A Long Preamble — there will be Boots!

I’m going to try telling you a long story in order to tell you a short one — some of my dissatisfaction with my blog recently is that I so often abandon the stories I want to tell for lack of time. I’m hoping to find or make room for occasional more exploratory, lengthy posts, even if I then end up posting less often.

Before I start, though, I’ll offer you a carrot. I’m going to tell the long story now, but the short story will appear within days and it will include pictures of NEW BOOTS. So please, patience?

More properly, what I’m telling isn’t so much a story as a lengthy preamble. To set the stage for something that happened this Christmas, I feel as if I need to go all the way back to my childhood and explain some things about me and money. Just as Lisa over at Privilege is self-reflexive about her High-WASP upbringing, I know that many of my behavioural patterns were set long ago and I think it’s worth tracing those roots.

I’ve told you before that I’m the oldest of twelve children (ten natural, two adopted) in a working/middle class family — my father was a Public Servant, a tradesman (chef, actually) who worked his way up to a supervisory/administrative position; my mother taught elementary school for a few years before staying at home to raise us. Single modest income, very large family, my parents did a great job of keeping us well fed and well clothed frugally — as the oldest, I would get new clothes more than my siblings who relied on hand-me-downs, but all of us wore second-hand often, either from church rummage sales or from helpful friends. Regular cow’s-milk-in-a-carton was something I only had at my grandma’s and I considered it a treat — at home, we mixed powdered milk with water, and I swear, there is really nothing you can do to make that taste good, nothing! We did use canned milk — for tea, for baking, for sauces — and when it went on sale as a loss leader at the local grocery store, my sibs and I would be charged with taking the “7 for a dollar” through the checkout, to get around the one per order restriction and load up. We did the same for margarine — although my mother couldn’t stomach the stuff and always had her own private stash of butter (which, interestingly, I never thought of resenting, never even thought of dipping into on the sly — it was sacrosanct, and it seemed obvious that she was entitled beyond question).

My dad occasionally retold a story of an evening when I was 3 or 4 and my grandparents were going to babysit myself, my two younger brothers, and my little sister. Cleaning up a bit before heading out to the movies, Dad threw some papers into the fire, realizing too late that he’d caught up the two-dollar bill that was going to pay for the evening’s entertainment. They settled for a walk on their own instead, having emptied the coffers.

So given that they were operating such a tight ship, money-wise, my parents were very observant about how we spent any money that came our way. Very observant. Very strict. If, for example, we found a pop bottle on the way home, we were not to cash it in, as our neighbourhood and school friends would do, for two cents’ worth of candy at the corner store. We tried this once, explaining to our mom that the owner wouldn’t redeem bottles for cash, only for goods, and we got in trouble. Next time, she insisted, we should ask for something useful, a packet of seeds, for example, which she’d noticed they stocked. (In case that you think the redemption of pop bottles is an odd or esoteric item to include in a discussion of money, you’ve never been part of a family whose patriarch would brake and pull over if he saw a bottle that needed to be retrieved; you’ve probably never piled up cases of bottles into an old wagon and lugged them back to a depot for cash, either.)

We did occasionally get an allowance, depending on what books mom had been borrowing from the library, what child-care methods she was trying out (Cheaper by the Dozen had a noticeable influence!) — again, sensible spending was the watchword, and I remember stocking up on stationery at the local Woolworth’s — amazing what you could buy for a quarter “back,” as the kids say, “in the day.” But rather than rely on an allowance, I started baby-sitting for cash somewhere around 11 or 12 (not surprisingly, I was very competent with little ones, even at that age), and also had a paper route. The summer I turned 14, I picked strawberries, then raspberries, then beans, then blueberries, and my siblings and I did more of that over the next several summers, banking some of the money individually, but also pooling our resources to contribute to a family tent-trailer and a boat. Also starting when I was 14, I started working as a page in the children’s department of our municipal library — $1.15 an hour, an amazing sum! I saved up, that year, for a flight to England to visit my other grandma.

Even with this money I earned on my own, though, my parents continued to exercise strict control. They had a formula for our earnings: a third for spending; a third for banking; and a third for family. For several months in high school, in fact, I stopped by their bank once a month to pay fifty dollars against their mortgage. From the perspective of 2010, this sounds unlikely, but readers who are my contemporaries will probably note that it was an unusual expectation at the time as well. I don’t remember ever resenting it, though, and I think I even prided myself on my contributions. What I did mind was that they would ever comment on how I spent the third that was my pocket money. There was so much control in that household that earning my own money, paying my own way, having things I didn’t have to ask for, sometimes even things I would keep hidden, was very important.

This attitude towards money, the equation of earning with independence, the refusal to relinquish that independence, may have had something to do with my dropping out of university the first time round, in my second year. I had a part-time job after hours in the veterinary clinic of a family friend — 30 hours a week. Since I lived at home and had earned scholarships to cover my tuition, I could have managed without the job. Having it, though, allowed me to buy and maintain my beloved Sunbeam Imp — more independence! — but the twice-daily 45-minute drive, the long work hours all eventually proved too much competition with classes and I finally gave up school and got a full-time clerical position. I moved from one job to another, working my way to a better and better pay cheque and when Pater and I married, I was the one with the chequing account and the credit rating; he finished his B.Sc. and I kept bringing home the proverbial bacon. When we switched roles so that I could stay home with our first daughter, I was insistent that I manage the money and relieved that he hadn’t the slightest interest in taking over. Not earning my own funds was perhaps the most difficult part of being a stay-at-home mom, even though Pater was loud and clear about believing that my work was as valuable as his, that I had earned an equal share of his income. Administering the bank accounts at least let me hang on to that sense of independence that was so important, even though I would occasionally feel like a fraud at it. I was much happier when I started building my piano/music theory studio and again having independently-earned funds.

All of which is to say, this lengthy preamble, that we have always deposited any individual earnings into our joint accounts and that I have always been the one to keep track of what goes in and what comes out of those accounts. Pater is not one of those men who like his toys; he’s not keen on shopping; and his idea of money management used to be to take out $50 and then manage until three days after spending it all before getting out another $50. He trusts me to be responsible with our money, and he doesn’t say too much about the new pairs of shoes. I used to be meticulous about my chequebook ledger, recording all deposits, making note of each cheque, balancing the book at the end of each month when the bank statement arrived. I did that month after month for decades and now, of course, it’s a thing of the past. Instead, ever since a bundle of erroneous charges totalling $800 went through my MasterCard a few years ago, I take a minute each morning to check my statement on line. This works very well for feeling secure about credit card fraud, but I have to tell you: it takes the surprise out of the Christmas gifts!

Which is where my long preamble ends. Next post, the short story and the boots. I’ll try not to keep you waiting too long . . . Saturday, perhaps?