Do the math

Unlike Barbie, I’ve never been afraid of math. (This is not the only way I am unlike Barbie, but let’s not go there.) When that hard plastic icon of femininity pronounced “Math is hard,” I was as outraged as anyone. Girls need positive math models, I thought, not one more voice telling them to not even try! Still, it didn’t occur to me at the time that maybe grown-up women need math models too, and that doing math in school doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll do it in real life. And it certainly didn’t occur to me that I was one of those women not doing her own life arithmetic.

Then, one day, a friend helped me spot my numerical blind spot. I was lamenting the high cost of Toronto rentals to a friend, bemoaning the fact that I’d never be able to afford a house. “What’s your rent?” she asked. “$1,300 plus utilities,” I said, for a two-bedroom flat in a house where the landlord cut the lawn once every summer. Well, almost every summer.

“And you’ve lived there how long?” she asked with what was starting to sound like alarm.

“Four years,” I said.

“So you’ve paid your landlord over $62,000 and you can’t afford a house?” she replied.

“That can’t be right,” I said.

“Do the math,” she said.

She was right. And when I went online later that night to see what size of a mortgage that rent translated to, I realized for the first time that, hey, maybe home ownership was a possibility. So why hadn’t I thought it was before? I’d traded math for emotion: I’d never pictured myself owning a home because I’d always imagined the house coming as step two — you know, the step after step one, the man. And since the man hadn’t yet materialized, I wasn’t letting myself do the math on whether I was entitled to that most valued reward of coupledom: a mortgage. What can I say — I was young and foolish. (Okay, I was almost 40.) Pushed by my pal to do the math, it wasn’t long before I waved goodbye to my landlord’s overgrown lawn and picked up the keys to my tiny big-city bungalow.