I Thought I Grew Up Poor…
…but I didn’t. Financial abuse warped my perception.
It’s what my mother always told me. Sometimes I cringe at many tone-deaf statements I may have made throughout my life based upon my faulty premise of my socioeconomic level.
Things like talking about taking vacations abroad, or moving from New York City where everyone in my family owned their own house, to an affluent suburb in Connecticut, to all the years I spent at sleep-away camp, didn’t jive with my preface about growing up broke.
My mother used money to control me and I mistook that for poverty. She refused to buy me clothes from any place other than discount stores like Woolworth, Ames, and Zayre’s because she said spending money on kids was a waste of money. For herself, she had a second bedroom for her own upscale wardrobe.
We’d fly to a foreign country. She’d rent a condo. Hire a nanny, then disappear for days. If I wanted a souvenir, it wasn’t in the budget.
I was fortunate to attend private school, but for years I went hungry because she wouldn’t get food I could make for lunch, nor pay for school meals.
I had an allowance…of sorts. When I was in elementary school, I received ten dollars a week, in theory. On the weeks she remembered to give me cash, I ate lunch at school…
