Work it because you're worth it

A long post about money, work and worth.

I’ve always had a tricky relationship with the notion of work. Like all small words that do a lot of heavy lifting, it can mean so many things. I grew up in a house where hard work was the norm. My dad was absent quite a bit during my childhood because of work. My mum worked hard because my dad was absent quite a bit and we lived in a way not dissimilar to my grandparents’ generation, which meant no labour saving gadgets and a lot of manual labour.

My dad worked to earn money. My mum raised us and kept the house. I say kept house like she indulged in a little light dusting. She did not. She operated more like a one woman Swiss Army knife and the army that used them. Later, my mum went to work too, but she was also expected to keep going with the Swiss Army knife stuff at home. My dad’s work was always prioritised. It was a different time.

We were told that we had all these nice things because he went out and worked for us. The word grateful was used a fair bit. We were. I am. But gratitude can cover a lot of grey areas, like the fact that as a child you have no choice but to accept your lot. Luckily for me, child labour laws were robust during my childhood and sending me up a chimney aged four was no longer viable, but not being able to seize the means of production for whatever reason, left me fairly helpless. Having to be grateful for something I couldn’t change, had no control over and which ruled my life was, it turns out, quite a problematic set up for future me.

The older I get, the more I know that it was my mum’s work that kept the ship afloat. It was her unpaid, exhausting, unacknowledged work that allowed my dad to go and do a job that we all had to be grateful for. We were at the mercy of his beliefs about work and money because he was the only one that had any.

Money was always an issue. My dad had been raised with money. My mum had been raised without it, but it was my dad’s fear of not having enough money and his quest to make and keep it that ruled us. It was clear that we had money, but it was also made abundantly clear that we did not have enough money, and that the word ‘enough’ was elastic, indefinable and very much at the mercy of my dad’s feelings.

I will caveat everything that follows this with the fact that I know now, as an adult, that my parents were doing the best they could with what they had and that they absolutely had shit of their own going on. I know how hard it is to be your own person and deal with your stuff and be a parent and deal with your kids. I know how hard it is to do all that and come from a generation where therapy was only for Americans and people on psychiatric wards. Asking for help with your feelings in those days was very much rewarded with a thick ear and a lecture on grinning and bearing it.

I never doubted that my parents loved me. I still don’t doubt it. The fact that I love them and understand all this has made it hard to think about this stuff for my entire adult life. The fact that they are proud of me and the things I write and that they read the things I write has made it even harder to articulate this stuff, because the last thing I want to do is hurt the people I love.

However, I have found myself in the last few weeks of starting my baby business and earning money, dealing with a lot of beliefs and ideas about money and work that started in childhood and which I have been too afraid to look properly at until now. Some of that fear is because I still have a very shaky grasp of finance in mathematical terms and I don’t understand sums. A large part of that fear is because I know that shining a light on the beliefs I inherited about myself and money is going to be painful. I can deal with my own pain, but it’s harder to accept that I’m going to cause pain to others and for a long time I just couldn’t accept that.

What I can’t accept now though is very much along the lines of the woman at the anti-Trump march holding the banner that says: ‘I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit.’ I’m tired. I’m tired of paying my therapist, even though I love her. I’m tired of being afraid. I’m tired of holding resentments and I’m tired of repeatedly offering myself up as a sacrificial lamb to save other people’s feelings. I’m tired of accepting roles I was given as a child because I’m fifty-fucking-three. I’m tired of hiding how painful this shit is and I’m tired of wearing myself out with all the things I’m not saying. So I’m saying them and quite selfishly I’m saying them because I need to.

As a child things were often boom or bust. There were the times when my dad would drive home in a fire engine he had just bought and then there were the times we went on holiday to East Anglia and played on the beach in driving winter storms because it was cheap. There were the times we would go out for dinner at a restaurant and there were the times my mum would cry because my dad would bring someone home for dinner and there wouldn’t be enough food to go around. There were the times at school I would be mocked for being posh and rich and the times at home when I would be refused things my ‘poorer’ friends had because we didn’t have the money for them.

