Money

I was going to make a list of my erstwhile estate and who gets what, but the brevity of the list and the paucity of my bequeathments made me depressed, and I figured no one would want to read that anyway. I mean, really, who wants to get my books, journals and Victorian porn?

...

A friend emailed me and said she had similar feelings about her family and money. We both grew up working class women of color in California and now find ourselves in positions different from those of our parents. Rather than take direction from our families we are walking away from them, deliberately making different choices--and sometimes they see that as an indictment of them. Her mother is upset she won't take advice about buying a house; my dad tears up when I tell him he needs to plan for the future. Both events make us uncomfortable and slightly ashamed. It's funny, my friend said that we can write about race, sex and class, but we hardly write about money.

My sister was telling me about that new show on MTV about the dumb blonde socialites. She was so disgusted by it (yet captivated by its car-crash-like spectacle) I had to laugh when she said, Rich people really are stupid, aren't they?

There's class resentment in my sister's disgust, yes, but her feelings are also about money. (I know how unclear that thinking is and if I wasn't at the office, I'd clarify that.) These moronic girls have more money than they will know what to do with--and they will do nothing with it. (Ok, vast generalization, but point to a debutante who's done something good for society and I'll show you a Republican who belongs to the NAACP.)

For me, my sister and my college friend (a professor now on the west coast), money means ... what? For my sister, it probably means her kids will be able to go to college, they'll have access to a good job perhaps, and will achieve a comfortable level of stability. It's the dream of the middle class--stability and comfort. For my friend...I don't know. It could mean that house. For me, it means doing unto others.

Money--*significant* amounts of it--means redressing some things. Scholarships for poor black kids. Scholarships for single parents wanting to go back to school. Comprehensive sex education in our communities of color. Yes, it could also mean traveling a lot and making sure my dad has a nice pillow for his old age, but when I think about having lots and lots of money (and I do) I think about the women I see in the morning, walking their kids to the Catholic school a few blocks away. They come from the women's shelter down the street; it's housed in a tall square Baptist church and women, silent, battered and too young, yet too old-looking, walk their kids to school.

We stand next to each other at the bus stop--their hair wild, socks and tights not matching, I in my office shoes and coat. And I feel guilty because I have and they don't and they should and then I wonder why I'm not doing anything significant about it. Which, in my rambling way, brings me back to those Opt Out women. And I wonder if their compacency is really so different from mine.