I had planned to write a completely different story.
The rough draft was in my head and I was looking forward to sitting down and letting it come out, one sentence at a time, on its way to you. It was to be a good story and it will be a good story for another day.
Today, other words seem more urgent and even though they echo of a subject on which I touched last summer, I am compelled to give them a home.
As I write this (in the middle of the night, which is pretty rare for me), an unfriendly little voice is whispering in my ear that I am only trying to pitch my latest baby and that I should be ashamed. I listen to the voice because I know too well that ignoring it would not make it go away and I keep writing.
Yes, The Money Playground is on my mind thesedays and yes, I believe that it is a great tool. Sure, I would love to share its simple wisdom with the world and of course, was I to sell a million programs by next week I would take my kids on some darn amazing spring break vacation.
But, no.
This is bigger than a spring break trip.
I know how it feels when something important needs to make its way from my mind to the keyboard and this is one of those.
So here goes.
It starts with a memory which for some reason had been asleep until this afternoon.
Why it had not resurfaced sooner, I am not sure. Considering all the current global talk about money (I think Suze Orman has been awake for the past week) as well as my own personal focus on the aforementioned Money Playground and its accompanying series of meetings, it seems that this recollection would have shown up loud and clear, weeks ago. Come to think of it (and this for the benefit of the unfriendly little voice who accuses me of self-serving verbiage) it would have made a great addition to a marketing package I presented to the head of a financial company a few days ago.
But it did not.
Instead, it showed up quietly this afternoon, as I left a coffee shop after having spent an hour with a friend, sipping hot chocolate.
She and I talked about the ways in which paying attention to our money mean freedom.
As I got ready to leave, I hugged her, walked back to my car and bam! There it was.
There I am.
It is the winter of 1993 in a small Vancouver BC hotel room. My mom and dad have come up for a visit and we are settling into a night of sleep.
This is a rare event as my parents, once extremely wealthy, are now almost completely broke. A series of greatly misguided or rather unguided - moves combined with years of complete lack of awareness/respect about money has created a barren financial landscape that would have been unimaginable a short decade ago.
It is bedtime. My dad wishes me good night, turns off the light and turns it right back on. I watch him get out of bed and walk over to his coat. He grabs a little notepad out of his pocket, scribbles a few lines, walks back to bed and turns off the light.
I am intrigued.
So I ask.
And that is when he tells me that for the last year, he has been recording nightly every penny spent during the day. And that is when he tells me, with tears in his voice that had he done this - or a version of this all of his adult life, neither I, my brother, sister nor our children would ever have had to worry about money.
Wow.
Tonight, this memory is mine again. My dad has been gone for almost nine years now as I believe guilt and regret teamed up on him and eventually won.
Through the years, my siblings and I did worry about money and for my part, I danced with it and around it for a long time until I slowly learned to partner with it. Mostly I learned to respect it, to pay attention to it, to be clear about it .
I also learned to pass that knowledge on to my children because that is an important inheritance.
And yes, I realize today with a strange happy/sad feeling that The Money Playground is no accident: it is the before its too late version of that little notepad my dad carried around. And because sometimes we are lucky enough to learn from the mistakes of the people we love, I have been able to add a few important twists to an already important idea; such as the notion of creation, of invention, of simplicity and of course, of playfulness which by the time of our story, my dad was understandingly incapable of adding to the mix.
I like to think that I did not create it alone.
And I also like to think that somehow, I can pass on some of that belief in the power of money clarity to you.
Whichever way you get there.
And, of course I would love it if you too came to play onThe Money Playground. I am pretty proud of it.
Laura Lavigne is a life coach, writer, artist and a mom. She lives on an island, loves to dance on her trampoline and eats pizza with a fork and knife. She is the is the author of "Pink Hair & Chocolate Cookies - real life lessons from a real life coach" as well as the creator of "The Money Playground", an innovative, simple and smart home budgeting program. www.themoneyplayground.com
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