A Hardworking Cinderella Story
I was recently made aware of a post by a rather fantastic blogger about the Gordian Knot of class issues and insecurity and prejudice so tightly tied around the American Dream, called "poor people aren't supposed to want nice things". Go read it. I will tell you that it hurt rather a lot for me to read. It is in many ways my own story.
I owe everything I am to the very few members of my family who scrimped and saved so that every now and then we could have Nice Things, who helped me brush off every bit of bitter internalised prejudice slung at me by my childhood peers for liking them, who taught me why we were working so hard to escape the poverty we were mired in. Sometimes it was travel, my grandfather spending his entire meager inheritance dragging the rest of his family with him for a summer in Germany, even if we stayed at home and ate cut-rate groceries from the local army base most of the year. For my mother it was food, finding hole-in-the-wall restaurants and encouraging me to love ethnic dishes no one else in the neighborhood had even heard of. For my dad, it was cobbling together a Frankenstein's Computer out of spare parts. For Nan, it was theatre and support of my love for a fine pair of shoes, instilling in me the appreciation of a good show and an excuse to dress up, if in secondhand finery. Beyond the lack of money itself, we wanted out of a grind where nice things were 'gross' or 'gay', where I was routinely bullied for using big words I learned from library books (for which I clearly walked uphill ten miles in the snow each way), where any saved-for fashionable clothes wouldn't make the wearer a target of scorn from girls both higher and lower on the class ladder. And now that my mother and I have each achieved some modicum of success? The post's author is right; we don't talk to anyone from that era of our lives. It hurts too much, for everyone.
I have at times over-identified with my father's family because they are a riches-to-rags-to-riches story. If you start with riches, you're allowed to know what they are, and claw back toward them piecemeal. Otherwise, what American society prescribes us is to live in a state of penance for our own poverty until some magical day the American Dream can be achieved all at once, house and white picket fence and a book deal for a heartwarming story, because otherwise we might all have to admit that dream is broken. It is broken. It doesn't work that way. And in the process of working toward it, one is inevitably broken in some way or another under the contradictions of it all. I was over thirty years old, with a mortgage and a car and no revolving debt and a top-twenty-five-percent white collar job, before I finally convinced myself I could buy a pair of boots I'd wanted for a decade. It has taken this much, this long, all of my family's hard work to show me the world, all of the fantastically frugal posh folks that are in my life now, to convince me I am allowed to have nice things.
That Gordian Knot is why. If we can't untangle it we had better at least admit it's there.
I owe everything I am to the very few members of my family who scrimped and saved so that every now and then we could have Nice Things, who helped me brush off every bit of bitter internalised prejudice slung at me by my childhood peers for liking them, who taught me why we were working so hard to escape the poverty we were mired in. Sometimes it was travel, my grandfather spending his entire meager inheritance dragging the rest of his family with him for a summer in Germany, even if we stayed at home and ate cut-rate groceries from the local army base most of the year. For my mother it was food, finding hole-in-the-wall restaurants and encouraging me to love ethnic dishes no one else in the neighborhood had even heard of. For my dad, it was cobbling together a Frankenstein's Computer out of spare parts. For Nan, it was theatre and support of my love for a fine pair of shoes, instilling in me the appreciation of a good show and an excuse to dress up, if in secondhand finery. Beyond the lack of money itself, we wanted out of a grind where nice things were 'gross' or 'gay', where I was routinely bullied for using big words I learned from library books (for which I clearly walked uphill ten miles in the snow each way), where any saved-for fashionable clothes wouldn't make the wearer a target of scorn from girls both higher and lower on the class ladder. And now that my mother and I have each achieved some modicum of success? The post's author is right; we don't talk to anyone from that era of our lives. It hurts too much, for everyone.
I have at times over-identified with my father's family because they are a riches-to-rags-to-riches story. If you start with riches, you're allowed to know what they are, and claw back toward them piecemeal. Otherwise, what American society prescribes us is to live in a state of penance for our own poverty until some magical day the American Dream can be achieved all at once, house and white picket fence and a book deal for a heartwarming story, because otherwise we might all have to admit that dream is broken. It is broken. It doesn't work that way. And in the process of working toward it, one is inevitably broken in some way or another under the contradictions of it all. I was over thirty years old, with a mortgage and a car and no revolving debt and a top-twenty-five-percent white collar job, before I finally convinced myself I could buy a pair of boots I'd wanted for a decade. It has taken this much, this long, all of my family's hard work to show me the world, all of the fantastically frugal posh folks that are in my life now, to convince me I am allowed to have nice things.
That Gordian Knot is why. If we can't untangle it we had better at least admit it's there.