To The Mamas Who Managed Everything
Except their own money
This piece is for my mother and all other mothers who didn’t see it coming.
The woman who dedicated her young life to being a mother. Who didn’t enter the workforce when she should have — she was young, her qualification was relevant, she had options — and instead raised three children, mostly by herself. A woman who then, when divorced at 40, had to start where he started at 25.
To call 15 years within a career, or none, a gap is foolish. It's a scary canyon.
The symptoms of this classic family setup are not subtle.
One. Mothers were never compensated for the care work they provided. Decades of labour, invisible to our financial systems. And it’s not just the salary she missed out on. What about pension contributions? Nobody was clocking those either.
Two. She compared milk prices across supermarkets whilst our dads negotiated hundreds of thousands of euros in their offices every week. Sit with that for a second. What does that do to a person’s frame of reference? How exactly are you supposed to dream in multiple zeros when your entire financial universe has been calibrated to the weekly grocery budget? You don’t.
Three. She never learned anything about money. Never learned how to even feel comfortable saying the word out loud. And why would she — when would she — if it simply wasn’t her department? She was already running the household, doing the laundry, feeding everyone, keeping the pets alive. Money was his job. She got handed a budget for groceries, clothes, and school fees. Which brings me to the part I personally feel most curious about.
Four. Our mothers depended on their husbands to bring in the money. And don’t tell me that money ever truly felt like hers. I’m not talking about diamond rings here. I’m talking about a guilt-free massage when her body was tired from running the entire house. The nice running shoes that would actually get her into exercising. The soft pretty towels that would make her feel cared for after a bath at the end of a long day.
Can you imagine what that does to a woman’s sense of herself? What she believes she’s allowed to want, allowed to spend, allowed to dream about? And can you imagine what that does to a relationship over years and years — the slow build of dependence, restriction, and resentment?
Girl. Just imagine always having to be ready to justify your purchases to your man.
Nope, I kindly decline. I feel limited just thinking about it.
She is 60 now. Basically starting where he was at 30. Only recently has she had enough stability to even think about a small investment portfolio. Before that, she was purely surviving, praying nothing unexpected would hit. A broken washing machine. A war that sends fuel prices through the roof. The stuff you can’t plan for when you’re already living at the edge of what the month allows.
I know from friends that a lot of moms’ reality looks exactly the same.
They didn’t see it coming. Because that’s just how it was. Their moms did it the same way. And their mothers before them.
Long story short: It got passed down generation to generation. The difference is that divorce wasn’t nearly as popular back then, was it? There was nobody in the lineage to teach them otherwise because they hadn’t experienced the consequences.
Researchers actually have a term for it — intergenerational financial transmission. 75% of American children learn the most about managing money from their parents. And the research is clear that financial attitudes, habits, and anxieties transfer specifically from mothers to daughters. The avoidance, deference, distance. That little voice that says someone else should really be handling this.
Let’s call it the disempowerment inheritance.
The motherhood penalty
The motherhood penalty accounts for nearly 80% of the gender pay gap. Each child under five knocks 15% off a mother’s earnings. Meanwhile dad often gets a raise when he becomes a father. Same event, opposite outcome – he gets rewarded, she gets penalised. Make it make sense?!
The divorce
This is where it all caught up with her. How exactly was she supposed to support herself?
Suddenly she’s navigating a financial crisis she was never taught to read. She doesn’t know what assets exist. She doesn’t speak the language of negotiation. And she definitely can’t afford someone who does. Meanwhile the math is brutally simple — whoever brings in more money affords the better lawyer. And leaves with more.
Household income for mothers who divorced in the 2000s dropped by around 33%. Her standard of living fell 27% while his rose 10%. For mothers divorcing in the late 80s and 90s, that translated to $20,000 less a year. Twenty. Thousand. A year.
My dad supported us, to be clear. He’d never have let us go hungry or miss out. But my mom was comparing prices across supermarkets to make the month work while he took us to the nicest Italian restaurant in town, bought property, and built a retirement fund. I was too young to clock the long-term weight of that. Now I do. And honestly? It’s infuriating how unfair that was.
Re-entering the workforce
So she went back to work. From z-e-r-o. My mom never even used her degree — she had my brother at 23. By the time my parents split she was 40, and a degree with zero experience attached to it isn’t worth much. So she pivoted. Went back to school for a secondary education, outperformed everyone – she rocked it and I was so stoked for her — but it meant sitting in class with 18 year olds, doing unpaid internships, going three more years without an income. To keep us fed she worked afternoons in a lawyer friend’s office. Glamorous? Not remotely. Necessary? Yup.
Career gap, outdated skills, and let’s not ignore the confidence that took a serious hit in there too.
Retirement
Eventually, if you spend your 40s and 50s clawing your way from surviving to actually living, retirement shows up whether you want to or not.
Women retire with about 39% less saved than men. Retirement balances run 30% lower globally — and that smaller pot has to stretch six years further, because women live longer. Around 20% of divorced women over 65 live in poverty.
These women weren’t careless though. They were running entire households, raising children, working part-time because full-time wasn’t compatible with the school run, and trusting the higher earner to handle the bigger financial picture. Made sense at the time.
She got to retirement with less than she needed and little to no leverage for closing the gap. At 60, starting where he was at 40.
I couldn’t help but…
What if she’d had her own money the whole time?
Because here is what I noticed once I started looking: research on marriage shows that even the perception of a power shift — not an actual one, just the perception — can change how a spouse behaves. Power in a relationship isn’t abstract. It’s felt. And money is one of the clearest ways it gets communicated, whether or not anyone ever says a word about it.
When one partner earns significantly more, the higher earner tends to take on a more authoritative role in financial decisions — consciously or not. The partner with less income ends up feeling powerless, and the imbalance creeps into other parts of the relationship, breeding resentment along the way.
Psychologists who study this say money in a relationship is never just money. It’s a conversation about worth, adequacy, love, safety, wearing a numerical disguise. A financially dependent woman can end up constantly tracking her partner’s mood, managing the temperature of the room, making herself smaller just to keep the peace. Which is a wild kind of math when you think about it — the less money she has, the more emotional labour the relationship costs her.
Therapists who specialise in this say that if you ignore a financial imbalance, it doesn’t go away — it surfaces as passive-aggressive behaviour, building until it erupts, sometimes between partners, sometimes spilling onto the kids.
I couldn’t help but wonder… What would it actually change if she had been financially sovereign the whole time?
Could she buy herself something without doing mental math first? Could she disagree with him at dinner without a small private risk assessment running underneath every word? Could she leave, if she ever needed to, without it being a five-year plan?
And what would it have done to him?
Because here’s my hot take: a man holding all the financial power in a relationship isn’t actually powerful. He’s just unchallenged.
I’m not saying my parents would have stayed together if she’d had her own money, and therefore sovereignty. I don’t know. Nobody gets a control group for their own family.
But I do know that this disempowerment inheritance needs to be broken to reduce the risk of imbalanced and overpowered masculine vs. feminine. Only that way can we rewrite how these two energies relate to each other.
We are here to change the current and shape the forward.
Yours sassily,
Liz
The Forward Current is the publication of Demi.
"Nope, I kindly decline. I feel limited just thinking about it."
Yes yes yes! Brilliant perspective!