My Money Story

Next semester, like some of you, dear readers, I will be taking my first ever class on class ("Class, Poverty, and Politics").  "Class" is usually added into courses on gender or race or sexuality, but rarely granted its own semester-length seminar.  It is also the social location I have done the least amount of personal work on, and therefore what demands the greatest reflexivity and accountability.

The professor of the spring course recently recommended Classified: How to Stop Hiding Your Privilege and Use it For Social Change! to those of us interested in checking ourselves on our privilege.  My copy arrived last week, and one of the exercises of its workbook-style format kept me up very late the other night in thought.  The exercise asks its reader to recount their "money story."  How did we come to our class privilege?  Most importantly, the exercise asks us to re-examine our money story after we tell it to be sure we are telling the full story.

In the spirit of full accountability, I am writing my money story here on this very public blog.  My intention is to return to this entry at the conclusion of the spring semester and reassess my money story to determine whether I have left anything out.  I plan to reflect on what I am about to write with the deeper understanding I expect I'll have next spring, when I'll be better able to fill in the gaps.

And so it begins like this.

My family's money is of very recent development, at least as far as I know.  I do not know too much about either of my parents' lineages.  I doubt that class status was ever static and linear in either of them, but I am not aware of any great wealth (although my paternal grandmother is the daughter of a British colonel and spent her childhood in India, which makes me wonder about the colonial legacy of my family, regardless of income).  For their privacy, I will not go into too much detail about my parents' childhood experiences, but I will try to share as much as is needed in order to explain where we are now.

My mother grew up working-class, although additional difficult family circumstances meant her experience sometimes vacillated into working-poor.  She is the third of five children raised in a little town off the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, Canada.  Her parents divorced when she was twelve.  My father grew up middle-class (when there was such a thing...I don't know if a 'middle-class' exists anymore in the way my father experienced it) to parents who had lived through a war-torn England.  They moved to a town outside of Toronto when he and his sister were just toddlers because of a job opportunity for his father, a railway electrician.  Money was tight, but there are markers of a middle-class existence that come up in old pictures and stories that my father tells.  For example, for a time they had an above-ground pool, and my father had braces when orthodontic work was at its most barbaric (his twin sister, however, did not receive braces).

Both of my parents joined the paid workforce quite young.  My father was a paper boy and bagged groceries.  My mother baby sat and worked in retail.  My parents married when my mother was 19 and my father was 21 (they just celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary a few weeks ago).  Neither was encouraged or expected to go to college, and neither did.  For a time, they lived paycheck to paycheck.  Once, they borrowed $5,000 from my dad's father, and, when they tell my sister and I this story, they always stress how they paid it back with interest.  They moved occasionally to chase increasingly higher salaried jobs for my father, who worked in the hardware business and found upward mobility in the marketing side.

This is blurry part of the story for me.  I realize in writing this story that there are important steps that I do not know, but have simply accepted as what is.  How did my father go from bagging groceries to jet-setting across the country?  What were the rungs of the ladder, and how long did he spend at each?  I do not know.  What I do know is that my father's social location was the wind at his back as he was upwardly mobile in his industry.  A white, heterosexual male, he was mentored by other white, heterosexual men in superior positions.  A man of color would not have had the same opportunities my father received, nor do I believe my mother would have been afforded the same mentorship.  This is not to discount the incredible toil and time my father has dedicated to his work, but rather to account for the context in which his toil and time were more likely to yield financial reward.

This is the part of the story I do know.  In the early 80s, my father received a job offer from a company based out of Louisville.  After much red tape, they were able to work out a high skills visa for him to move to the United States with my mother.  This was especially difficult to do since they did not have advanced degrees...I doubt such a visa without higher education is even possible now.  I don't doubt, however, that the fact he was a white married man from a rather non-threatening Canada facilitated what is a very trying bureaucratic process.  My twin sister and I were born shortly afterward.   Due to the conditions of the visa, my mother could not work.  This meant, however, that I had the great privilege of an at-home parent throughout my childhood. 

I have said to my parents before that we were wealthy during this time, although they disagree with me.  I still stand by this assessment.  I'm sure I can think of endless examples that marked our wealth.  We took spring break trips to major U.S. cities every year, and for a couple of years we went to a rather lavish resorts in Virginia.  We went to plays.  We belonged to a country club.  We swam, did gymnastics, played piano, golfed.  I did all these things as a child without any thought to the finances it took to do them.  We had health insurance, orthodontic work, and access to developmental and physical therapies when we needed them.  We were always pushed to succeed academically and given the necessary tools to do so. 

For the sake of full accountability, I must tell you that I am strongly resisting an overwhelming impulse to clarify that we weren't 'really' wealthy, because wealthy people are the people who go to boarding schools and have horse farms and drive Porsches and never have to work a day in their lives.  It is very difficult to resist this impulse.  I know I must tell you the harder, colder details without cushioning the stark truth to class privilege.  None of us have to have trust funds or be due for any whopping inheritance to still be wealthy.  Wealth is much more flexible than so rigid a caricature; moreover, it is always easier to see the people who are ahead of you than the multitudes you've left in your wake. 

Now, the rest of my money story.

My sister and I both made it into a traditional public middle school, which was determined via a lottery.  Entering this middle school was essential, because it tracked us into what were considered the "better" public high schools.  This was ephemeral however, because shortly after we started sixth grade, my father's company experienced a hostile takeover, and he was laid off.

My father took a new position with a substantial pay cut.  We moved to a town of what was then about 50,000 in eastern North Carolina.  My father stopped wearing suits and ties and cologne.  And traveling - he was home constantly, and we were, too, as we stopped taking vacations.  This was a difficult time for my family, but I would say we were still definitively upper middle class.  We were still very comfortable.  We still played piano and belonged to a country club.  I knew from the trailer parks we rode through every morning and afternoon on the bus route that not everyone lived like us.  Plus, money works differently in a mid-sized southern town than in a large southern city. 

By the time my sister and I were looking at colleges, both of my parents were self-employed, my mother in real estate and my father still in hardware marketing.   My parents supported me financially throughout the college search, application, and selection process.  At the time, my father felt deeply ashamed that he could not send both my sister and I to private university without going into substantial debt.  Instead, my sister and I attended a prestigious public university, debt-free (poor us!).  They supported us through summer interships, study abroad programs, and expensive student housing.  Perhaps the greatest evidence of my class privilege is that I majored in English and minored in creative writing...and I aspired to be a professor of English despite the consequences.  And then my parents supported me through applying to graduate programs, and later they fronted the moving costs when I selected a program and relocated to upstate New York.

And here I am, in graduate school, my 'money story' the bricks in the path leading to where I stand now.

I am afraid I have painted too simple of a picture, as class is not so uncomplicated, nor have the struggles that my parents have faced been so sweetly surmounted.  But my point, of course, is not to defend the struggles, but identify the simplicity and ease with which class privilege works, unquestioned, in the lives of those who have it.  Although I am almost entirely self-sufficient now, I know that the many tools along the way facilitated, if not outright allowed for, my current position.  Even though I make about one and half times the poverty level as a graduate student and have taken on student loan debt of my own, I still understand myself to be upper middle class.  To be a graduate student itself is an elite form of low-income existence.  I carry my class privilege with me always, regardless of my income. 

I will return to this post next May to see if I have done this story justice.