When you found out people lived better or worse than you.
June 30, 2024 2:21 PM Subscribe
When did you realize some folk were better or worse off than you. As a child I mean.
I discovered it when I was about 8 or 9 years old. That's when you start getting invited to friends houses for sleepovers, or just maybe to play in their backyard on a weekend. Before that I was surrounded by friends who lived in the same housing development as I. Lower middle class. We weren't poor.
But as I started making friends outside my immediate close circle of friends at home, I could not help but notice very different living conditions. Some lived in brick ranch style homes with big glass picture windows. Or they had wall to wall plush carpeting. One friend's kitchen was matching appliances in avocado color. And an oven built into a wall. I was dumbfounded by this. The friends didn't give it a second thought. They probably assumed this is just how people live. On high school one friend had a live in housekeeper. His parents were both dentists, but sadly liked their cocktails a bit too much. So tell me when did it occured to you that you were better or less well off than your friends.
I discovered it when I was about 8 or 9 years old. That's when you start getting invited to friends houses for sleepovers, or just maybe to play in their backyard on a weekend. Before that I was surrounded by friends who lived in the same housing development as I. Lower middle class. We weren't poor.
But as I started making friends outside my immediate close circle of friends at home, I could not help but notice very different living conditions. Some lived in brick ranch style homes with big glass picture windows. Or they had wall to wall plush carpeting. One friend's kitchen was matching appliances in avocado color. And an oven built into a wall. I was dumbfounded by this. The friends didn't give it a second thought. They probably assumed this is just how people live. On high school one friend had a live in housekeeper. His parents were both dentists, but sadly liked their cocktails a bit too much. So tell me when did it occured to you that you were better or less well off than your friends.
Kindergarten? 4 or 5 years old. Going to kids houses for birthday parties. My parents just didn't have it together enough to do things like a cake and present or parties.
Then getting to 2-4 grade and realizing kids had parents took them on family vacations at school breaks. You could GO to these places you heard about. It never occured to me.
Going over friends house and they were served food at supper or a snack. Like a parent just gave them a plate of food they had made - the kid had to do nothing.
Seeing lunches that a mom packed. I remember being in the 2nd grade with no food and no money feeling so hungry at the lunch table. I had a lot of time to observe other people's lunches.
There was a girl whose mother CUT an orange for her, then wrapped in aluminum foil, THEN put it in a baggie.
I had the same pair of pants to wear every day and other kids had a bunch of clothes.
When I was in the 3rd grade remember some kid talking about his mom folding his clean clothes and then putting them in his drawers. I was like "come on, your mother does your laundry, folds them and then puts them away in your drawers. Ya right." It seemed to outrageous.
Luckily it seemed like a real boon. I got to wear friends clothes and go on cool vacations/movies/rollerskating on my friends' parents dime. I never felt unlucky about it. Just felt lucky I had some rich friends that let me do cool things with them.
posted by ReluctantViking at 3:07 PM on June 30 [6 favorites]
Then getting to 2-4 grade and realizing kids had parents took them on family vacations at school breaks. You could GO to these places you heard about. It never occured to me.
Going over friends house and they were served food at supper or a snack. Like a parent just gave them a plate of food they had made - the kid had to do nothing.
Seeing lunches that a mom packed. I remember being in the 2nd grade with no food and no money feeling so hungry at the lunch table. I had a lot of time to observe other people's lunches.
There was a girl whose mother CUT an orange for her, then wrapped in aluminum foil, THEN put it in a baggie.
I had the same pair of pants to wear every day and other kids had a bunch of clothes.
When I was in the 3rd grade remember some kid talking about his mom folding his clean clothes and then putting them in his drawers. I was like "come on, your mother does your laundry, folds them and then puts them away in your drawers. Ya right." It seemed to outrageous.
Luckily it seemed like a real boon. I got to wear friends clothes and go on cool vacations/movies/rollerskating on my friends' parents dime. I never felt unlucky about it. Just felt lucky I had some rich friends that let me do cool things with them.
posted by ReluctantViking at 3:07 PM on June 30 [6 favorites]
Once my parents split up in 1977, I never lived in a proper house again until I bought one at 32. We had to move to different apartments every year. So starting in about 4th grade, I considered anyone whose parents owned a house rich. Split level, more rooms than people, multiple working cars … fancy!
posted by caviar2d2 at 3:30 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]
posted by caviar2d2 at 3:30 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]
Almost immediately that I can recall. Mid 80s, I would have been a toddler. San Antonio Texas and visiting family in Houston. Mom is from money, dad is from solidly mid century middle class to lower class. My family is made up primarily of musicians - mom and dad are both flute players, dad plays piano and composes, both big singers active in temple choir, lead tenor and lead alto. Mom has a collection of wind instruments, ranging from obscure things picked up during childhood world travels to a really fancy high quality silver piccolo.
She made arrangements when I was in preschool and early elementary to bring her collection in to school and show them to all the kids and let them mess around with the less precious ones. She played short pieces on her beautiful flute and showed how the rest of them sounded. Fan favorite was always the big bamboo sheng, a type of mouth organ that, when played unskillfully, makes a truly incredible honk. Anyway, it was a real treat for the kids and everyone always had fun. But it was immediately clear to me that Mom’s instruments were special. Other kids had their parents come do activities, like one dad brought a setup to help everyone plant seeds in little pots, and another mom helped us bake hamentaschen (the kids mostly picked fillings and spooned them in), we did tissue paper crafts for fiesta with families from the primarily Texican community center across the steeet, but nobody else had a parent who brought a big world spanning priceless collection of things and let a bunch of four year olds get their sticky fingers and spit all over them for a couple hours.
Other people had awesome parents and big houses and horses and stuff (Texas) but my house had a bunch of fancy stuff in it. We could touch it all and none of it was off limits as long as we asked first, we never had a pristine living room where nobody went, but we had silver and china and crystal for special occasions and other fancy stuff that we actually used, and I knew that was unusual. Not only did we have nice things, we used them, and Mom shared them with everyone, and it wasn’t too big of a deal if something broke or got stained because we could afford a replacement or someone else in the extended family had inherited the even more irreplaceable things.
