Rivet remembers that the rich ladies can't see the dirty-faced tree climber she is on the inside
TL;DR: Dr Rivet remembers that the rich ladies can't see the dirty-faced tree climber she is on the inside.
I had a bit of a personal revelation this morning. My mother and I lived with an iron-willed and well-heeled great aunt (my father’s aunt) for a bit when I was a 12 year old tomboy struggling with the abrupt onset of puberty. This was the same great aunt who pressured my father to "get his family back together", resulting in my mother and and I moving from California to Oregon for an attempt at nuclear family life that lasted about 3 months between the time my father got out of detox and the time that he resumed drinking, ending in "the beer and table saw incident".
My two great aunts were transparently horrified by my lack of class and gender normative presentation, and I was subjected to the my fair lady treatment. I’m sure it came from a place of love, but the underlying message was that my multiply-divorced mother (the only fixed point in my crazy childhood) was a lost cause and they were going to make me marriageable by changing every unacceptable thing* about me.
The next school year, my mother was strongarmed into sending me away to live with dad's cousin in Seattle as a mother's helper for her 5 kids (again, clearly intended by the aunts as class and gender reeducation, though the cousin herself was much more of a freethinker than her mother probably knew). It was a very difficult and alienating year for a 12 year old. When I came home, my mother had a fiancee again (handsome and a good provider, but also misogynistic and sociopathic. That marriage lasted a couple of years, through which my mother was plagued with panic attacks; I've never asked, but that was probably a condition of my being able to come back. Go ahead: ask me my opinions about marriage and dependency.)
Being made to feel abject was the last thing I needed at that age, and it reinforced all the insecurities about class that I was starting to develop as my life expanded and I came into contact with people with money because my mother would scrounge and hustle to find opportunities for me (e.g. my best friend at the time was an well-off girl I met at the nerd camp I attended on scholarship; her parents was lovely and welcoming but I never knew what to do with myself around them).
All these older women in philanthropy trigger in me the same “you should know better than to sit on the nice furniture“ response.
*some of these, like "a lady always carries a handkerchief", have some value. But I prefer to think of it as "it's handy for a person with chronic sinus issues to carry a handkerchief."