handed it to her little sister. The youngest girl child started to get mad until my eldest said “Taxes suck, huh?” and then walked out of the room.
I no longer do my own taxes. But I am a proponent of the mom tax (issued selectively and mostly on baked goods and candy) as a gateway to discussing one of those two inevitabilities of life. Death. And Taxes.