It was clear to me from about four or so that other houses weren’t like mine. My neighbors across the street had a great house full of toys and comfy couches but they ate off plastic dishes and their grandma lived with them. My brother’s best friend lived in an apartment with a single mom and he would come to our house and exclaim about the space and playing in our backyard and be, to my toddler mind, absurdly grateful about dinner or snacks or our cable tv. He explained that he simply didn’t have that stuff, his mom couldn’t afford it. I didn’t know where the money in my family came from but I knew we had enough and a lot of people we liked didn’t.
But my grandparents, aunt and uncle in Houston? Hooboy. 80s business boom money plus old inherited NYC wealth mixed with Houstonian city cowboy swagger? Their houses were full of untouchable stuff. Crystal figurines and original art, horribly uncomfortable trendy furniture, pools and hot tubs. Plenty of white carpets and electronics and instruments for show, not play, and fancy cars with tiny back seats I had to squish into even as a tiny five year old. Grandma’s old money was a lot better for me because, like Mom, she was fine with me playing with and touching fancy stuff as long as I asked and was careful. Around about seven years old I definitely knew that there were different types of rich people. My grandparents on my mom’s side were way more rich than my uncle, because even though my uncle’s house was bigger and shinier and full of way more stuff I wasn’t allowed to touch, my grandparents’ stuff was older and prettier and better made, able to withstand use. They did have a lot of things in places I couldn’t reach, like locked curio cabinets and art high up on walls. And then there were even richer people than them, and I didn’t know any of those people but they lived in LA and New York and Paris, obviously.
I knew that most people didn’t have the things my family did younger than that, though. We did a lot of charity stuff with temple, Mom and Dad were very active in Brotherhood and Sisterhood. So they brought me a bunch of places doing things to raise money for different causes, and also to help in different community centers and shelters and soup kitchen type spots. I was always full of questions and they did their best to answer, so I had a clear idea that some people didn’t have homes, or couldn’t afford to buy food, or didn’t have parents, or couldn’t buy shoes, or whatever it was. Most of our friends were less well-off but still would have been middle class, though we were on the edge of the city and were very friendly with a bunch of rural folks too, who I’m sure ranged from secretly rich to destitute but living off chickens and the land.
As a young adult my privilege definitely bit me in the ass on more than one occasion. I am always offering to pay for stuff, give things to people, get tickets, etc, because I know other people don’t have the money. And because it was never an issue to do this when I was little, it took a lot of work to understand that this was insulting or presumptuous or dangerous when I was someone’s peer or otherwise an adult speaking to another adult. Throwing money around is apparently a great way to silently declare superiority and authority, which I truly did not get until my mid twenties. I got that money was power, but I didn’t get that people who don’t have money can be hurt when given money, because of that implication that the other person has so much money/power that it wouldn’t even matter to them to give some away. I love love love to give gifts, and I love to make gifts, and it turns out most people see gifts as transactional, which is not the case for me at all. So when I was little and Mom was bringing her cool instruments into my kindergarten class, and my schoolmates went home to tell their parents about this, their parents were going “oh shit Mizu’s mom did something really fancy, now I have to take time off work/spend a bunch/do something really impressive”. My brother’s friend who came over to watch our cable tv, his mom apparently never came over for dinner because she felt ashamed. My neighbors across the street invited me over to decorate for Christmas because they felt like they owed my family for their kids tearing up our backyard. And it goes on.
posted by Mizu at 3:32 PM on June 30 [8 favorites]
She made arrangements when I was in preschool and early elementary to bring her collection in to school and show them to all the kids and let them mess around with the less precious ones. She played short pieces on her beautiful flute and showed how the rest of them sounded. Fan favorite was always the big bamboo sheng, a type of mouth organ that, when played unskillfully, makes a truly incredible honk. Anyway, it was a real treat for the kids and everyone always had fun. But it was immediately clear to me that Mom’s instruments were special. Other kids had their parents come do activities, like one dad brought a setup to help everyone plant seeds in little pots, and another mom helped us bake hamentaschen (the kids mostly picked fillings and spooned them in), we did tissue paper crafts for fiesta with families from the primarily Texican community center across the steeet, but nobody else had a parent who brought a big world spanning priceless collection of things and let a bunch of four year olds get their sticky fingers and spit all over them for a couple hours.
Other people had awesome parents and big houses and horses and stuff (Texas) but my house had a bunch of fancy stuff in it. We could touch it all and none of it was off limits as long as we asked first, we never had a pristine living room where nobody went, but we had silver and china and crystal for special occasions and other fancy stuff that we actually used, and I knew that was unusual. Not only did we have nice things, we used them, and Mom shared them with everyone, and it wasn’t too big of a deal if something broke or got stained because we could afford a replacement or someone else in the extended family had inherited the even more irreplaceable things.
It was clear to me from about four or so that other houses weren’t like mine. My neighbors across the street had a great house full of toys and comfy couches but they ate off plastic dishes and their grandma lived with them. My brother’s best friend lived in an apartment with a single mom and he would come to our house and exclaim about the space and playing in our backyard and be, to my toddler mind, absurdly grateful about dinner or snacks or our cable tv. He explained that he simply didn’t have that stuff, his mom couldn’t afford it. I didn’t know where the money in my family came from but I knew we had enough and a lot of people we liked didn’t.
