Aleks Jassem - Get Your $hit Together

To independence.

Its 5:11 a.m. and you have to peeagain.

Its been like this for the past few mornings, and every night at 9:50 p.m., youve been falling into the deepest sleep of your life. Your boobs hurt. Your lower back aches. Your whole body feels swollenlike all the carbs youve eaten lately have finally caught up to you. You cried at work this Tuesday; you had a wicked hangover after two glasses of wine on Thursday. On Saturday it dawns on you: Your period is late.

You buy a pregnancy test and leave the untouched package on the counter for 24 hours while you continue to live your best non-impregnated life from Saturday evening to Sunday night. Finally, you muster the guts to pee on that stick and learn your fate.

You wait 30 minutes (the suggested 20 minutes plus 10 to be safe) and re-enter the bathroom.

You approach the vanity and catch your own eye in the mirror. One last glance at the woman who didnt know...

Youre pregnant.

Holy fuck.

Suddenly the ground beneath you starts to give out. Your mind shoots in a million directions at once. Boy or girl? Twins or singleton? Will we have to move? Can we actually afford this?

Youre excited, youre terrified, youre acutely aware of the financial ramifications of inviting a very small, very cute, very revenue-negative roommate into your heart and home for the foreseeable future.

With the affirmative pee stick still sitting on the bathroom counter, you make a vow to yourself and to your unborn child that youre going to grow up. Youre going to be better. Youre going to reel it in and stop spending money like an assholefor their sake and for yours.

You exit the bathroom, tell your partner the happy news, and enjoy a private celebration. That night, you lie in bed, hand on belly, staring up at the ceiling, experiencing a full-blown existential/financial crisis. The next day, you enter research mode.

If this is where you are in your journey right now, then good on you, sister! (And congrats!) You took your curiosity and did exactly what you were supposed to do with it: You let it inspire you to learn.

From experience, however, we know that theres a good chance youve sought financial enlightenment a bit later in your mom career. You see, the initial glimmer of financial curiosity is often fleeting because sometime during a womans second trimester, she enters mama-bear mode: a state of being wherein thoughts go from pragmatic to primitive. Steam-cleaning the curtains seems more urgent than looking into Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs), and spending your lifes savings on a Restoration Hardware nursery set and a $2,000 stroller sounds like a practical allocation of funds.

Yup. Been there, bought that.

Blame the hormones. Blame the algorithms. Blame the ads. But as your belly expands, your inner dialogue starts to chatter and all it says is Focus on the baby. Nothing matters but the baby. Just keep doing things and acquiring things for the baby. So you go and you do and you acquire and its all about the baby. You defer financial responsibilities to your partner (bad idea), and you hire someone to clean the house (great idea), so that you can attend classes about the baby and doctors appointments about the baby. You register for the baby and celebrate the baby and then one day: You have the baby.

During the early days of new motherhood, its legitimately impossible to give a shit about anything other than figuring out what exactly goes into keeping an infant alive. You learn to swaddle, master different shushing techniques, and attempt new modes of feeding. You become a human mattress and vomit receptacle. You change diapers full of mustard-yellow shit (theirs) and diapers full of crimson-red blood (yours). You align your rhythm with your babys. You become one with them (again). Youre enveloped in the baby haze. But then one day... clarity.

You emerge from the fog and step into a new realm of (mostly) uninterrupted sleep and small but valuable increments of alone time. It takes a few months to get there, but eventually the world that exists beyond the four corners of your babys nursery comes back into focus. You can think again. Your priorities have shifted, though, and now the looming prospect of going back to work seems even more horrifying. The pull to stay home is real. You start to consider your options: going back to the career you left to have your baby; finding a new (more flexible) job that hopefully still constitutes a lateral career move; or extending your hiatus even longerat least until theyre in schoolbefore eventually re-entering the workforce. You can sense that in making this decision, a significant amount of access is at stake: access to money, access to power, access to the conversations that matter.

For the past six years, we have used the Rebel Mama platform to give modern momsnotwithstanding their vocationaccess to the conversations that affect them most. Weve written blog posts and books to help moms step into their power and advocate for their mental and emotional well-being. For six years we smashed stigmas and dismantled taboos. For six years weve fostered community connections and built a modern village to support a new generation of child-bearers. For six years we busted our asses in the name of empowerment, and do you know what we learned in the process? We learned that for six years wed been overlooking the most important piece of the empowerment puzzle: Money.

Money is the international language of power, which means that empowerment simply cannot be fully realized without financial literacy. The old adage He who has the gold makes the rules still holds true. The goal now is to amend the pronoun. In order to do that, youll have to become financially literate first.

Financial literacy is what this little gold handbook has been designed to give you. Its everything that school didnt teach you about moneyhow to earn it, spend it, save it, invest it, and teach your kids about it. This is a girlfriends guide to finance. A no-judgment, no-bullshit cheat sheet of all the things you need to get your $hit together when youve got a family to account for.

Weve been at this mom gig for a while now, and what we know for sure is that moms need so much more than a day at the salon to take care of themselves. We dont need healing crystals or essential oils or a facelift for our vaginas, and we certainly dont need another suggestion to stock up on wine. What moms really need is someone to show them a clear-cut path to economic freedom. Fuck bubble bathsthis is the real self-care.

Whether youre debt-ridden and broke or you have some money in the bank that you simply dont know what to do with, anytime is a good time to take control of your financial future. To do it, youll need to do two simple things:

1. Learn the game.
2. Plan to win it.

Let us teach you the rules and help you with your plan, babeVirgo-style (read: interactive pages and checklists galore). Come with us on this journey of learning, debunking, and understanding. Spoon with your pregnancy pillow, strap your baby to your boob, or settle in on the sidelines of your kids soccer practice. No matter what stage youre in, listen up because were doing this. Were entering the final frontier of empowerment together.

We cant afford not to.