TurboTax Hell

My husband will never read this and that’s probably a good thing.

I hate my husband. This morning. It’s not the first time. I’ve hated him at least once a week over the 50 years we’ve been together. I’ve hated him for dropping his bicycle helmet and anything else he’s come home with on the kitchen table that I designed and whose gorgeous wood surface, when uncluttered, is what my dreams of peace are made of. I’ve hated him for the pile of stuff that’s been sitting in the hall for four months, waiting to get taken down to the basement. I’ve hated him for never putting dishes in the dishwasher or unloading the dishwasher or taking the washed dishes he’s piled up in the drainer and putting them away on shelves. I hate him for all the tasks that have somehow been assigned to me over the years, without my agreeing. When did I agree to be the only one who answers the phone? Why am I the manager of phone messages and household accounts and Instacart ordering?

When, fucking when, did I agree to be the one who does our taxes?

In the days before we got married, adopted a child, and our taxes got complicated by research trips and childcare and honoraria and mortgage interest, we each did them ourselves. Then, when we started to file jointly, there were the years when I sat for hours at my (former, not so beautiful) kitchen table, surrounded by W-2’s, 1099-misc’s and etc. and pre-organized them for our accountant, who then did mysterious things with the numbers and forms I gave him and came up with a figure that was always more than we expected. I was the one who had collected the W-2’s and etc. and there was always something that had come in the mail addressed to my husband that he’d forgotten to give me and was now lost somewhere in his office (I won’t even go there, narratively or actually.) An hour or so of foraging. Follow-up calls and after we submitted, requests for forgotten information from the accountant. Of course, my husband took care of those calls. NOT.

Have I mentioned that I’m afraid of math? My husband isn’t. But somehow, I’m the one adding up the numbers on the receipts. How did that happen? Like so many of the arrangements between partners, it’s hard to locate the moment when a household division-of-labor sidles wordlessly into everyday life. Often but not always it’s gender-based. “You thought you were going to get away without this, didn’t you?” The wicked interloper sneers and giggles, proud to have made this continue through the decades of “progress.” While we’ve been marching and legislating and getting those jobs that our mothers didn’t dare imagine women would ever get, he (non gender-neutral pronoun deliberate for the wicked sexist god of the domestic DOL) has been plotting more invisible ways to keep us in our place. Get the girls responsible for management of domestic functioning!  That’s a good one, because even if you have a partner who cooks or cleans or is great with the kids, you’re still going to be the one overseeing everything. And fretting about everything that’s done or needs to be done. And exhausting yourself over it all while they do a specific task (if you’re lucky enough to get that) and are free.  

In the case of my husband and me, it’s a mixture of gender, personality, and neurological functioning. He’s chronically absent-minded, I’m compulsively not. He can, bless him, totally block out the minutiae of everyday life while he explores the intricacies of French verbs; I can’t do anything else that day until I’ve figured out what we need to order from Instacart. He doesn’t care at all about uncluttered surfaces; they have no purchase on his imagination. He’s comforted by old habits—like washing dishes by hand—whereas I’m promiscuously drawn to the not-yet-in-my-life: new products, plans for vacations, renovations. We would never have bought a house or had pets or adopted a child if I hadn’t been the motor of push. When we met, he was sharing a one-room basement apartment with a baby-grand piano and cardboard boxes that stood in for shelves.  I’m fairly sure he’d still be there (or some version of there) were it not for me. But idiosyncrasies of both of us aside, he’s also a boy and I’m a girl, and what Pat Mainardi, in a genius essay from the early days of the “second-wave,” called “the politics of housework” shaped us both. The difference between us is that he luxuriates in it while I resent it.

Did I mention that I love him dearly?

Just not last night. And not this morning, as I wake up with brain-fog and headache and an empty package of Pepperidge Farm “Chessman” (I ate the whole thing) and an aching back from sitting on the couch for five hours while “TurboTax” tormented me and Edward sat reading student essays and enjoying the dinner that I didn’t have a chance to eat.

Our accountant had gotten pricey and undependable, and no one new would take us on. I’d tried to find one for a couple of weeks, and here it was, April 15, and Monday was the deadline. Why not just ask for an extension? You ask. As those of you who are habitually late with their taxes know, they make you send estimated money in with the request so you actually have to sort of do your taxes even though you’re asking for an extension. I’ve never understood the logic or mechanics (and certainly not the justice) of all that. I’ve just let my accountant figure out how much we’d have to plunder from our savings in order to satisfy the IRS while the interest for being tardy accumulated. This year, with no accountant, I was left to figure it out on my own. So I pulled out last year’s return, and sat down with the W-2’s and etc.

I lasted perhaps fifteen minutes before I gave up.