But my grandparents, aunt and uncle in Houston? Hooboy. 80s business boom money plus old inherited NYC wealth mixed with Houstonian city cowboy swagger? Their houses were full of untouchable stuff. Crystal figurines and original art, horribly uncomfortable trendy furniture, pools and hot tubs. Plenty of white carpets and electronics and instruments for show, not play, and fancy cars with tiny back seats I had to squish into even as a tiny five year old. Grandma’s old money was a lot better for me because, like Mom, she was fine with me playing with and touching fancy stuff as long as I asked and was careful. Around about seven years old I definitely knew that there were different types of rich people. My grandparents on my mom’s side were way more rich than my uncle, because even though my uncle’s house was bigger and shinier and full of way more stuff I wasn’t allowed to touch, my grandparents’ stuff was older and prettier and better made, able to withstand use. They did have a lot of things in places I couldn’t reach, like locked curio cabinets and art high up on walls. And then there were even richer people than them, and I didn’t know any of those people but they lived in LA and New York and Paris, obviously.
I knew that most people didn’t have the things my family did younger than that, though. We did a lot of charity stuff with temple, Mom and Dad were very active in Brotherhood and Sisterhood. So they brought me a bunch of places doing things to raise money for different causes, and also to help in different community centers and shelters and soup kitchen type spots. I was always full of questions and they did their best to answer, so I had a clear idea that some people didn’t have homes, or couldn’t afford to buy food, or didn’t have parents, or couldn’t buy shoes, or whatever it was. Most of our friends were less well-off but still would have been middle class, though we were on the edge of the city and were very friendly with a bunch of rural folks too, who I’m sure ranged from secretly rich to destitute but living off chickens and the land.
As a young adult my privilege definitely bit me in the ass on more than one occasion. I am always offering to pay for stuff, give things to people, get tickets, etc, because I know other people don’t have the money. And because it was never an issue to do this when I was little, it took a lot of work to understand that this was insulting or presumptuous or dangerous when I was someone’s peer or otherwise an adult speaking to another adult. Throwing money around is apparently a great way to silently declare superiority and authority, which I truly did not get until my mid twenties. I got that money was power, but I didn’t get that people who don’t have money can be hurt when given money, because of that implication that the other person has so much money/power that it wouldn’t even matter to them to give some away. I love love love to give gifts, and I love to make gifts, and it turns out most people see gifts as transactional, which is not the case for me at all. So when I was little and Mom was bringing her cool instruments into my kindergarten class, and my schoolmates went home to tell their parents about this, their parents were going “oh shit Mizu’s mom did something really fancy, now I have to take time off work/spend a bunch/do something really impressive”. My brother’s friend who came over to watch our cable tv, his mom apparently never came over for dinner because she felt ashamed. My neighbors across the street invited me over to decorate for Christmas because they felt like they owed my family for their kids tearing up our backyard. And it goes on.
posted by Mizu at 3:32 PM on June 30 [8 favorites]
I mean, similar to you - when I started having friends outside my parent's inner circle (which was all within the middle class, with some range). I remember being really overwhelmed by the first wealthy home I entered - and then jealous - it seemed so fun as a kid to run around a giant house - now those sort of home inspire revulsion in me.
posted by coffeecat at 3:39 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]
posted by coffeecat at 3:39 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: ReluctantViking. About the school lunches. My close friend in high school was a transplant from Mobile,Al. Her Dad was transferred to Buffalo for work. Worked at the bridge going to Canada. Immigration or something. Anyway her Mother was the most genteel woman. She would pack my friend Susan's lunch. Cut the crusts off the sandwich, and cut them in triangles...And foil wrap cream cheese stuffed celery.
posted by Czjewel at 3:48 PM on June 30
posted by Czjewel at 3:48 PM on June 30
I was nine when we moved from a working class neighbourhood to one that was more diverse. In my new school – a public school, like my previous one – there were some kids who talked about going skiing on winter weekends, horseback riding at other times. They weren't bragging, it was just normal chitchat about what they were up to. I didn't particularly want to do those things but it made me aware of the class divide.
posted by zadcat at 4:04 PM on June 30 [3 favorites]
posted by zadcat at 4:04 PM on June 30 [3 favorites]
I never realized until I went to college. I grew up on an affluent, very white island community in Puget Sound. I remember riding the bus home and kids being dropped off who I knew lived in mobile homes and in one case a single-wide trailer, but I never once connected that they had less money and were worse off economically than my family. It was completely just not a thought I ever had. My friends lived in houses like I did, maybe sometimes someone shared a bedroom with a sibling or their house was smaller. I was completely unaware of economic differences in my hometown for basically the whole 18 years I lived there.
posted by lizard music at 4:11 PM on June 30 [3 favorites]
posted by lizard music at 4:11 PM on June 30 [3 favorites]
In 2nd or 3rd grade, I remember being very surprised to learn that one of my classmates lived in an apartment building, rather than a private house. At that age, I was certain that only a poor family would raise children in an apartment.
posted by kickingtheground at 4:36 PM on June 30
posted by kickingtheground at 4:36 PM on June 30
In 2nd or 3rd grade, I remember being very surprised to learn that one of my classmates lived in an apartment building
I had a similar experience when I was about that age. I went to a friend's house and was very impressed that they lived in an apartment building. I must have associated it with the fancy buildings I saw in TV shows set in New York or LA.
posted by synecdoche at 4:40 PM on June 30
I had a similar experience when I was about that age. I went to a friend's house and was very impressed that they lived in an apartment building. I must have associated it with the fancy buildings I saw in TV shows set in New York or LA.
posted by synecdoche at 4:40 PM on June 30
Not specifically a financial difference but a related cultural difference: Freshman year of college I went to a museum with a classmate and saw him touching a painting. I regularly went to museums as a child and learned as a toddler not to touch the art. He'd never been to one so had no idea touching was forbidden.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 4:59 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 4:59 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]
I had some cousins from my father's troubled side of the family who would come stay with us for a week in the summers the years when I was probably 6-12. The first couple of years we picked them up at different apartments, and like another commenter said I didn't really know anyone who lived in apartments (but I lived in a college town so to me that was where young people lived before they had kids, not necessarily poor people) but that was also my first experience seeing visibly poor neighborhoods and that was my first glimpse into other lives.
