Growing up, I didn’t think we were rich. Maybe that is how it is for most people who are, in fact, wealthy. In our small town, it was easy to recognize the people who had money: they lived in big, fancy houses and drove big, new cars, and attended the big, prestigious events. In retrospect, I’m not sure how fancy and prestigious you can get in a town of 2,000 people, but there were definitely people at the top, people at the bottom, and a whole lot of people in the middle.
That’s who we were, middle people.
Sure, my dad’s family owned thousands of acres of land and raised 3,000 cattle each year. But my dad worked 7 days a week in punishing weather conditions and was lucky to get a week off a year. (On Sundays he got up early to double feed the cattle before church.) Sure, we bought new Suburbans with a custom pink stripe on the side. But then we drove them for 10 years or 200,000 miles, whichever came first. (Later, we moved on to a new Sienna with the same pink stripe.) We rarely ate out; Dad said, Why go to a restaurant when your mom makes meals just as good or better? (There were also just four or five places to eat in town.) On trips, we ate from the Dollar Menu at McDonalds, and when Dad discovered $5 Little Caesar pizzas, that become the trip meal of choice. Our family vacations mostly consisted of driving to visit family in Michigan, Colorado and Washington. (We did go to Disney World once.)
I remember one summer when Dad did a “series” on our family values. We had devotions every day after lunch, and similar to Rechab giving a charge to his children to avoid drinking wine and living in houses, he gave us his rules to live by. He mentioned that if we wanted to, we could afford to buy a new vehicle every year, but he and Mom chose to give the money away instead. This did not leave much of an impression on me, mostly because buying a new vehicle every year seemed like the peak of foolishness. Why buy a new vehicle when the old one is working perfectly fine?
In retrospect, maybe I should have been more impressed. Over the years, I have become more aware of the wealth my dad’s family possessed. This became more evident when Dad died, and Mom suddenly had a lot of money, millions of dollars, on her hands. It became more evident when my paternal grandfather died, and the long process of selling the ranch began, the end result being the distribution of high seven-figure amounts to each of his five children.
I worked in high school and had a very, very, part-time job in a lab for a few years in college in addition to working summers, but I never used that money to pay for anything I actually needed. I got a scholarship that covered college tuition, but my parents covered the cost for student housing, my car, parking, and insurance. When I was home for three months looking for a job after my dietetic internship, I didn’t even consider offering to pay rent while I lived at home. Half of medical school was paid for with scholarships, but the other half was covered by Mom. When we moved to our current location, Mom bought our house with cash, and we’re in the process of paying her back.
And, to be honest, this seemed pretty unremarkable to me. Yes, I realized I was lucky to have my parents pay for my tuition, but the rest of it seemed par for the course. (Not the house thing, but it wasn’t surprising.) What are parents for, if not to help their kids out as they get started in life?
I am slowly realizing that the only way this can seem normal to me is because I have grown up as a rich person. Kind of how a fish does not think it is remarkable that it lives in water.
This realization has not happened due to an internal process, but rather because I married my husband, who I thought was a middle person like me. As it turns out, he may be a middle person, but growing up he was a middle person whose family was constantly flirting with the bottom.
My husband likes to remind me that he grew up in the ghetto. The nicer part of the ghetto, to be sure, but still a place where he learned early on how to distinguish the sound of gunshots from the sound of fireworks. In my husband’s mind, a dishwasher is a signifier of luxury. His parents had six kids, and between number two and three made the decision that his mom would stay at home with them- something that no doubt had a positive impact on their lives, but also significantly reduced their bottom line. When able to, the kids went to work, and portion of their paychecks went toward paying bills. I was astonished to learn that one of my sister-in-laws, who had gotten a full-ride scholarship in college, took out loans so she could give the money to her parents. Every child has a story of finding money missing from their bank account. This is treated as a matter of course – the bills needed to be paid.
As two people who both saw themselves as middle people (now- I think my husband would have seen himself as coming from the bottom earlier in his life), there have been moments where we learn things about each other that seem unfathomable. His sister’s college loans story, for me. My mom giving us $15,000 to buy a car when mine abruptly stopped working, for him. I was grateful, but not surprised; after all, she was going to do the same thing for my brother. That someone would have $15,000 available to gift was almost more than my husband could comprehend.
Two years out from fellowship, I make a very nice salary. My retirement accounts don’t have too much in them yet, but we’re starting to make up for lost time, and I don’t worry that we won’t have enough. I don’t think I’ll ever reach the level of wealth my grandfather or even my dad had, which is fine with me. I still think of myself as a middle person, although I joke with my husband that he married a rich wife.
And really, I guess I am.