A friend had suggested TurboTax. “It’s kind of fun, they lead you right through it.” When I went to the website, it turned out to be even better. TurboTax promises to actually finish the whole deal— no extension necessary—by the deadline. And if you pay enough (about half of what my accountant now charges) you can even get them to do it for you by “one of our experts.”

Do it FOR ME? Joy. Unbounded joy. Joy such as I’d not felt since Hillary was nominated.

 We know how that turned out.

First there was the usual missing form. This time, social security. My husband’s, of course. But maybe my bad? I doubted it—I’m very careful to put all the envelopes that say “Important: Tax Information Inside” in a big folder as they come in. But I’ve been less organized this past year, so I spent a half-hour going through the papers on my desk three times. I found a lot of mysterious and interesting things I’d forgotten about, but no SS form. Turned out to be in my husband’s office. Of course. No doubt stuck inside a pile of catalogues and other stuff that should have been sorted immediately but instead had been dumped—on my beautiful kitchen table—and eventually made its way into the much larger pile of unsorted stuff accumulating in his office for—I don’t know, 20 years? Ok, I’m used to this. Don’t get irritated. Move on.

He went for a run and I returned to the delightful promise of TurboTax to “do it all for me.”

Not exactly. You have to fill in some information and take pictures of all your tax forms, of course. No big deal—except although I kept getting the cheery message “All Good!”it turned out, after the expert came on the scene to presumably “do it all for me,” that nothing was getting through on their end. “Log out and come back on and, I’m so sorry, you’ll need to take all those photos again.” Ok, I can do that. Except the same thing happened four times, and every time I tried to get back in, they wanted me to change my password. It’s mildly annoying to have to change a password once. This was four times in three hours, all the while wondering whether any of the work done over the past three hours was saved or not, and at this point my husband was home, all sweaty and relaxed and ready for the dinner I’d ordered from Cheesecake Factory, and I was afraid to get up to eat, lest my precious online connection with the expert be lost.

“How is it going?”

All I could give him at that point was a snarl. Which he wisely ignored.

Another hour of repeat picture taking. My husband’s driver’s license turned out to be expired (he always bikes), so that was another hitch. “A passport will do.” Luckily, he has one. I struggled for several minutes to get it to lay flat for a picture before I asked him to hold it down for me. At that point the “have to ask” was already building into an interior catalogue of all the things I’ve had to ask him to do that he should have done without my asking. Didn’t he see me struggling? And with HIS fucking passport!

It turned out, too, that the two “experts” I had been talking to weren’t the actual expert who would do my taxes. One was helpful, the other was worse than not-helpful. She had me trying for a half-hour to retrieve a PDF of my entire 2021 returns (they were in the portal of one of the accountants who’d requested them, only to say they were too busy to take us on) before she realized that all they needed were the first two pages. When I was finally connected to the actual expert, I was so relieved to see her face that I told her how pretty she was. (Inappropriate but she seemed to enjoy it.)

Annette and I had about fifteen minutes of bliss together before our connection got cut. And not restored.

Five minutes. Ten minute. Twenty minutes. As I sat anxiously waiting for her to call back (turns out her computer went down for awhile) I had the unfortunate opportunity to unglue my eyes from the screen, and saw my husband across the room, digesting his dinner and grading his students’ papers, seemingly oblivious to my descent into TurboTax hell. And also, also….Seemingly oblivious to the unwashed dishes! The unloaded dishwasher! The junk in the hall! The crap of his on my beautiful table! My uneaten dinner! My unwritten substack post! The pictures I’d asked him to hang for the past five months, still leaning against the hall closet door! The messages on the answering machine! (Some of which were from his own doctors!) The lawn chair lying on its side! The plate with a quarter inch of water on it, left in front of my coffee machine where I was almost sure, groggily making my first cup of coffee, to jostle it! The empty doggie water dish!

“I’m sure she’ll call back.” He. Actually. Said. That.

I have the sense, narratively speaking, that my quoting the Vesuvius of accusations that exploded out of my mouth is, at this point, unnecessary. Let’s just say his reassurance that she would call back did not go over well.

Eventually, the lovely Annette did call back. I can’t remember what frustrating glitch we next faced, but she ending up suggesting we finish today. I should name the time, I’d been through enough. Finally, someone in the room was attuned to me! She apologized profusely for all the problems I’d encountered. I felt warm and hugged and mothered.

Glaring at my unperturbable husband—a quality of his I’ve cherished and counted on in many circumstances—I closed my computer, reorganized the paperwork, grabbed the Chessmen, and left the room.

The door is still closed. My head hurts from sugar-overload. I need to leave the room for another cup of coffee before I can expose myself to Scout, my adored Pittie, who is out there waiting to jump all over me with the most forceful tongue action anyone I’ve known has been capable of. Not ready for that.

But I’ve got my date with the lovely Annette at 5. And sometime before that, I will undoubtedly start loving my husband again. Just not yet.