The Anthropocene Chronicles

Checks: The End of the Patriarchy, Part 1

Recently I had an argument with my sister over a check. She owed me money for a shared purchase made two weeks earlier and refused to settle up electronically. "I'll mail you a check," she insisted. This was an affront: I felt stiffed, asked to wait an additional week for her portion. After pointing out the ease and safety of electronic payments, the vulnerability of having one's routing number in circulation, mailbox theft and the general inconsideration of demanding that a friend/family member indulge one's stubbornness, I reflected on--and raged about--my troubled history with checks.

Checks first came to me as gifts, made out for $10 or $20 and tucked into a birthday card from an aunt or other family member. Gifts meant a lot to a daughter of the 1950s. I don't mean gifts as natural talents; I had plenty of those, but they were beside the point, less important than the material rewards bestowed by benevolent forces. This belief, in the redemptive power of gifts, was instilled early on. Little girls got dressed up and dolled up and waited to be admired. All good things came to such girl/dolls. They had only to look the part and wait. Waiting patiently (translate: don't complain) was key to being rewarded. I must wait, but I may not ask; I might reasonably expect a check on my birthday, but I certainly couldn't ask for one. And of course, for us girls of the 50s, waiting culminated in the ultimate magical thinking of Prince Charming, who would arrive one day, bearing all manner of gifts, and spirit me off to my future. Oy vey.    

The idea that benevolent forces bearing gifts existed was reinforced throughout my young life. It didn't matter that I rejected stories of love at first sight and the prince--and, later, The One and soulmates--nothing could override my early conditioning. Though I was determined to make my own way, I had been drinking the Kool-Aid essentially since birth. The cards were stacked against me. And, to invoke another cliche, the house always wins.  

Since I never received an allowance--which would have acknowledged that I had needs--I worked part-time after school and during the summer, earning my first paychecks as a teenager. My pay was carried to the bank and put into a savings account with a passbook that was stamped with each deposit. But in September 1970, when I left for college, I got my first checkbook. My own checking account! It was a statement of personhood, a form of identity. When I was 18, it seemed like a giant step into the adult world.  It was a point of pride.

A checkbook came with responsibility, of course. I had to balance it, by adding the credits and subtracting the debits to know how much money I had. That I "had money" was another heady step up. Managing my checkbook put me on the same level as my parents. It granted me independence, and even if it extended only as far as my own finances, I was now a fully functioning adult woman.

 Relatively quickly, checks morphed from a form of emancipation into servitude. As a college freshman in 1970, I was dependent on occasional checks from my father. Let's pause on that word occasional. As before, there was no scheduled allowance; rather, these checks were a form of parental largess. That I put up with this outrage is shameful to admit, but I never objected. I didn't ask for what I needed because I hadn't learned to; my survival depended on protecting the status quo, of him as benevolent donor. This beggarly practice, of never asking but accepting what was sent whenever it was sent, led to massive self-neglect. The cascading effects of financial insecurity included poor nutrition, chronic anxiety and depression, falling grades, and exhaustion, from working part-time jobs during all but one of my undergraduate semesters.

Checks required waiting, something I was very good at. Back then--until the 90s--checks, from employers and otherwise, were mailed home, meaning that the postal service was a fixture of my financial life. Waiting and then running: the arrival of a check necessitated a trip to the bank off campus (open only until 3 pm and not always conveniently located) that could not be put off.

The sad truth was that checks were always more trouble than they were worth. They were necessary, but the associated challenges were onerous and agitating. The never-simple checkbook balancing, with pages of the monthly statement and the cancelled checks spread out on the table, brought me face to face with the stark reality that checks needed to come in as fast or faster than they went out. Therein lay the problem.

Even as a young adult with a job in New York City, this routine of collecting checks from employers and trotting to the bank continued. Much valuable time in my 20s was expended standing in line, waiting to deposit. The hidden cost of waiting for checks, depositing checks, and then for them to clear was considerable. These costs were deducted from my salary in the time lost and the fear of bouncing a check and incurring overdraft fees imposed by the bank. It only got worse when I became a publishing industry freelancer and was paid on a cycle that lumped me, the one who provided clean copy on deadline, with the paper suppliers in the 30-day payment schedule. The only way to close gaps between checks—and cover those I was writing—was to work multiple jobs, including in-house temporary gigs without benefits. It was my adolescence all over again.        

