Downwardly Mobile
Inspired by this question from the NYT posted by Barely Tenured: “Compared with your parents when they were the age you are now, is your standard of living now much better, somewhat better, somewhat worse, of much worse?”
This is what I wrote in her comments:
“We’re both worse — I’m much worse, Brett’s not quite much but still worse.
Brett grew up in a middle-class family that was careful with money. He lived in a tony suburb so always felt poorer than he was but his parents could help pay for college and now are having a *lovely* upper middle class retirement. His dad was in the army in his twenties, retired from the company he started working for after his dischrage and his mom always worked at least part-time. They were careful with their money and are enjoying life now.
My dad made six figures in sales and management and my mom never had a job until after the divorce. My dad went on to invest his money in a restaurant, lost everything and married his former secretary. He will never retire, had two more children but now makes six figures again. He spends money ridiculously fast. My mom worked her way up and now makes a very good living but during our teen years, my family really struggled.
Brett and I make decent money now but for a few years we had a combined income of less than 30K and at one point less than 25K and at one very difficult point, less than 20K. I quit my job to be home with Noah and that loss of income was very, very difficult. We are still now struggling to get out from under it so while we make decent money now, we’re still paying for that hard time. (Paying off debt, catching up on savings.)
I think of our family as being more like my grandparents, both sets of whom struggled a great deal. I guess we’ve boomeranged back to where our families were.”
I definitely grew up with privilege. In fact, I grew up with enough privilege to reject a lot of the values my parents had at this age. See, my father is a total workaholic and very much about keeping up with the Joneses. The pressure he put on himself to get us in the “right” neighborhood and get us the “right” things (like fancy cars in the driveway, over-priced and over-stuffed furniture, a sunken living room with a vaulted ceiling before that was a common thing) meant that he was never home, that his marriage(s) fell apart, and that he only really knows two of the six children he has. So I grew up rejecting that and that, my friends, is a privilege. It’s a privilege to choose to have less without feeling completely freaked out by it. By which I mean that Brett and I both have this middle-class security (and stupidity) about the world. We both have college degrees (his parents paid for his; I have big loans), we think it’s a kick to have trash-picked furniture, and neither of us have ever seriously worried about not having enough money to feed our kids (we both know that our parents will help us if things got dire). This is something my grandparents — either set — did NOT have so in that way, we haven’t boomeranged.
I kind of think that maybe my parent’s upper middle class status was a family anomaly. On both sides the aunts and uncles have done well (in some cases, remarkably well) but I’d say the majority of the cousins are kind of where we are. Not all of them but a lot, and some less well-off. I wonder if my feeling of privilege was a blip in our generational radar? And I wonder how it’ll be for Noah and Madison.
I don’t think I’ll really be able to tell for some years yet because our social world is stratified although solidly middle-class in mindset. (With one exception, our friends are either very well-off or else like us, kind of choosing to “live simply” but with degrees and decent resumes.)
I suppose I’d have more to say about this but Brett is warning me that it’s time to go to Noah’s baseball practice so off I go! Hope this isn’t too scattered and useless.
We alternated between being very well off to decidedly NOT well off growing up. A large part of that had to do with my parents separating and getting back together often. I guess the most poignant sign of our yo-yo economics was my Mom going from driving a Yugo (when my parents divorced) to driving a Mercedes (when they got back together and remarried) if you can imagine that! Talk about “stability whiplash” for a kid. We also went to living from a tiny, albeit nice enough, house to a very large, very comfortable house in a much nicer suburb. A “moving on up” scenario. It was crazy. I don’t want that for my kids. I rather them have less, consistently, than more sporadically.
I think we’re trying like hell to do a good job of holding the line. So far, so good. We live in a nice, smallish house in a very nice neighborhood with good public schools and great people. But right now, things are tight and about to be a lot tighter (I’m expecting #3 and not planning to work for a long while after). I’ll admit, I get scared about it all sometimes. But I don’t think the situation will ever be “dire.” I can always work on many different levels. I have a career to fall back on. Not my chosen career, but one nonetheless. I think that will be our saving grace. I’m willing to sell my soul to the devil (again) should it come down to it. It certainly wouldn’t be “easy.” But is life ever? Eh. Not really. I’m happier now than I was a few years ago when we had a lot more money in the bank. It’s all relative, I think.
Great topic, Dawn!
I wish I had the time right now to do this topic justice, but I couldn’t agree with you more when you say that conciously rejecting the status quo comes from a place of privilige.
Rob and I were watching one of those reality tv shows where the winner gets 1million dollars and the people on the show were talking about the money like it was $100 million. They are willing to be exploited for $1 million.
We were having a discussion with our kids about this and I had said that it is only because we are in a position of privilige that we can say money isn’t important. A million dollars would not be life changing for us. We have everything we need. It would get us nicer versions of the same stuff, but I don’t have any real desire for that.
I can’t even imagine poverty. I know I will never be hungry. And that is privilige.
I’d love to think out loud more about this, but my nursling is kicking the keyboard and typing with just my left hand is not easy under the best of circumstances.