The other day, my daughter and I spent the day at the San Diego Zoo. Long story short, I ended up at home at the end of the day, just having ordered some pizza to be delivered because I was too worn out to cook, and I realized I didn’t have my ATM card. Lost somewhere in the zoo apparently.
Now, I pay for everything with my ATM, I don’t use a credit card. So if that thing gets lost, I’m SOL until I can get a new card.
In any case, my husband was out of town so I couldn’t ask him to cover the pizza that day. So I am scrambling through my purse, through jacket pockets, under couch cushions, looking for enough cash to cover the food that would be at our door at any minute.
My daughter, seeing that I was in need of some money, ran downstairs to her room and grabbed her piggy bank and said “Mommy, I have money for the pizza. Here, take it.”
I noticed her sweet gesture immediately because I am not sure as a little girl, if I would have just offered up my money. First of all, at her age, I had no money as I didn’t start getting an allowance until I was older than she is right now. But even if I HAD some money, I don’t think I would have been offering it up.
At age 6, my daughter has a piggy bank, and I have been starting discussions with her in our life about the value of money, and how it works, and how we have to make some choices about what to spend our money on (because we can’t have everything we want when we want it). She’s been wanting us to buy a camper for the last 9 months and I keep saying that a camper is not an everyday purchase and she’s not quite getting that idea yet.
In any case, she didn’t even hesitate and just wanted to help and share what she had in order to get our pizza covered. I admire that because like I said, I am pretty sure that I would not have done that when I was a child. I grew up the daughter of immigrants, who worked very hard and saved every penny – my parents provided our family with an amazing upper middle class life, my brother and I were well loved and taken care of and as kids we never had any awareness of financial concern. Despite this, generosity with money was not innate in me – I always came from a place of a fear of lack and holding what I had close. An abundance mentality I did not have.
I found myself wondering if that gesture was something that was just innate in her soul, or was it the result of something I taught her in my effort to have her NOT inherit what I considered to be one of my lesser qualities (something that I know in my heart I need to get better at myself). Maybe she just has the idea of infinite abundance, having so recently come from source, so that she didn’t even think about not having money later. Or maybe she has been raised by me, her dad, and her step dad, to just always know that there is more coming because she really does not want for anything.
No matter what the answer, I was proud, and in awe, of that little gesture on her part. My concepts around abundance and money stem have always been with me – and while I have been aware of these limiting beliefs and have been working to shift them, I still have a long way to go.
It is my prayer that my little one keeps cultivating this mindset as it is really a beautiful thing.
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