Disclaimer: I’m using my mom in my stories solely to share the process on how I learned things through my issues with her. Yes, we didn’t have good relationship for years but it has been a lot better now. Please keep on reading my newer posts if you’d like to find out what happened and what changed me.

 

About 8.5 months after my dad passed away, my mom came to the States and visited us. I was excited and nervous at the same time. Excited because I had learned so much from KPY teaching that I felt I could (and should be able to!) handle things better between me and her. Nervous because well, from previous experiences, every visit started with “I can’t wait to see you” and ended with lots of yelling and bitterness about everything 😀

So she was here and everything was going quite well. One day when we were grocery shopping, she picked up a bunch of bananas. She then picked another bunch and compared the two. She weighed each bunch with her hands and tried to decide which one was the heavier one. Then she asked me to do the same and let her know what I thought. I did that and told her which one I thought was heavier. Probably dissatisfied by my answer, she kept weighing them. She was choosing bananas for a while already, I thought couldn’t we just move on please? They charged the bananas by weight anyway.

Then a little later, still choosing bananas…., she asked how the banana was charged, by piece or by weight (we were at Trader Joe’s before and they charged bananas by each piece so she was aware it could be charged either by each piece or by weight).
I told her it was by weight, probably grumpily too since I was annoyed. In my mind, it was like,
OMG MOM! How different can the 2 bunches be? At 69 cents per lb, the difference can’t be more than 10 cents. Come on…. Let’s move on! It’s just bananas.
Geez, she’s always like this.
Always has to….

Before I could finish my thought, I suddenly remembered that ehm… I’m not much different than her. Maybe not when buying bananas. But remember that time when I bought some items from Michael’s, then I got 50% coupon emailed and I willingly drove back couple days later to get price adjustment over, I don’t know, $1.40? And I thought it was totally worth driving back there?

How about that time when I told my husband that we could take free buses provided by the hotels in Vegas to get around. And while, yes, we could and did so, the wait was not fun at all since it was HOT and it involved a lot of walking in the heat. That was because I tried to save money by not renting a car!

And the other time when I couldn’t choose between getting the item I really want at a higher price or going with the cheaper option that I didn’t love but could settle with? (Okay, this one is more like all the time…)

And even worse, I told my husband not to buy me certain things as a gift because I thought it was too expensive (or at least, I could get it cheaper than he could). This one really hit me hard because o my gosh, how terrible am I that I didn’t even give my own husband any freedom to choose what he wanted to buy, for me? WHO DOES THAT?!

It was a very bitter pill to swallow. However, after realizing that, I did my best to stop doing these things. I thought I was helping my husband by saving us/him some money but in reality, I think I did more harm in doing so. It wasn’t easy to change my behavior since it was something I had trained for most of my life. But after seeing the results that could happen, it wasn’t worth the money I could save.

I didn’t go from “get the best deal or nothing” to “just pay whatever is asked without even looking or thinking”. I still check to see if I there are better price elsewhere but I stopped making it my one and only goal to get the best deal on earth anyone can find.