Money, love, and what we inherit
Photo credit: Booker T. Sessoms, 2022
Family lore has it that my maternal grandmother, born into a family of extraordinary wealth, turned her back on her parents at eighteen, took a job as a seamstress, and left that wealth behind for good. She cut her long hair short at the same time, for good measure, and when it came time to marry, chose a sailor of -- to her family -- questionable background (my maternal grandfather was apparently partially Roma, or something else that made him dark-haired and olive-skinned). In short, she rebelled.
The story, as it was told to me, was that there had been so little love and so much money in her childhood that she thereafter opted for things that signalled a lower class position: cheap furniture, plastic jewellery, skimping on the meterage for the colourful dresses she made for herself out of leftover polyester fabric. I observed these latter details myself, just as I watched her laugh hysterically whenever her mother’s funeral came up in conversation. Whatever the truth about the role of money in this equation, it was clear that something traumatising had happened when she was a child.
I have always believed that my fear of the corrupting power of money comes, at least in part, from this family history.
I am not blind to the privilege inherent in that fear. I have never truly lacked anything essential. Even in the years when my parents were cash-poor, we lived in a family-owned seven-bedroom apartment. More to the point, though we during those years regularly had potatoes (and little else) or plain pasta for dinner, we ate, went to school, and were warm, clothed, and loved. (The financial strain of those years left a different scar: I also fear having too little. I will write about that another day.)
To be honest, I don’t think it is entirely irrational to be wary of the insensitivity that can accompany having more than one needs. A quick look through the recently released Epstein files makes it clear that people with too much money can come to believe they are above law, order, and basic human decency. The callous dismissal of other people’s pain is as disturbing as it is unsurprising. We have spent more than a century building toward a version of liberal (in the European sense) capitalism that values money over people, every day of the week.
I don’t know how to say this in a way that doesn’t sound pompous, so I won’t try. As a thought experiment, though, examine your assumptions the next time someone asks you for money on the metro or the street. Do you think of them as lazy? Do you hold them solely responsible for their poverty? Do you feel anger at them for “making” you feel uncomfortable about your refusal to give? Many people with money to give feel some combination of the above. I know those are my own knee-jerk reactions, until I remind myself of the facts: I did nothing to deserve the position I was born into. And whether I share my wealth or not, I will sleep in a bed tonight.
What I am trying to say is this: we are all somewhere on a spectrum from dirt poor to Epstein-level unethical. He may have been abnormally abhorrent, but what nature created, money made infinitely worse.
The irony of my grandmother’s life is that I am not sure she found more genuine affection in the life she chose for herself. As a girl, I rejected the strict gender roles in my grandparents’ marriage -- not because I understood her unhappiness, but because I, too, had to do the dishes while my brother did not. When I think of her now, I remember a kind of clenched-teeth grit that, decades later, I interpret as someone who did not really want to be a homemaker at all. In a warped way, she bequeathed me both a deep desire to challenge gender inequality and a fear of money-as-worth that has at least pushed me to look for the real thing: love.
