Daddy yelled
and Mommy cried
and new dresses appeared
A pattern
my young heart
vowed to break
Chose a man,
reticent in nature,
pursued a career
Then babies came
and I stayed home
and he withheld cash
Pendulum swings
left to right – money
holds the key to power
(Money first appeared here January, 2019. Image my own)
Anchored, no money –
lack has a way of turning
dreams into fool’s gold.
(Dug up this haiku from August 2015 for today’s prompts: Ragtag Community and Fandango both choosing ‘fool’. Image from personal collection.)
Daddy yelled
and Mommy cried
and new dresses appeared.
A pattern
my young heart
vowed to break.
Chose a man,
reticent in nature,
pursued a career.
Then babies came
and I stayed home
and he withheld cash.
Pendulum swings
left to right – money
holds the key to powers.
Patterns, it seems,
twist and morph,
leave me impoverished.
We are in the bank and I am waiting as Thor does his banking and stops to visit with the employees. He hugs one teller and another near me looks at me with a sorrowful expression. I don’t clue in until this happens three times, and then I realize the embrace is more intimate than I had thought. I run into the nearest washroom. Two women from the bank are present. “Did you know about this?” I ask. They indicate that they did and look at me with pity. “Is there more”, I ask? “Yes”, comes the reply. “He is doing drugs too.” “How do you know?” Panic grips at my heart. “He asked us if we knew anyone who deals in codeine.” I have no choice, I will have to leave him. Where will I go?
I awake from the dream in sobbing anguish, and then relief as I come to my senses. The dream had seemed so real, at least the emotional part. I know that feeling all too well.
Thor has an easier relationship with money than I do. He sees it simply as a tool, a means to an end. He seldom worries about it. “Feed the cat another canary” he will casually say before spending.
My experience is completely different. Money, I have learned is an instrument of power, and that power is abusive.
My mother’s first husband packed all their possessions into a moving van and left her with an empty house and even emptier pocketbook. She had four children to care for and no means of doing so. She married the first man who showed a willingness to take on her plight, and remained forever indebted to him, unable to free herself from the abuse that would follow. The power that he exerted over us was justified by the fact that he provided for us; he was the breadwinner. Money made him king.
I was sickened by how my father used money to control my mother. Until I was fifteen, he would not allow her to work outside the home. Just when she reached a breaking point, threatening to leave, he would buy her expensive clothes and take her on exotic trips. Her weakness angered me as much as his ploys. I hated that money reduced them to such ugliness. I vowed to live my life differently.
But of course, I didn’t.
When I married and had children, I chose to stay home, putting myself in a position of dependence. My husband reminded me of that frequently, never allowing me to spend money on myself or the children. If I wanted something, he would tell me, I had to earn it. I was trapped between my need to parent my children, and my desire to provide the better things in life for them. In the end, he moved me out, and abandoned us financially. Money was the weapon he always used against me.
My daughter now fights a similar battle. The father of her child, unwilling to take on responsibility, flaunts his new possessions in her face while she struggles to support the two of them. Money, again, is the root of this evil.
“(C)onsider formulating a new concept of money as a neutral quantity,” Derek Lin writes in The Tao of Joy Every Day. I would love to perceive money in a different way, free of the emotional charge it carries for me, but there have been too many painful associations for me to view it lightly.
I confess, when it comes to money, I still feel afraid.
I arrived home from school one day to find my mother sitting in a corner trembling, her face face blotched red and swollen from crying. “Mom?”
The eyes that stared back at me were distant. This was not my mother. I took stock of the situation. It was 3:15. My little sister would be home from school in half an hour. Dad would be home at 4:30 and expect dinner on the table. Nothing had been started yet. I dropped my books and got down to business.
“Mom. You need to talk to me. D is going to be home soon, and we have to get dinner on. What’s going on?”
She nodded slightly. “I can’t do it anymore. Your father……..” Her voice trailed off, but she didn’t need to say anything. I knew how brutal my father could be. I heard daily how stupid she was, and how she never cooked anything properly, even though that was her only job. I wanted her to leave him, too.
“I’ll do whatever I can, Mom. In two years, I can quit school, and get a job. I’ll support us.”
Was that a faint smile?
“We’ll make it work, Mom. We’ve got each other.”
Reaching for the pots and pans, I added, “Now what can we get started for dinner?” There would be hell to pay if dinner wasn’t on the table the moment my dad walked in.
* * *
At twelve years of age, I learned that money was what kept my mother in an abusive relationship. It never occurred to me that she had the option of getting a job; she was a stay at home mom. Five years later, we would go through a similar scenario, only then I was already living on my own, and had enough sense to get her to a lawyer. In the end, my father convinced her to stay.
Years later, I would find myself a stay at home mom, with a husband who controlled the purse strings. Like my mother, I felt powerless, and inferior. Unlike my mother, I left anyway. I braved poverty in order to find my worth. Nevertheless, I struggled, seldom able to give my children the material things they craved. I felt guilty, worthless, inadequate. After six years, I had a serious talk with God.
“God,” I said, “I want to make a difference in the world, but I can’t do it if I don’t even know where the next meal is coming from.”
I tried affirmations: All my needs are always met; there is enough for everyone.
Eventually, things turned around. Yet, my relationship with money has not yet healed. I want to be able to say the money’s the money, the way my new husband does. I want to be able to see money as a means to an end, and not the end of my means.
My attitude towards money still needs work, but I am ready for change.
(Image: empoweringparents.com)
One Woman's Quest 