Then one year we picked them up living in an old farm shed. They stayed two weeks that year, up until school was about to start, and we dropped them back at another relative's house that was in the same area as the shed, which I kind of got the impression my father might have arranged in the meantime.
My parents had some friends who I'm sure came from money anyway but also got rich in the 80s oil industry, and it was obvious even to my sheltered self that there was quite an escalation in fortunes, and even young and not hugely self aware I definitely noticed that we were periodically invited to participate in their newfound rich-people-lifestyle but my parents did not buy ski condos or small planes even though my dad worked with those people. I was in my older teens when that shit rapidly started falling apart and it was quite obvious who had overextended and who had not.
posted by Lyn Never at 5:08 PM on June 30
Then one year we picked them up living in an old farm shed. They stayed two weeks that year, up until school was about to start, and we dropped them back at another relative's house that was in the same area as the shed, which I kind of got the impression my father might have arranged in the meantime.
My parents had some friends who I'm sure came from money anyway but also got rich in the 80s oil industry, and it was obvious even to my sheltered self that there was quite an escalation in fortunes, and even young and not hugely self aware I definitely noticed that we were periodically invited to participate in their newfound rich-people-lifestyle but my parents did not buy ski condos or small planes even though my dad worked with those people. I was in my older teens when that shit rapidly started falling apart and it was quite obvious who had overextended and who had not.
posted by Lyn Never at 5:08 PM on June 30
We were taught to hide and be very quiet if the doorbell rang and it was just known that you never ask to invite friends over because the answer would always be no. I don't remember an age, I just noticed that I got invited to friends' houses and went through their front doors all the time and it was no big deal. Our house was hoarded.
There were other differences with other families, of course, money/lifestyle/family dynamic/cultural. But I don't ever remember having any friends or acquaintances who couldn't invite people over to their house.
posted by phunniemee at 5:09 PM on June 30 [2 favorites]
There were other differences with other families, of course, money/lifestyle/family dynamic/cultural. But I don't ever remember having any friends or acquaintances who couldn't invite people over to their house.
posted by phunniemee at 5:09 PM on June 30 [2 favorites]
As soon as i knew there were other people, I knew they were different from me
posted by rd45 at 5:12 PM on June 30 [3 favorites]
posted by rd45 at 5:12 PM on June 30 [3 favorites]
I was 4 when my parents rented the old house at a horse ranch. The landlord's kid had what seemed like every star wars action figure available at the time while I'd never seen the inside of a movie theatre and all my toys were were mismatches bought at garage sales or otherwise used hand me downs or home made.
posted by Mitheral at 6:57 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]
posted by Mitheral at 6:57 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]
By kindergarten or first grade, I was definitely aware that other kids had or did things that we didn't (video games, going to Disney World, etc). In my case, this was more about culture and parenting choices than money. I basically attributed all difference to kids at school being American.
posted by hoyland at 9:59 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]
posted by hoyland at 9:59 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]
I think I have never even had the sense that the children I made friends with lived the same kind of lives I did, not even to begin with. I remember two visits to other people's homes when I was really little and being fascinated by how different the styles and expectations were there. I swear I must have been not much more than a toddler at the time, because one experience was foundational. I remember the top of their toilet tank being not too high to see, when I was standing beside it because I was charmed by a decorative doll on top of it and the doll was about my chin level. Just as strong a memory was when the visit was over that day and we left to go home, when I realised that their home would continue to exist and things would continue to happen there, and these people who were not my family members would have their own lives and continuity. Everybody we didn't know existed the same way we did. In other words I got my first sense of object permanence when it came to strangers. It was such a major revelation that the memory of having it stayed with me.
The second thing I picked up from those two very early visits to other people's houses was that middle class/aspiring working class nice was a thing that other people did. My parents not so much. Decorative dolls on toilet tanks and things bought from the Sears catalogue was very much not them. Spare money went on books in our house.
My grandmother's home, meanwhile was a post Victorian period piece, as they had hit very hard times in the depression and everything they had and treasured came from their early secure years in the 1920's. Those were the three types of homes and lives that I knew about when I was still old enough that the tires on the bigger delivery trucks on Saint Catherine street were as tall as I was.
The first school I went to, when I was four years old, was the old Canning Street School, and it was going to be demolished, along with the slum surrounding it to put through railroad tracks. I didn't get to go to the homes of the other kids. I went there because it was the only pre-school program/daycare available at all, which was intended to help kids obtain kindergarten readiness; since I was already starting to read, I got taken there so that my mother could get a very brief time when she was not on duty with a little kid who required the constant vigilance that little kids do. It was a long walk and the program only lasted two hours, so my mother didn't have time to walk home again afterwards before she had to pick me up. My mother would hang out there talking with the other mothers, and perhaps getting to visit them. Coming home she would tell me about the lives and experiences they were having, which were what you would predict for black inner city mothers who were about to be evicted in a massive slum clearance. She liked hanging out with them. So at that point I knew that there were people who came from different cultures and had lived experiences that my mother found different enough from our own to comment on them. I was still at the stage of doing parallel play with my peers in prekindergarten, but she discussed their lives and their issues with me on the walk home. Naturally, being from a radical socialist background, her sympathies were with them.
By the time I was starting kindergarten I knew of four cultures - Respectable, ex-pat English working poor, which was my grandmother's culture; the bohemian culture I grew up in, with poverty chosen as a radical act; the life that went with the material culture I saw in the media, and on the street, which adopted middle class clothing and roles; and the lives of people who were othered by society. Now I didn't have the words to describe any of this. If I had attempted it, I would probably have described them as "Old people" "Ordinary" "Other people" and "Oppressed."
I started kindergarten late because we moved to a very nice rising middle class/ affluent neighbourhood after we were evicted from our downtown apartment so it could be demolished. The fight to avoid eviction kept us in the building long enough that my starting kindergarten had to be delayed. Kindergarten involved being with the kids of the comfortably off. Somewhere early on during my elementary school years, I picked up the idea that their parents were all doctors and lawyers, or even possibly trust fund families. (My mum discussed the Seymour family where the parents did bad things instead of working, but luckily there was money in the family so their relatives supported them.)
Likely a chunk of the idea that all the kids at school were privileged was something I picked up from my oldest sister when she discussed her peers. She was attending a private school on scholarship, alongside of the children of families that were quite well off. As a scholarship kid she felt many strata lower in economic status than they seemed to be. She was sent to that school because, while she had had the choice of all the private schools that gave scholarships, that one also provided uniforms for their scholarship students. Once she visited the home of one of her schoolmates, and that schoolmate gave her more than half a dozen brand new bathing suits, tags still on them. The family owned the factory. The level of affluence at home for them was pretty impressive, even if the school meals they all got to eat at St. George's were atrocious and they described them as baked bull-rushes.
The other thing that was notable was that many of the kids at her school and at mine kept kosher and went to Hebrew school. You couldn't miss the fact because on Jewish Holidays one third of my class was always absent. My school was largely pupils who lived in the very good neighbourhood, but being close enough to the urban core there were also some kids who got sent to our school, perhaps because their parents went to the extra trouble and effort to send them to a better school, or because they had been expelled permanently from other surrounding schools. I went to a good school but I never felt safe there because of the small number of violent little boys. There was a boy's home in our area, a small mansion that had been converted as a residential institution for boys who were delinquents, or from broken homes. Most years there were one or two boys in my class who came from severely troubled backgrounds, and we all knew they did because they would beat the hell out of other kids if they were triggered. The institution practiced brutal corporal punishment, so that if they weren't troubled when they went into it, they were two weeks later. Now I didn't know that, then. I just knew that a Weredale boy would rabbit punch you as soon as look at you, had a monumental chip on his shoulder, could not manage academics, excelled at sports and lived in group home. Knowing this was important because your chances of avoiding being beaten up were dependent on it. Any boy who performed at the top level in gym class should not be allowed within six feet if at all possible. The far side of the room was the optimal distance. Speaking to them was a seriously risky decision. Robbie punched me out and broke my glasses because when we were made to line up in the corridor outside the classroom I allowed myself to end up standing beside him.
There were a fair smattering of people from different cultures steadily showing up at my school. One boy came to us with only some English, and I remember a deputy of us pouncing on him because he had just come from China and could therefore read the Chinese characters on our yellow pencils! The poor lad was quite alarmed and taken aback, but rallied when he realised our intent was not hostile. The characters on the pencil turned out to say "Made in China," and we went away contented and pleased to have that cleared up. Most of the recent immigrant kids at my school were not from the inner city; they were rather, the children of immigrants with professional degrees who used that status to move to Canada. There was one very pretty girl, who was I think, from India. Another was a boy from Britain who came to his first day at school, in Montreal, in January wearing a pair of little grey shorts, despite the fact that it was probably at least twenty five degrees below freezing. I believe we also had some embassy kids, who likely stayed with us briefly before their parents were able to place them in the private schools.
But the main difference that I understood to exist between my family and everyone else's was that we were poor and they were not, something easy to perceive from the fact that my clothes were second hand and everyone else often dressed very much more nicely than we did. My parents did not have the concept that people judge you by your clothing, or if they did they figured that some skillful darning indicated that you were well looked after, as it had been from their own childhoods as urban poor. So we stood out, because even the poorest kids had parents who tried to dress them to look like rising middle class. My mother frequently was under-functioning, with winters where she was too sick to go out; when she was well she put her energies into completing her university degree. Her peer group was the student hippies who were not yet raising school aged children. Performative middle class motherhood was not her.
My father always emphasized the fact that we were poor. He was talking about working class solidarity and income inequality but we missed that fact because my parents' political choices made us appear to be so poor that we were struggling. My parents choose to give us as much freedom as they could. Even for our era we were extraordinarily free range. When I was seven or eight years old I once ended up over three miles from home, and had to turn up unexpectedly on my grandmother's doorstep to get home. Finding her place was a challenge given that this was in downtown Montreal and the buildings were tall enough to hide the streets behind them. What my parents intended was liberation from their own strictured up-bring. My grandmother had been a nanny during the 1920's. She thought it was appropriate for children to hold hands while walking six paces ahead of their parents on the path in the park on the Sunday walk. But what was intended to be freedom for us, looked to outsiders like neglect.
So the kids in our classrooms and playing in the same park with us appeared to be extremely different from us culturally, and we never looked or sounded like we fit in. In fact, when I started school I still had a vestige of the twin speak that I shared with my slightly older sister; I am told that many of my peers couldn't understand me, as I spoke with a pronounced English accent about three times faster than normal.
And this difference was compounded by the fact that as soon as I learned to read I dived into books and hid in them. I found school overwhelming and boring, and while I was by no means remotely brilliant, I strongly preferred to steadily work my way through every book in the kid's library over interacting with my peers or doing my school work. This meant that I was actually picking up culture from the fiction I was reading at least as much from my interactions with the kids in my class. One of my major influences was the entire oeuvre of the children's fantasy author, E. Nesbit. Since I was two beats behind when I did interact with the other kids in real life, I drew on the many often highly realistic interactions in those books as scripts to use. That worked just fine with my own siblings, but not so much with classmates. They were watching Flipper and the Munsters and the Partridge Family on TV, while I was immersed in the storybook culture of Edwardian England.
And finally to cap it all off, I was gender fluid at a time when that concept didn't exist. Usually when I interacted with my female peers, I was a boy; when I interacted with my male peers, I was a girl. My parents had no problem with the flip flopping roles. Why should they? They had no intention of putting me into starched white dresses, nor of condemning me if I cried. Having no concept of gender fluid either, they only felt vaguely that it was a good thing that I shouldn't feel confined by gender norms, the same way that they felt women shouldn't be reviled from wearing mini skirts and being sexually active, and that men shouldn't be reviled for growing their hair long. A lot of people had a hate on for women in trousers still, let alone those other two things. And yet by the time I was thirteen my mother had gotten her degree and then come to the conclusion that she was lesbian, and I was living with her in a kind of gay student commune in the McGill ghetto, where transvestite* guys came over to get advice on attempting cross dressing for the first time, and lesbians practiced a butch presentation. Incongruities in my gender presentation meant nothing at home, at a time when they were beyond incomprehensible at school and when I was visiting the homes of my schoolmates.
I actually missed seeing a whole lot of the differences between my family and other people's then. It never occurred to me that my father shouldering much of the domestic load was unusual. After all I had seen advertisements where a man would be wearing a frilly apron while he washed dishes. Of course the frilly little apron looked absurd. It was clearly meant to look absurd because it was entirely useless for keeping your clothes clean and dry even when it was depicted on a woman. And I mean, he did follow the role of being the taciturn Dad who seldom showed sympathy to his kids, but showed affection instead by buying them things - usually books, art materials, educational opportunities, or scrumptious things to eat.
I don't know where he would have found time for idle affection towards his kids, what with working rotating shifts as a labourer, coming home from doing the grocery shopping, then doing the housework, and grabbing some time to read his books. I certainly felt loved by him because I could see constant daily evidence of his commitment. Yes, he fit the male stereotype. To me as a child he had the massive shoulders of a labouring man. Any differences between him and the other kid's Dad was surely one of income, and the fact that we were working class, but they were either middle class or rich. They probably had a maid so their dad didn't have to do as much housework. After all our apartment came with a maid's room in it off the kitchen. That was why my older sister was able to get a bedroom of her own instead of sharing with my sister and me. Maids were normal for Other People.
My mother felt that the difference between us and all the other kids, was NOT that we were appallingly badly behaved, but rather that we were brilliant. Delusions may have been her strongest personality trait. But in my mind then as a child she best matched those lovely mothers in the E. Nesbit novels - loving, fun, protective against evil outsiders - but also chronically sick with some non specified disease that never ended in tragedy, but allowed the kids complete autonomy to discover Secret Gardens and to time travel.
I don't remember even trying to be like the other kids. I wouldn't have known where to begin if I had. Instead my childhood ambitions were bent on finding those Secret Gardens, and being like kids in books. I wanted to sail boats on the Norfolk Broads and ride a pony on the Yorkshire moors. I wanted to sneak through enemy lines while pretending to be out looking for a cow, and I wanted to find a magic ring. And I did find those Secret Gardens and magical worlds when exploring lanes, on long afternoons out of school, or when I got to reveling in the green of the parks and watching the carp swimming in the cool of the fish pond under the trees. I feel like I grew up in the most beautiful place on earth and that I was having adventures. But then, I suppose a great many people feel that way too, simply because childhood makes the place where you grow up seem beautiful and nostalgia obliterates its blemishes.
*This is what they called it themselves then. My apologies if the term is now not appropriate. They were culturally quite different from current transwomen, because they were adamant that they were men, did not express any desire for gender reassignment, but just want to dress as and be treated like women intermittently when they felt like it.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:48 AM on July 1 [4 favorites]
The second thing I picked up from those two very early visits to other people's houses was that middle class/aspiring working class nice was a thing that other people did. My parents not so much. Decorative dolls on toilet tanks and things bought from the Sears catalogue was very much not them. Spare money went on books in our house.
My grandmother's home, meanwhile was a post Victorian period piece, as they had hit very hard times in the depression and everything they had and treasured came from their early secure years in the 1920's. Those were the three types of homes and lives that I knew about when I was still old enough that the tires on the bigger delivery trucks on Saint Catherine street were as tall as I was.
The first school I went to, when I was four years old, was the old Canning Street School, and it was going to be demolished, along with the slum surrounding it to put through railroad tracks. I didn't get to go to the homes of the other kids. I went there because it was the only pre-school program/daycare available at all, which was intended to help kids obtain kindergarten readiness; since I was already starting to read, I got taken there so that my mother could get a very brief time when she was not on duty with a little kid who required the constant vigilance that little kids do. It was a long walk and the program only lasted two hours, so my mother didn't have time to walk home again afterwards before she had to pick me up. My mother would hang out there talking with the other mothers, and perhaps getting to visit them. Coming home she would tell me about the lives and experiences they were having, which were what you would predict for black inner city mothers who were about to be evicted in a massive slum clearance. She liked hanging out with them. So at that point I knew that there were people who came from different cultures and had lived experiences that my mother found different enough from our own to comment on them. I was still at the stage of doing parallel play with my peers in prekindergarten, but she discussed their lives and their issues with me on the walk home. Naturally, being from a radical socialist background, her sympathies were with them.
By the time I was starting kindergarten I knew of four cultures - Respectable, ex-pat English working poor, which was my grandmother's culture; the bohemian culture I grew up in, with poverty chosen as a radical act; the life that went with the material culture I saw in the media, and on the street, which adopted middle class clothing and roles; and the lives of people who were othered by society. Now I didn't have the words to describe any of this. If I had attempted it, I would probably have described them as "Old people" "Ordinary" "Other people" and "Oppressed."
I started kindergarten late because we moved to a very nice rising middle class/ affluent neighbourhood after we were evicted from our downtown apartment so it could be demolished. The fight to avoid eviction kept us in the building long enough that my starting kindergarten had to be delayed. Kindergarten involved being with the kids of the comfortably off. Somewhere early on during my elementary school years, I picked up the idea that their parents were all doctors and lawyers, or even possibly trust fund families. (My mum discussed the Seymour family where the parents did bad things instead of working, but luckily there was money in the family so their relatives supported them.)
Likely a chunk of the idea that all the kids at school were privileged was something I picked up from my oldest sister when she discussed her peers. She was attending a private school on scholarship, alongside of the children of families that were quite well off. As a scholarship kid she felt many strata lower in economic status than they seemed to be. She was sent to that school because, while she had had the choice of all the private schools that gave scholarships, that one also provided uniforms for their scholarship students. Once she visited the home of one of her schoolmates, and that schoolmate gave her more than half a dozen brand new bathing suits, tags still on them. The family owned the factory. The level of affluence at home for them was pretty impressive, even if the school meals they all got to eat at St. George's were atrocious and they described them as baked bull-rushes.
The other thing that was notable was that many of the kids at her school and at mine kept kosher and went to Hebrew school. You couldn't miss the fact because on Jewish Holidays one third of my class was always absent. My school was largely pupils who lived in the very good neighbourhood, but being close enough to the urban core there were also some kids who got sent to our school, perhaps because their parents went to the extra trouble and effort to send them to a better school, or because they had been expelled permanently from other surrounding schools. I went to a good school but I never felt safe there because of the small number of violent little boys. There was a boy's home in our area, a small mansion that had been converted as a residential institution for boys who were delinquents, or from broken homes. Most years there were one or two boys in my class who came from severely troubled backgrounds, and we all knew they did because they would beat the hell out of other kids if they were triggered. The institution practiced brutal corporal punishment, so that if they weren't troubled when they went into it, they were two weeks later. Now I didn't know that, then. I just knew that a Weredale boy would rabbit punch you as soon as look at you, had a monumental chip on his shoulder, could not manage academics, excelled at sports and lived in group home. Knowing this was important because your chances of avoiding being beaten up were dependent on it. Any boy who performed at the top level in gym class should not be allowed within six feet if at all possible. The far side of the room was the optimal distance. Speaking to them was a seriously risky decision. Robbie punched me out and broke my glasses because when we were made to line up in the corridor outside the classroom I allowed myself to end up standing beside him.
There were a fair smattering of people from different cultures steadily showing up at my school. One boy came to us with only some English, and I remember a deputy of us pouncing on him because he had just come from China and could therefore read the Chinese characters on our yellow pencils! The poor lad was quite alarmed and taken aback, but rallied when he realised our intent was not hostile. The characters on the pencil turned out to say "Made in China," and we went away contented and pleased to have that cleared up. Most of the recent immigrant kids at my school were not from the inner city; they were rather, the children of immigrants with professional degrees who used that status to move to Canada. There was one very pretty girl, who was I think, from India. Another was a boy from Britain who came to his first day at school, in Montreal, in January wearing a pair of little grey shorts, despite the fact that it was probably at least twenty five degrees below freezing. I believe we also had some embassy kids, who likely stayed with us briefly before their parents were able to place them in the private schools.
But the main difference that I understood to exist between my family and everyone else's was that we were poor and they were not, something easy to perceive from the fact that my clothes were second hand and everyone else often dressed very much more nicely than we did. My parents did not have the concept that people judge you by your clothing, or if they did they figured that some skillful darning indicated that you were well looked after, as it had been from their own childhoods as urban poor. So we stood out, because even the poorest kids had parents who tried to dress them to look like rising middle class. My mother frequently was under-functioning, with winters where she was too sick to go out; when she was well she put her energies into completing her university degree. Her peer group was the student hippies who were not yet raising school aged children. Performative middle class motherhood was not her.
My father always emphasized the fact that we were poor. He was talking about working class solidarity and income inequality but we missed that fact because my parents' political choices made us appear to be so poor that we were struggling. My parents choose to give us as much freedom as they could. Even for our era we were extraordinarily free range. When I was seven or eight years old I once ended up over three miles from home, and had to turn up unexpectedly on my grandmother's doorstep to get home. Finding her place was a challenge given that this was in downtown Montreal and the buildings were tall enough to hide the streets behind them. What my parents intended was liberation from their own strictured up-bring. My grandmother had been a nanny during the 1920's. She thought it was appropriate for children to hold hands while walking six paces ahead of their parents on the path in the park on the Sunday walk. But what was intended to be freedom for us, looked to outsiders like neglect.
So the kids in our classrooms and playing in the same park with us appeared to be extremely different from us culturally, and we never looked or sounded like we fit in. In fact, when I started school I still had a vestige of the twin speak that I shared with my slightly older sister; I am told that many of my peers couldn't understand me, as I spoke with a pronounced English accent about three times faster than normal.
And this difference was compounded by the fact that as soon as I learned to read I dived into books and hid in them. I found school overwhelming and boring, and while I was by no means remotely brilliant, I strongly preferred to steadily work my way through every book in the kid's library over interacting with my peers or doing my school work. This meant that I was actually picking up culture from the fiction I was reading at least as much from my interactions with the kids in my class. One of my major influences was the entire oeuvre of the children's fantasy author, E. Nesbit. Since I was two beats behind when I did interact with the other kids in real life, I drew on the many often highly realistic interactions in those books as scripts to use. That worked just fine with my own siblings, but not so much with classmates. They were watching Flipper and the Munsters and the Partridge Family on TV, while I was immersed in the storybook culture of Edwardian England.
And finally to cap it all off, I was gender fluid at a time when that concept didn't exist. Usually when I interacted with my female peers, I was a boy; when I interacted with my male peers, I was a girl. My parents had no problem with the flip flopping roles. Why should they? They had no intention of putting me into starched white dresses, nor of condemning me if I cried. Having no concept of gender fluid either, they only felt vaguely that it was a good thing that I shouldn't feel confined by gender norms, the same way that they felt women shouldn't be reviled from wearing mini skirts and being sexually active, and that men shouldn't be reviled for growing their hair long. A lot of people had a hate on for women in trousers still, let alone those other two things. And yet by the time I was thirteen my mother had gotten her degree and then come to the conclusion that she was lesbian, and I was living with her in a kind of gay student commune in the McGill ghetto, where transvestite* guys came over to get advice on attempting cross dressing for the first time, and lesbians practiced a butch presentation. Incongruities in my gender presentation meant nothing at home, at a time when they were beyond incomprehensible at school and when I was visiting the homes of my schoolmates.
I actually missed seeing a whole lot of the differences between my family and other people's then. It never occurred to me that my father shouldering much of the domestic load was unusual. After all I had seen advertisements where a man would be wearing a frilly apron while he washed dishes. Of course the frilly little apron looked absurd. It was clearly meant to look absurd because it was entirely useless for keeping your clothes clean and dry even when it was depicted on a woman. And I mean, he did follow the role of being the taciturn Dad who seldom showed sympathy to his kids, but showed affection instead by buying them things - usually books, art materials, educational opportunities, or scrumptious things to eat.
I don't know where he would have found time for idle affection towards his kids, what with working rotating shifts as a labourer, coming home from doing the grocery shopping, then doing the housework, and grabbing some time to read his books. I certainly felt loved by him because I could see constant daily evidence of his commitment. Yes, he fit the male stereotype. To me as a child he had the massive shoulders of a labouring man. Any differences between him and the other kid's Dad was surely one of income, and the fact that we were working class, but they were either middle class or rich. They probably had a maid so their dad didn't have to do as much housework. After all our apartment came with a maid's room in it off the kitchen. That was why my older sister was able to get a bedroom of her own instead of sharing with my sister and me. Maids were normal for Other People.
My mother felt that the difference between us and all the other kids, was NOT that we were appallingly badly behaved, but rather that we were brilliant. Delusions may have been her strongest personality trait. But in my mind then as a child she best matched those lovely mothers in the E. Nesbit novels - loving, fun, protective against evil outsiders - but also chronically sick with some non specified disease that never ended in tragedy, but allowed the kids complete autonomy to discover Secret Gardens and to time travel.
I don't remember even trying to be like the other kids. I wouldn't have known where to begin if I had. Instead my childhood ambitions were bent on finding those Secret Gardens, and being like kids in books. I wanted to sail boats on the Norfolk Broads and ride a pony on the Yorkshire moors. I wanted to sneak through enemy lines while pretending to be out looking for a cow, and I wanted to find a magic ring. And I did find those Secret Gardens and magical worlds when exploring lanes, on long afternoons out of school, or when I got to reveling in the green of the parks and watching the carp swimming in the cool of the fish pond under the trees. I feel like I grew up in the most beautiful place on earth and that I was having adventures. But then, I suppose a great many people feel that way too, simply because childhood makes the place where you grow up seem beautiful and nostalgia obliterates its blemishes.
*This is what they called it themselves then. My apologies if the term is now not appropriate. They were culturally quite different from current transwomen, because they were adamant that they were men, did not express any desire for gender reassignment, but just want to dress as and be treated like women intermittently when they felt like it.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:48 AM on July 1 [4 favorites]
I don't remember feeling less rich than other people as a kid. I just thought that kids who had a lot of nice stuff, got to go to Burger King and whose parents gave them new toys when it wasn't Christmas or their birthday were "spoiled".
I was fortunate to have the basics I needed and my family made it seem like they were deliberately building our character by not buying us everything we wanted.
My dad also had a reputation for being cheap, so it never occurred to me that we were on a tight budget for a reason other than dad being tight plus the aforementioned character-building.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 3:27 PM on July 1
I was fortunate to have the basics I needed and my family made it seem like they were deliberately building our character by not buying us everything we wanted.
My dad also had a reputation for being cheap, so it never occurred to me that we were on a tight budget for a reason other than dad being tight plus the aforementioned character-building.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 3:27 PM on July 1
I was aware of this at a a pretty early age, like I lived in a rural area so it was a gamut from people who owned planes and had their own runways to people who lived in dirt shacks, with us in the middle, but my sister's young children went to my parents house and they were talking amongst themselves and said something like "they must be poor because their tv is really small" -, which we all found hilarious.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:31 AM on July 2
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:31 AM on July 2
I grew up with mom and stepfather (working class, blue collar) and spent summers in a different city with dad (middle class, business owner).
All of my friends and neighbours (10 months of the year) were poor. Most had only one parent, unemployed, living in subsidized housing and not enough food. That's who I compared myself to, so I thought we were fairly well-off.
I considered my dad "rich" and didn't know anyone like that anywhere, except maybe on TV. He had a jacuzzi!
It wasn't really until university that I started to realize the "correct" social location of both of my family homes.
University was also when I became aware of the things I hadn't had that my middle-class peers took for granted. Not material things but experiences and approaches to parenting - summer camps, travel, parents who read, music lessons, etc.
Then, later, parents who pay your tuition, contribute to a down payment or a wedding, offer career advice and connections, etc.
And now, much later, parents who can pay for their own care, leave you an inheritance instead of a financial mess, etc.
I'm still better off than many many people, just not the people I met in uni who became my lifelong friends.
posted by Frenchy67 at 10:03 AM on July 3 [1 favorite]
All of my friends and neighbours (10 months of the year) were poor. Most had only one parent, unemployed, living in subsidized housing and not enough food. That's who I compared myself to, so I thought we were fairly well-off.
I considered my dad "rich" and didn't know anyone like that anywhere, except maybe on TV. He had a jacuzzi!
It wasn't really until university that I started to realize the "correct" social location of both of my family homes.
University was also when I became aware of the things I hadn't had that my middle-class peers took for granted. Not material things but experiences and approaches to parenting - summer camps, travel, parents who read, music lessons, etc.
Then, later, parents who pay your tuition, contribute to a down payment or a wedding, offer career advice and connections, etc.
And now, much later, parents who can pay for their own care, leave you an inheritance instead of a financial mess, etc.
I'm still better off than many many people, just not the people I met in uni who became my lifelong friends.
posted by Frenchy67 at 10:03 AM on July 3 [1 favorite]
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posted by Daily Alice at 2:52 PM on June 30 [3 favorites]