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I rebelled. While my parents are the most financially cautious and responsible people you would ever meet, I have taken a different path and paid the price - or as my kids can attest-- continue to pay the price.
What I don't know is if my rebellion was about their cautious financial nature or whether the rebellion was more about the complex system known as our family dynamics.
Did I rebel to rebel?
If my parents had been business owners and risk-takers would I have become the financially cautious one?-Or is my DNA wired to take financial risks?
It's complicated. I just know that the money messages I got as a child culminated in a rejection of my parents approach to finances.
What I know is that I got sick and tired of everything about everything being tied to money in our house. Money was always in the room and it was oppressive.
There were judgments of how others spent their money. There were warnings about potential doom. Another child would have taken those messages to heart and adopted them as their values and beliefs to continue in their adult life.
Not me, I didn't want to embrace their values: I wanted to be free of them. I wanted a life when money was not the number one topic to all daily conversations.
Early memory,age four: my mother hiding something she bought in the closet and making me promise not to tell me dad she bought it.
Early memory, age five: my dad giving me a $1.00 to go to the Saturday afternoon movie and instructing me to bring back 75 cents in change. I understood the instructions but the older kids who I was going to the movie with talked me in to spending the 75 cents at Rose's Five and Dime store.
His fury and the punishment that followed were harsh. I think that was the day I came to understand the concept of injustice.
Early Memory:we were the first family in the neighborhood to have a clothes dryer.
Early Memory:we were one of the first families to have a dish washer.
Teenage memory: my mother driving to three different stores to go grocery shopping to get the best price on every item.
Teenage memory: my mother constantly telling me that money didn't grow on trees.
Teenage memory: my mother refusing to let me buy John Meyers and Villager Skirt and matching sweater outfits because she didn't believe in buying labels. She had a seamstress sew a home-made version of those A-line skirts. My mom knit the matching sweater. She was delighted. I was mortified.
Teenage memory: my dad paying for my college education no questions asked- I didn't have to take any loans nor did I have to have summer jobs. A gift I began appreciating the day I got my first paycheck as a TV reporter in Richmond, Virginia.
Recent memory:my parents always being there for me when I stumbled.
But growing up I felt financially suffocated. What I clearly remember thinking at the time was if money was so tight then do something about it: Get a different job, live in a different house, get a second job -- just do something so that the lack of money wasn't always the topic of conversation.
I knew my dad had the potential to make a lot more money. He was psychologist who worked for the state and I knew that if he went into private practice he would make a lot more money.
He was not interested. He liked his 9-5 hours, his state pension, and the relatively stress free world he lived as a state employee.My dad was never interested in material things.
I was interested in making money, stuff, and status.
My mom worked when I was young- she had a ballet school in the afternoons but by the time I was 15 and she was 40, she had retired. I didn't think that was a smart financial move. In fact, I distinctly remember encouraging her to get a job so we wouldn't always be talking about money.
She wasn't interested in working part time. She would rather go from grocery store to grocery rejecting the 19 cents for two pounds of bananas because she remembered they were selling for 18 cents for two pounds at the other store. A penny saved....
Money may have been tight but not tight enough that she would get a job to make it easier. And from those observations, my beliefs were formed. I decided that I didn't want to be financially stuck. I wanted a life where
