Birthday rant
My daughter was invited to a birthday party sleep over at a friend of hers. As it turns out, out of the three others that were also invited, my daughter was the only one to show up. That was fine since the 2 of them have been best friends for 4 years now. I had no problem with the birthday party or the sleepover but the next day my daughter informed me that her friend’s dad and his girl friend were taking them to the movies. Again, so far no problem. The problem arose when it cam time to pick my daughter up and she informed me that I should bring $10.00 so she could pay her friend’s dad’s girlfriend back for paying for her to go to the movie with them. Now it came as a shock to me that when someone takes a child as part of a birthday party celebration to have the child pay their own way! I asked my daughter if the movie trip was considered part of the birthday stay and she said yes and she was not told that she would need to bring money for it.
Normally I would not mind pitching in for a treat like the movies if the family was short on cash but this all happened after my daughter’s friend’s dad had told me all about his new job and his pay rate of $35.00 an hour with frequent overtime days and showing off their new RV.
Rant over but I still don’t understand.
Jesus, this sounds terrible. I guess you must feel really weird, perhaps even humiliated. I guess I would pick up the telephone and ask this dad about that thing: “I am puzzled by this 10$ thing, I am confused since it was a birthday and I understand it is not really a matter of money in your case… So would you be willing to tell me how do you see this situation?” I feel it is so important to just speak up in situations like this, to open up the box and talk things over, see what’s behind it all and if there can be a solution that would work for everybody involved…