July 25, 2024

I have a fraught relationship with money, with pursuing it in particular. Income and I don't typically get along very well. I tend to feel like it's a forced relationship and it often has been in my life. I felt forced to work before I was ready, forced to take jobs I didn't really want, forced to sit in a cubicle staring at numbers all day. 

When I was a teenager, my parents expected me to get a job, to pay for my car and to start being a responsible adult I guess. But I was so shy and so unwilling that I didn't even try to get a fun or interesting job. My sister got me a job babysitting kids at the gym where she worked as a lifeguard. I didn't feel capable of getting a job I actually liked or wanted. But she sure seemed to be able to. I think this is when my personal relationship with money started to go south.

It continued to go south for most of my adult life. I felt stuck in boring, underpaid, unfulfilling jobs. I was trying to do what was expected of me, to be a normal person, to pay the bills. I kept my bills as low as possible for most of that time. To hopefully help me get unstuck from the boring, pointless work I felt forced to do to support myself. 

Being so cheap kind of worked actually. I was able to save up enough money to quit my boring bookkeeping job back in 2008 and go live on a Native American reservation for 5 months, volunteering at a youth center out there. It was meaningful, adventurous, and exciting. I met some cool people, experienced a different part of my country, and finally felt like I had some freedom. 

After that, I had one meaningful, interesting, and adventurous job that required long hours and paid way less than minimum wage, but gave me a free place to live and paid for most of my meals. In exchange, I had to live out in the woods 5 days a week, work 16 hour days, and look after some wonderful, yet often unruly teenagers. I lasted a little over a year until I was too tired to keep going.

So I went back to bookkeeping, off and on. I'd take a temporary job whenever my partner and I moved to a new place, which we liked to do every couple of years or so. The people I temped with tended to like me and thought I did good work so they'd usually hire me for a permanent position. Well, permanent usually turned out to be a year and a half. I'd reach my limit of boredom and dissatisfaction, give my notice (much earlier than 2 weeks usually), and Marshall and I would pack up all our stuff and move somewhere new. And the cycle would start all over.

That cycle stopped back in 2019, when Marshall and I moved back to my hometown to be close to my mom when she suffered a ministroke and started having heart trouble. I felt hesitant to move back home, the place of family strife and disharmony. But I wanted to be here for my mom. I'd been away for over 10 years and really enjoyed not being so tangled up in family drama or dysfunction.

My mom died the next year. My sister and I took care of her for the months she was sick and we both held her hand when she took her last breath. It was my biggest heartbreak to lose my mom, my worst childhood fear. Yet I was really grateful I got to spend the last year of her life with her and to care for her and comfort her when she was scared of dying. I played some meditation recordings for her, we both learned a little qi gong, I massaged her legs with oil when she couldn't get out of bed. I joked with her and made her smile after she stopped talking.

My cheapness gave me the time and freedom to be with my mom when she needed me. I had learned to save enough money to not have to work from time to time and how to feel somewhat ok when unemployed. Being unemployed in our culture is pretty frowned upon and I definitely struggled with it, but I needed more freedom than always having a job allowed. And I used that freedom to help my mom and to give myself the gift of being with her when it mattered.

Then my mom, the woman I learned to be frugal from, who told me she couldn't afford a T-shirt from K-Mart for me when I was 8 years old, left me a ton of money. I can't begin to tell you how crazy that is to me. I'm often left wondering how real our money troubles were when I was a kid. My dad has a completely different take on it than she did. All I know is I felt like we didn't have as much as my friends, my dad did not have a regular career and my mom felt forced to get a job when she expected to be a housewife and a mother whose husband took care of earning money. And she had that for quite a while, but it disappeared quite dramatically when I was around 5 or 6, when my dad's family restaurant went out of business.

And, boy, has that story done a number on me. I'm forever feeling like I vacillate between being my mom, forced to work a boring, underpaying job, and being my dad, unemployed but free. To be fair to my dad, he wasn't always unemployed. He was self-employed and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. 

I never knew what to tell people when they asked what he did for a living. He used to run and own the restaurant his dad built. He worked with a neighbor laying cables for computers. He bought a house downtown and flipped it with a couple of friends and made a lot of money on that. I remember us getting nice things around that time. He bought some condos and a house to rent out and became a landlord. He invested in the stock market. And finally, when I was 19, he bought a franchise and became a dental equipment repairman. And my mom almost left him when he bought it. 

She did leave him later and money was a big reason for that. She wanted someone with a stable, well-paid job. When the restaurant went under and he didn't immediately go get a job, any job, she felt like he wasn't willing to do whatever was necessary to take care of his family, that he wasn't being a "real man." So she felt like she had to earn money and she got a job as a secretary, part-time. That turned into her full-time job for the next 30 years. 

Meanwhile, he felt like they had enough money to be ok and he was working, just not in a typical job. I remember them fighting about it and my mom begging him to go get a job at Taco Bell. I loved and idolized my dad when I was a kid so I tended to take his side, listening in on their fights behind my closed bedroom door. But I also loved my mom and think I took on a lot of her perspective about money. Maybe my career trajectory, or lack thereof, is some kind of twisted way to honor both of my parents, to make them both right.

Well, I've written a book. Money seems to be a wellspring of stories and ideas for me. Who knew? Exploring it this month, through gaming and other things, does seem to be opening me up. It feels like I'm more willing to let go of my old ways of being with money, of perceiving money. To not be so caught up in my old stories. To be able to laugh about my and my mom's cheapness, my whole family's cheapness really. To see the gifts that being so cheap did bring me. And to be willing to let go of only focusing on being thrifty in my attempt to be free.

Maybe it's ok to pursue money. Not at the expense of everything else. Not in a way that is dirty or underhanded. But in a light-hearted, open, willing-to-be-supported way. At least that's my hope.