Ask Farnoosh: Divorce, Toxic Workplaces, and Smart Home Upgrades

**Farnoosh Torabi** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:32)
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**Farnoosh Torabi** (0:58)
Welcome to So Money, everybody. I'm Farnoosh Torabi. On a whim, I decided to share a parenting fail on social media this week. I, you know, can't be bothered with Instagram sometimes, but I know I have to feed the beast.
That's the truth. Although I love being on there and watching everybody else's videos and getting schooled on different kinds of parenting hacks. So I decided to share one of my own. It's actually an excerpt from A Healthy State of Panic. And if you watch the video on Instagram, I used a technique that a lot of people are using right now, which seems to be in favor with the algorithm. It's where you do a voiceover and you're watching the person doing something basic, like someone might be doing yoga, someone might be like just driving. I was blowing up balloons for my son's birthday. And it was tangential to the story that I told, the piece of advice that I gave. And I wanted to share it with you this Friday.
If you want to go and check out that video, which has gone a little viral in 24 hours, it's gotten about 30,000 views, which is a pretty big deal for me. I'm not that cool, but sometimes I have interesting ideas and funny ideas. So this is a story about how a few years ago, just a few years, because my son just turned nine this week and he was about five when this happened, my daughter Colette was about two and a half. They went to a birthday party. Now I was working, so I sent them to the birthday party with their babysitter. This birthday party was for a boy who had invited both Evan, my son and his sister. So I gave them the present, told them where to go, where to show up. It was just down the street at the local indoor soccer venue. So they go, a couple of hours pass, they come back, I'm home now, and I say, how was the party? And our babysitter says it was fun. Colette said it was so much fun. She's showing me like the goody bag and all the things. And Evan is grumpy. And he's telling me, mommy, I didn't know anybody there. And I thought he was just exaggerating because the truth was that his friend wasn't a friend from his classroom at school. It was a friend from another classroom. And so I thought, well, of course, he's going to invite his friends from his other classroom. Evan and him are just buds separately. Like that happens. You're going to meet new people. Good for you.
He said, no, mommy, I didn't know anybody. I said, well, of course, you knew at least Blake, who was the birthday boy and his brother, Ollie. And he said, no, mommy, they weren't even there.
At which point I started to panic. Okay. And I checked my calendar.
And lo and behold, Blake's birthday was the following Saturday. Same place, same time. The wires had crossed in my brain. I thought it was that Saturday. Now, the point of this story is not that sometimes you fail as a parent and you should feel bad about it. The point is that sometimes you fail as a parent and it's an act of brilliance. Let me continue. Now, of course, who sends not one but two kids to the wrong birthday party, right? Like I, at this point, I'm a bag of emotions. I'm embarrassed. I'm worried that maybe we have caused this innocent family that threw this party for their kid at the soccer venue extra dollars because our kids decided to crash it. So we called the venue, told them what happened. And the venue manager is laughing. He's like, no, I mean, no one noticed and they didn't get extra charged. And so when I hung up the phone, I thought, hmm, this was a colossal mistake. I will own this. But did anybody get hurt? Did it cost anyone anything besides maybe a little bit of discomfort, Evan, playing with kids he didn't know? This failure had zero consequences. And then I wondered, this indoor soccer venue ran at least three, four events a day on the weekends. Could I have been releasing my children to random birthday parties for years while I had some free time? I should have thought of this before. And as I write in my book, and this is a story from A Healthy State of Panic, rather than letting your fear failure make you doubt your capabilities, sometimes the fear is just a signal that you got to just laugh, laugh it off. Because as long as you're okay, and the kids are okay, not much else matters. Think about the times where you have failed in your life. Maybe you would go back and change a few things, or maybe you wouldn't. In this case, I would not have changed a thing. All right. This mailbag is an old mailbag, but I wanted to resurface it. These questions are still relevant, and lots of important takeaways for us even still. And I want to start with the question that's probably going to take the most time to answer.