So there was always a power imbalance when it came to checks. The issuer--whether my father, an employer or my ex-husband--had power over me as I stood by the mailbox, waiting for something to materialize. The problem is that anything conferring power can lead to abuse. The person who writes the checks can dangle them like a carrot and demand another form of exchange, like good behavior. (The right-to-work movement operates on this principle, of "keep your head down and you'll get paid.") Make you dance for it or otherwise demean yourself. Be nice to your mother, who never calls or asks how you are, but we don't talk about that. Wait an extra week for the child support because it doesn't suit his schedule. Or tolerate passive-aggressive reminders of how fortunate I am to get anything, a testament to his nobility--which somehow countenances an alimony check made out in neon yellow ink that can't be read and must be replaced at his convenience. But why not? I've always been the dupe, the one to bear the cost of waiting or driving around or offering add-ons.

Waiting for checks--in other words, to be paid--is devaluing. When realizing the profit takes so long, and is fraught with so much exertion, the actual money fritters away and matters less. I stop caring when I have to wait three weeks to be paid or repaid, or if I have to send a second invoice. A kind of "oh well" attitude sets in. When a person is separated from her money, the "oh well" curdles quickly into "fuck it," and my life doesn't count anymore. If there is no connection between the work and the payment for it or the trouble gone to for the annual ritual of placing grave blankets at our parents' cemetery plaques, then a person is separated from herself.

Thankfully, the pressure--and the sturm and drang--of checks began to ease over the past twenty years, with the advent of online banking and direct deposit. But it took a while for the changeover, and checks were still common currency when I opened my tutoring practice in 2005. In the first decade, I accepted checks, but the headaches remained, including carrying them and driving around to deposit them. There were also the microaggressions. To whit: after an hour or more of working with a student (an in-person session involving driving and parking) I would stand by the door while an adult person would ask me the fee (already quoted) and then consult with a spouse or search the house for cash (yes, really) or ask me if the check they've written is okay.

Truth be told, there was always something archaic about a piece of paper, a scrip, as a representation of value. And bipolar: a check was worthless until deposited but dangerous when not. A big check in your purse was risky, capable of flying out of your wallet or being misplaced. The few occasions when I handled very large sums--when I bought my home and when I settled my father's estate--I took cabs to the bank to get those checks off my person. In early 2022, when I wrote the last in my book to a local physical therapy practice that did not accept card payment, it was a no-brainer and a relief to junk checks for good.

From today's perspective, I mourn the person I was, who took on the extra work, who assumed the additional costs that dealing with checks demanded. The psychic burdens and the time I'll never get back. Eventually I learned to outpace them, so to speak, to have an income that accrued faster than they exited my account. But that didn't happen until well into the era of online banking, when I gained some control over my finances. Thanks to improvements in technology, I could press a button and see what money I had. I could instruct the bank to make payments on a date of my choosing, rather than put a check in the mail and hope it would get there in time.

It might be argued that online banking is just a digital checkbook with many of the same headaches, such as late payment. But the dynamics are different: clients are far less likely to forget you when their kids are hectoring them on Venmo. But mainly electronic payments level the playing field. We're more equal, the sender and the recipient. The money is deposited right away, and I am compensated. And the handoff is instantaneous and clean. The Send button delivers an immediate dopamine hit. Life can be less stressful.

It can certainly be simpler than it was in the early days of my first checkbook. And maybe the power balance has begun to shift, from a tyrannical system to something more egalitarian. I'll mail you a check--and make you wait a week-- is a form of bullying. It's also a political act. The demand that a woman wait for her payment cements the patriarchy by insisting on her subjugation in exchange for largess. That's the hidden message behind the 1950s images we daughters were force-fed, when we were little girls playing tea party who received birthday checks written by older aunts sipping tea. Let's explode that scenario in which little girls wait and don't ask.

The moral of the story is not about checks; by all accounts, they’ll be extinct by 2026. Rather, it’s pay your daughters an allowance. Do it electronically. And be on time.