I never went without. Of course I didn’t, because there was enough of everything, but the feeling that there wasn’t and the fear that it might all just disappear was there in everything we did, said and owned. Imagine the dissonance caused by being surrounded by examples of the comfortable life you’re living but having the constant, gnawing feeling that you’re one step away from living in a rubbish tip, hunting for scraps.

This and my dad’s need to get a deal or a bargain with everything meant that the messages were mixed to say the least. My dad once waited three years to buy my mum the Kitchenaid mixer she wanted for Christmas because he refused to buy it until he found a deal. He enjoys bargain hunting. So do I. But his enthusiasm exceeded the limits of a hobby and became something darker, at least for me. I learned from this and hundreds of other moments that money came first in the pecking order.

A lot of this stuff led to funny situations which are now family stories told with great hilarity, but I realise that as a child I didn’t always find them so funny, because I didn’t always understand what was happening, and I was working hard to try and decipher situations which were strange by anyone’s standards. It may be funny to find yourself standing on the lawn in the middle of the night because the French boiler with no instructions your dad bought off a mate is about to explode and the fire brigade are there, but it’s also terrifying. There were a lot of French boilers growing up.

It led to a lot of confusion and for me, a lot of fear around the power that money exerted. I felt that money was dangerous and unpredictable and the work you did to earn it was a stick you could beat people with. What money represented became attached to a lot of volatile emotions like fear and rage, greed and selfishness. It also got attached to a lot of beliefs and behaviours around control and who wielded it. I didn’t understand it emotionally and I didn’t understand it in basic, practical terms. I just knew I was afraid of it.

I didn’t understand why, if I had been given something called ‘spending money’ for example, I couldn’t spend it. Or why, if I did spend it, I might get into trouble for doing exactly what it was designed for. Not always, because that would have been easy to understand, just sometimes. The rules shifted all the time. Money was tricky and a lot of the time, when I had it, it felt like a trap because I would inevitably fuck it up. I learned to distrust money in general and me in relation to money specifically.

I was the one in our family who was ‘bad’ with money. I was not to be trusted with money. I was selfish. I was always the one with her hand out asking for something she didn’t deserve. I wanted the best but had no money to buy it with and when I asked for what I wanted, I was greedy. I didn’t understand that if someone asked you what you wanted, you weren’t actually supposed to say, unless it was free or cheap. I was a spectacular failure at reading the room if the room was a bank and my dad was the bank manager.

I learned then to jettison money as quickly as possible. I understood that money was supposed to give you things, but for me, a lot of the time, if I kept hold of it, it took far more than it gave. If I kept it, I would at some point be expected to do things I didn’t understand with it. Maths and numbers in general frightened me because I couldn’t make them work for me in the same way I could with words and letters. I found that if I spent the money I was given as quickly as possible, I would still get into trouble and be labelled a greedy spendthrift, but at least I’d have nice things that nobody wanted to take away from me. Things were comforting. I was also very comfortable having no money of my own. I knew how to do that.

And of course, this relationship with money massively impacted my relationship with work, because very few of us work because we love what we do. We work to earn money to pay for the life we lead or want to lead, or the life we are taught to expect.

My parents funded my degree because we were not eligible for grants. They also funded me loafing around in the holidays during my three years as an undergraduate, because by then I had fully leaned in to being an ungrateful, selfish gobshite as far as money was concerned. I felt utterly defeated by it and gave up having anything to do with it at every available opportunity.

They also supported me during the first year of my part time M. A. when I couldn’t find work because I was overqualified and under experienced and about as much use as a chocolate teapot. I have a lot to be grateful to them for, particularly the fact that they didn’t fire me into the face of the sun when I both spectacularly failed my M.A. and walked away from a disastrous relationship one week before I was due to marry that particular disaster, leaving them to pick up the tab. I had embraced being a failure with money and tied it to my shitty sense of worth as a person and then imploded my entire life to that point.

