Blogs are fun!
I’m loving this conversation!
Chris said, “Dawn, I wonder if you are more sensitive to these types of situations having grown up with money and now not having that same lifestyle for your children?”
Yes, I think so. But also when my parents split (when I was 12) we were in this weird no-man’s land of no money but some money. Basically we still lived in the big, new-build house but we had no furniture since my dad took all the nice stuff. My mom sealed off the sunken living room with plastic so we didn’t have to heat it. We had food in the ‘fridge but if we ate it all before my mom could shop again, then we didn’t have food (making me slightly psychotic about both wanting Noah not to feel panicked about having enough food but also feeling like I need to distribute bananas on a quota system). I babysat to pay for my lunches and school clothes, etc. Everyone else in our neighborhood still had money (still had two incomes) and so we were the only ones with our air shut off and our clothes hanging out. I got very defensive about our lack of money situation and I remember feeling very, very scared about it all of the time. And guilty about ever needing money, which is the reason I babysat a lot.
This is why I’m not really clear about where I fit. I think that the middle class (and I haven’t read the NYT series so I may be talking out of my ear) is so flexible and huge and really very diverse. My mom went from dirt-floor poverty to lower middle class as a child; she went from upper middle class to lower middle class and back up again as an adult. My sister and I both have dipped down and I’ve recently come back up. My dad was second generation American whose father sold hats for a living and who now makes a tidy living doing financial planning for the truly wealthy. We’re all over the place and I think that’s pretty common.
In my own limited experience, there is definitely a mindset that comes from growing up with money and there’s definitely a mindset that comes from growing up poor and these mindsets have to do with feeling secure and how you use your sense of insecurity or security as you make your way in the world. But middle class folks, they are less predictable. Because, I think, that’s such a flexible and sometimes unpredictable class, you know? And then, too, you can grow up solidly middle class in a rich neighborhood and feel poor. Or grow up solidily middle class in a poor neighborhood and feel rich. It’s like there’s too much room in the middle to really define it very well.
But it’s almost midnight and I’m tired and I haven’t read the series and probably I don’t know what I’m talking about.
