Till Debt Do Us Part: The Lessons I've Learned About Love and Money and How to Keep Both

By Teresa Crone

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 2, 2005
• ISBN: 9781462844111

Teresa Crone

Teresa Crone was the eighth woman to become a cast member on season one of the first daytime reality show, “Starting Over,” which features six living in a house together, working on individual goals and supporting each other under the guidance of two personal Life Coaches. Teresa’s personal goal was financial freedom. This book follows Teresa’s personal trials and triumphs as she lost everything in the pursuit of love,and recounts the lessons she has learned that can help anyone avoid the entrapments resulting from emotional vulnerability. Teresa now resides in Cincinnati, Ohio and is a practicing psychotherapist.

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Copyright © 2005 by Teresa Crone.

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This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Epilogue

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the two people who have stood by me through thick and thin, my daughters, Tiffany and Brittany. To have blundered as I have in life, it is a great gift to see respect in their eyes when they look at me. That respect and love have driven me to want to overcome my mistakes and become a true role model to them.

I want to say a special thanks to my dad, who is residing in a Veteran’s home, and to my uncle Pete who has been there for me and never judges. I want to remember my mother who is passed on, and my beloved aunt Millie who recently passed. I know Uncle Pete misses her too. They were the happiest married couple I know of, married over 60 years.

Acknowledgements

The true turning point in my life began the day I stepped into the house of the reality TV show, Starting Over. From that day forward I would began an evolution to a place where I would never be the same. People ask me all the time if the show ‘really helped me.’ I tell them it changed me life, and it did.

Special thanks to Rana Walker and Rhonda Britton who were the Life Coaches for season one of the show. Their wisdom and tough love brought many issues to the forefront and made me face them and overcome them. I entered the show to work on debt, but I confronted so much more about myself. Thank you, Rhonda, for identifying what became the foundation of this book, my conflict over love and money and how I had used them interchangeably. Thank you, Rana, for empowering me with the two most important words WHO CARES? when I kept worrying about who might be mad at me if I chose to stand up for myself. Thank you for the hugs and the tears, for helping me to honor my mother and become at peace with her death once and for all, and for helping me find my self-respect again.

Thank you to Steve Rhode, my ‘money coach’ who walked me through every step of dealing with debtors and empowered me with the tools to be a negotiator. He really was there for me for the long haul.

Thanks to the exceptional women who were my housemates who showed me what true friendship is, and none of it involved spending my money.

Thank you to the producers and all the crew members who work behind the scenes, an incredible group of professionals, many of whom I have never seen and never will, who are committed to the daily task of running a show, but also ‘keeping it real.’

Chapter 1

An ‘Outhouse’ Mentality

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.

—Dennis Wholey

In the 1980’s and early 1990’s there was this television show that my mother was addicted to. It was a show that depicted unsolved murders, missing persons and the full spectrum of people deceiving people, sometimes draining unwitting victims of their entire savings accounts.

I remember always thinking, "Idiots! I would never be so stupid as to let somebody con me out of hundreds of thousands of dollars!"

But, today I am living proof that it really can happen to anybody, given the right circumstances and the right vulnerabilities. Oh, and one more thing. ALL ‘con men’ aren’t ‘professionals’ who are bent on draining your account and disappearing. Even I would have caught on to one of those guys. Sometimes, the ‘con man’ is just an ordinary guy whose life experience has taught him to attach himself to security, which turns out to be in the form of YOU. Sometimes he just uses the word ‘love’ to manipulate you for what he wants and needs, which is usually somebody to take care of him so he doesn’t have to be responsible for himself. Sometimes, he even hangs on long after the money is gone. Maybe even, sometimes, he really DOES love you, but he is just a toxic person that you have let into your life during a weak moment. Someone for whom YOU can serve a purpose. That is my story.

My story probably started years ago with my shaky sense of self-esteem. Growing up, I was embarrassed to come home on the school bus because the other kids always got to see my house, the ‘unfinished’ house, first covered with tar paper, and, eventually, with weather boarding, but with a bizarre twist. On the side of the house where the kitchen was, there were uneven boards sticking out in the air as if there was some invisible room yet to be built. And, of course, that truly was the case. My dad planned all my life for a yet-unfinished extension to the kitchen, and he had left the weather boards ‘staggered’ so that there wouldn’t be a blunt seam between the existing kitchen and the someday-to-be-built kitchen extension. His desire for perfection often prevented him from completing tasks because he envisioned he didn’t have time to complete them ‘right.’ So, he procrastinated until that phantom time that never came, to finish the job. Sometimes, this technique invaded his ability to even start a job. I understand that. I inherited some of it from him.

Anyway, kids on the bus would ask on a regular basis why we didn’t just cut those boards off? In defense of my dad, I would explain that he was going to build another room. They would nod with a mix of confusion and understanding.

That room, of course, never happened. Finally, a few years ago, at the urgency of my mother, my dad sawed the ugly boards off. The back of the house is still covered in tar paper, however, just in case my dad, now 77 and in a VA nursing home, gets inspired to add that room.

Such was my childhood, filled with unfinished projects and good intentions that never came to fruition. My first role model for procrastination.

But that wasn’t the most embarrassing part. The most embarrassing part was the outhouse. Despite my grandmother offering to pay for all the plumbing if my dad, who was a carpenter, plumber, electrician, mason, mechanic and farmer, would only put in the bathroom, it still evaded us year after year. Bringing friends home to spend the night was a horrific experience. I knew, eventually, they would ask to go to the bathroom. After a while, my mother developed a sense of humor about it, and would just hand them the flashlight. They would look perplexed, and I would have to admit, shamefully, that we didn’t have a bathroom, that we had to go to the outhouse. Most kids were good sports about it, and we would trek out back together, braving the spider webs which always seemed to develop in the toilet.

It became more difficult, however, when I got older and started to date. Why did it always seem that my date had to go to the bathroom as soon as he got to my house? Was there some cosmic conspiracy that made a guy wait until he got to my house, to decide he had to go to the bathroom? Horrified, I followed my mother’s suit and handed him a flashlight. I tried to laugh it off, but the humiliation is something that has never left me. My own two girls don’t realize how blessed they’ve been to always have indoor plumbing!

It may seem like this has nothing to do with my mishandling of money, but I believe it has everything to do with it. My lack of self-esteem was rooted in my early embarrassment. Had it not been that we could have had a bathroom at any time, but my dad refused to put it in for whatever reason he had (once he said he was afraid the taxes would go up if we had indoor plumbing-yep, blame it on the government) it would have been different. In later years, I believe it was a control issue with my mother who had come from a family that had indoor plumbing. When she was a teenager her parents had built a new home, complete with bathroom and claw-foot tub, and from there she married my father and began a life whose demeanor was less than what her own father had provided. There was quite a bit of discord between my father and my mother’s father, who was a hardwork-oriented man