A forever long, reminiscing post that is part autobiography, part commentary on class and wealth, and extremely self-centered.
I had a pleasant lunch with my mother and my oldest sister today. We talked about this and that and got to reminiscing about our history together. We have always been fortunate - we had places to live, food, working cars, toys, and later on could even swing piano lessons and college educations - but as we talked today, I got to thinking about how my perception of being "normal" in terms of wealth changed as I grew and as our circumstances changed here and there.
Up until about age 4 or so, I hadn't thought much about these sorts of things, seeing as how I was still in the business of acquiring language, socialization and fine motor skills, in addition to singing songs to anyone who would listen. Once I hit pre-k age, though, I think a certain crude, infantile understanding of "wealth" had been subliminally transfused to me through things like Scrooge McDuck's endless counting of gold coins in the DuckTales cartoons. I cite that specifically because (1) it's one of the few things I clearly remember watching a lot during that period of time and (2) it's the only explanation I can come up with for why I believed that Grandma having "gold" handles on the drawers of her furniture meant that she was rich. No seriously - I would go into her home (a newly acquired double-wide) and sit in front of the end tables running my fingers along the drawer handles. She still has those furniture pieces and the handles are now only partially gold, as the veneer has been worn off by use and by my childhood caressing. When we moved in with her, I believed we were moving into a nicer home because we were going from no gold handles to gold handles and from a heating system that consisted of one very loud heater in the living room to a system where heat actually came out of this hole in the floor right into your own personal bedroom! Three bathrooms instead of one! A big (to us) Christmas tree every Christmas! We were so lucky!
As I became a preteen, my perception of wealth and status became influenced by harmful and misleading cultural narratives. I made snarky remarks about being "trailer trash." Not once did I consider what sort of stereotypes I was reinforcing, or how hurtful that sort of language might have been to anyone sitting near me who might also live in a trailer or who might wish they were lucky enough to have one...all I cared about was that the people I wanted to make laugh were laughing. In any event, it was a sign of my new viewpoint: we were clearly classless and poor because we lived in a trailer, whereas normal people lived in "real" houses. Never mind that the "real" house we had occupied prior to living in the trailer was crumbling and dangerous...I was a shining example of the phenomenon in which humans tend to hang on tenaciously to a specific worldview once they've landed on it and they tend to remember all data that supports it while disremembering all data that disproves it. Stubborn creatures of habit, we are.
During my sixth grade year (which in my region is the first year in a new school for public school kids) we made our next move up the ladder. We had one false alarm - had a house decided upon and were going to move during Winter Break, but then it fell through. I was delighted, of course, because I had just gotten used to my school and was not at all anxious to leave. Shortly thereafter, though, the parents picked out another house and we moved right before my 12th birthday. I was partially distraught; dagnabbit, I had just gotten used to my old middle school and here I was having to start over completely and with only 2.5 months left in the school year! But on the other hand, there was this house.
This. House. It was a "real" house, and it was so much prettier than the previous "real" house we had lived in, which was built in the 50s, had wood paneling on the walls and didn't originally sport a bathroom (one had been added before we lived there.) This house, however, was built in the 90s. The walls were painted, white in most of the house except the wallpapered bathrooms and the painted kid bedrooms. THE BEDROOMS!! Amber and I had separate ones! Mine was big enough not only for a double bed all for me and standard bedroom furniture, but we could even finagle it so that the spinet piano Mimi gave us could fit in my bedroom as well! There was a backyard with a playhouse and a hammock, a paved driveway instead of gravel that we could write on in chalk, a crawlspace to hide in during tornadoes so that we didn't have to run across the road to someone else's house...it was the most wonderful house ever. We weren't poor people anymore, we were normal!
My assessment of us as "normal" lasted until I saw some of my new friends' homes, with their multiple stories and their internet access and their DVD players and in some cases, pools. I downgraded us to the low side of normal - we weren't poor, but there were times when it felt like I was the only kid in the entire county school system who didn't have an AIM screen name, which I assumed was the result of us not being able to afford internet (it wasn't.) Like lots of kids, I hoped that one day I would be successful enough at something to make enough money to have a big house with a pool and digital gadgetry and pretty decor and all that. I wasn't contemptuous of our home, but I didn't fully appreciate it.
My next move came at 18, and I'll say only this: nothing will make you appreciate your one-story unpooled house like living at college. To this day I rejoice in floors that are the same elevation at one side of the room as they are at the other.
Once I got married and started working, my whole understanding of wealth and class began to broaden. I began to see the myriad ways in which people gain and lose, began to think about the crushing cyclical nature of poverty, and began to realize how unbelievably lucky I had been as a kid. I had parents (several!) who were able to acquire jobs to support the family and were able to complete their own educations so that they could help me and my sisters complete ours, we lived in structures where we felt reasonably safe and felt confident that if something did happen, we would be listened to and protected by law enforcement, we had enough money to buy nutritive food, medical care, and cars to take us to get those things, the parents had sufficient income without any of the kids having to get jobs to help sustain the family (getting jobs to help pay for things the kid wants or help with college is a different thing) so we kids could focus on school, our parents' occupations were scheduled so that they were at home most evenings and thus had time and energy (hehehe) to talk to us and see after our emotional well-being and included weekends off for leisure activities...there's a domino effect happening here. One layer of luck tends to lead to another. I have no personal lived experience with poverty, but based on what I have read from those who have and various thinky blogs like Sociological Images, the same happens at the other end of the spectrum. One layer of suck leading to another. If any one of several elements in my family's history had been just a little different...if this one hadn't graduated from high school and thus hadn't gotten into this career, or if another hadn't had a parent at home to help with homework in the subject that would one day become his/her passion, or if I hadn't been at the right place at the right time, the whole story could have changed.
Of the many advantages I had as a kid, one of the biggest was the life lesson that you should never stop learning, never stop listening, and never believe that you are 100% right because the world is big and varied and you aren't God. I hope to keep that lesson always and use it to keep learning about people and to help them add some layers of luck to their own lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment