4-minute read time.
Please enjoy this piece by my little brother.
As I was growing up, I considered myself a middle-class child; I had food and a home, and my mother and father each had a car. My sister and I lived comfortably with our parents, two cats, and, eventually, our dog. Sure, our house wasn’t the cleanest – there was sometimes so much on the dining room table that we couldn’t eat on it. But we had enough and didn’t live in complete filth. Our two cats eventually died, one cat before the divorce, one cat after, both of kidney-related complications, which is very common in cats of their age.
After the divorce, it was different. My father was still upper middle class, but for my mother, it was less obvious. She moved in with her “friend,” and my sister, our dog, and I went with her. When we were with this friend, we never wanted food or clothing, and everything was clean (my mom’s friend was a bit of a neat freak). Eventually, we left due to an issue with our dog and the friend’s dog fighting, and the “friendship” ending.
We moved to our Grafton duplex, and things didn’t take long to become messy. The kitchen and pantry had old food with maggots and flies, and sometimes food wasn’t always available to us, but my mom got a new car, so I thought we must still be financially okay. Soon I stopped getting as much clothing, which was not a huge issue to me. I didn’t really mind wearing overly large clothing because my mother’s explanation made sense, “You’ll grow into it.” What started being an issue was that by the time I had grown into the clothing, it would be stained or dirty or something else. Turns out living in a dirty house doesn’t lead to the cleanest clothing.
Once our time in Grafton was up, my mom bought a house in Worcester. She purchased a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar house, now valued at over four hundred thousand dollars. With that money, we must be middle class. Just because our house is a mess and we don’t always get good food or clothing doesn’t mean that we are poor. My mother chose not to work, and I still don’t truly understand why.
And that brings us to today. My grandfather on my mother’s side is funding a large part of my education. Thank god for him. My father and I are on good terms but are almost entirely financially separate. My mother gets over twenty-five thousand dollars in child support from my father, of which I see barely any, with my room and board for all but 4 months being part of my education, and in the four months I do stay with her, I get food and an air mattress. She doesn’t pay for my clothing or really anything for me. I get that she isn’t paying for my stuff; I’m nineteen, and I should be more independent now, but the money that is legally owed to me, meant to pay for my clothing, shoes, and food, is not being used on me. When I was living full-time in Worcester she spent less than one-hundred dollars a year on my clothing, now it is closer to five dollars, as she buys the occasional thrifted shirt.
I am a struggling student, and I feel like neither of my parents wants to or will contribute to my life, but I can’t bring it up to them. By all accounts, my father contributes twenty-five thousand dollars to me every year, so I can’t ask him for more because I should be getting the money he is already giving my mother. I have tried communicating my money issues with my mother, but that never ends well.
I don’t understand how my mother can survive. Twenty-five thousand dollars a year in child support, no job, and a nice sum inherited from her mother. I try to rationalize why we had to live that way, how we could live that way for this long, and how much longer she will be able to live. It will likely never make sense to me, at least not until my mother eventually passes away decades from now.
I take whatever job pays me best and is most convenient. And I try to save as much as possible, right now I’m saving about forty-five percent of what I earn, but I’m going to try to save more. I don’t want to be poor; I want to be comfortable, and I’m so tired of not knowing how my financial stability will change. I am scared my grandfather’s money will not be enough to pay off what I can’t get in loans, and I’m petrified that I will no longer be able to afford education. This fear has been with me for a long time, as soon as I realized we weren’t always getting food I was scared. Today, it manifests in the form of depression and severe anxiety, which are both influenced by other factors from my childhood.