At the age of seventeen I had a breakdown. It stopped me in my tracks. I was paralysed by what a horrible, poisonous, damaged person I thought I had become. I didn’t know how to change it. Instead I tried to stop everything because I wasn’t brave enough to kill myself, although I thought about it every day.

After about six months of living like this, I got what I can only describe as ‘bored,’ but it wasn’t a shruggy, teenage sort of boredom. It was more a deep, bone weary, FFS kind of state that propelled me forward into life again. I can’t say I was living. I think I was trying to die but more elegantly and with a bigger element of risk at play. At the time I told myself I was having fun again. I was not having fun at all. I was going through the motions of what fun was supposed to be. Fundamentally I didn’t really care what happened to me but I decided to get moving anyway. Everyone else was growing up, so I thought I’d better get on board.

I took this to mean that I was better. Just like I was not having fun, I was definitely not better. I was surviving with periods of brief insanity letting off steam like a pressure cooker until I ran the whole lot into a wall after failing to get an M.A. and failing to get married, and owing my parents squillionty pounds which I have never repaid them and which leaves me forever in their debt in all kinds of ways. Now I think that what looked like my life ending, was actually the long put off end of my breakdown and the beginning of a healthier chapter. Healthier should definitely be in inverted commas here.

I had had a few jobs by the time of the life wreck, but after fruitlessly signing on for months I had been offered a chance to skill up and I took it. This had allowed me to claw my way into a temping position at a big scientific publisher’s where I worked as a secretary’s secretary and general dogsbody. After a few months I was taken on permanently and then I was promoted. It turned out that given half a chance I was actually quite employable and I was good at my job. So good that I got promoted again.

I had been living with the disaster for a while by then. When we started out, he was earning the money. When I turned out to be a good employee, I was suddenly in a position where I was earning more money than him. Not only was I earning more money than him, I was using it to improve our life. We moved from a mouldy attic flat to a house. I bought us a car. I paid for a holiday. I was still being a Swiss Army knife at home. You think he’d have been happy. He was not. He was very unhappy that I was solvent and capable. Apparently our life was only meant to get better if he was in charge of it and I was still grateful and poor. He would accept handouts from my parents, but not from me. He still needed me broke and stupid.

It took me a long while to understand what I was accepting from him and leave. It’s a pattern I’ve enacted countless times since with people and situations large and small. I’m lucky that I get out. I’m not so lucky in that I keep getting in because it feels so comfortable at the start. It feels like home. It feels like this person could be my family. Of course it does.

On top of being the girl who's bad with money. On top of being the girl for whom holding onto money feels like holding onto a grenade with the pin out, there’s always the Swiss Army knife undercutting everything. The blade of unpaid labour. The tweezers of emotional grunt work. The weird thing that gets stones out of horses’ hooves that doesn’t even have a name but which I can wield like a pro. The countless things that I do that I have done for so long that they don’t even feel like work anymore, but which slow me down or stop me dead in my tracks. The jobs that take me away from my own work, my own job, my own money.

Since starting this new work, I’ve run into that girl a lot. She’s afraid for me. She’s scared of all the trauma that’s come bundling into my life through my relationship with money and work and the people who taught me about it. She’s afraid that if she finally reclaims her relationship with money and work on her terms and values herself highly enough to set herself free from the past that the cost might be too high in all the ways that really matter, and which have nothing to do with money at all. She’s afraid she might have got it all wrong and that by doing this, she might actually be the selfish, greedy person she was told she was. She’s afraid she’ll lose the people she loves.

I think she’s wrong. I think I might be able to do this work in a way that is slow enough for me to manage with care and love for that girl and the people who love her. I think I might be able to do it in a way that is empowering and resourceful. I think I do understand money. I think I understand money in the ways that matter the most and I think it’s time for me to take my share in a way that heals and liberates me. I think it’s time to allow richness into my life in every way. I think I’ve worked hard for it. I think it’s going to be ok.