Rich Girl

As I get older, it becomes more and more clear that I have a huge chip on my shoulder when it comes to perceived elitism, and more directly, and for lack of a more gentle term, People With A Shitload of Money. It’s hard to really pinpoint my reaction, but I’ll say that it comes in the form of becoming super-defensive and twitchy when I’m in certain towns or see certain types of cars, or hear that someone I’m meeting is FROM a certain town. I have a list of towns that I’ll never live in, because I don’t want to feel inadequate, and worse, I don’t want my kids to feel inadequate.

Now, there’s something to be said for being down to earth (I am, extremely so) and grounded (ditto) and wanting to make sure that your kids are surrounded by people who have those values, and there is a strong argument to be made that in one’s formative years, confidence may be built by at least living in a geographic area where there is a relatively even playing field of economic factors. But it would be a fallacy to say that People With A Shitload of Money automatically, by way of their Shitloads of Money, don’t have those values, you know?

I don’t really know. I just know that I have this total chip on my shoulder about it, and I am at least grateful that I’m aware of it, although that doesn’t help matters much. On the other hand, when I’m at gym class with my kid and a mom who lives in one of The Towns With Shitloads of Money announces that I should move there, because although everyone lives in mansions, they are super down to earth! And their kids wear Old Navy! Rich People: They’re Just Like Us!, I kind of want to announce that yes, but we can’t AFFORD a $3M mansion, so believe me darling, you are nice, but your breath is wasted. I’d also like to note that she said this while noting that the people in the Other Rich Competitive Town Next Door are super snobby and won’t talk to her when she goes there, and all I could think was that rich people really ARE like us, in that they stereotype just as badly as we do.

This isn’t really making any sense, is it? I mean, I have friends in all of the traditionally wealthy towns up here, and frankly none of them are terrifyingly wealthy (probably on par with us, honestly, and while we’re fine, we’re far from Rich), and they are all down to earth and well-valued, etc. etc. It’s just this CHIP I have on my shoulder about those towns that when people ask me if I’d ever consider moving to them, I practically SNORT IN THEIR FACE and announce that we’re moving to [Insert really high crime bad neighborhood here], where the Normal People live. Normal people who want their kids to be illiterate and get shot on their way to school, that is. But you see, I swing like a pendulum.

Am I making it clear that this is MY problem? I hope I am.

I grew up … well, poor might be too strong a word, but my family certainly didn’t have a lot of extra money, if any at all. (And I’m talking about my bio mom’s side, and this may all get confusing, but it’s where I lived primarily and ah, divorced families, so hard to explain.) (Also things have since turned around for them, so …)

But the thing is, almost EVERYONE in my tiny town was pretty, uh, downtrodden, in a lot of ways. At least the people I hung out with, anyway, and it wasn’t a big school district. In some ways, it was utopia, because there was no competition, very few kids had cars, and we missed most expensive fashion trends because no one could afford them anyway. I really didn’t know we were in the lower end of the economic spectrum, until it came time for me to go to college, and I had to go where I got the biggest financial aid package (Syracuse, as for a myriad reasons, state schools weren’t an option, as my mom and stepdad — my primary residence — were moving out of state, ETC OH MY GOD CONFUSING).

Fine, great, off I went. And OH HO HO, Syracuse. I’d never seen money like that in my life. Did YOU know Syracuse has a super-wealthy population? Because I didn’t, and that was sure something they didn’t explain on my lame little campus tour. Kids CAME TO SCHOOL with luxury cars. To school! With leather-interior brand-new BMWs! At age 18! I was casually in conversation with a nice young man who was talking about his father, who worked in Hollywood. “Oh, what does he do?” I asked. “Um, he’s [famous character actor],” he answered. My roommate sophomore year had a $1,000/month clothing allowance. Ha ha! I don’t even think I paid a thousand dollars a month in TUITION BILLS. No — I KNOW I didn’t.

It was nuts. I was terrified. I panicked. And while I think there were a lot of contributing factors and bad choices on my part that made my school experience a flood of inadequacy and panic, I think it’s hard not to panic in that situation, and I spent the majority of my college experience feeling Not Good Enough by the simple fact that I didn’t come from Money, or even money, with the little ‘m’ and everything. After all, I didn’t even have a beat-up clunker at school, much less a Mercedes, and besides, my dining hall work study job didn’t bring in enough cash to cover anything beyond the basic beer and pizza runs, so mall trips were out.

My summer jobs paid for part of my tuition and most of the money I had to live on the entire year. I bought precisely one pair of jeans while attending college, and I used Sun-In in my hair because I couldn’t afford to color or cut it (I typically cut it on visits home). Meanwhile, my contemporaries were composing rush skits around the fact that everyone was simply HAD to buy the latest pair of Georgia boots. I remember filling out the paperwork for my sorority and choosing a big sister, and writing down, “Please, give me someone else on financial aid, too.” Knowing how embarrassed I was about my financial situation, I MUST have been desperate to admit it out loud, on paper and everything, my God.

(They did.)

(Apropos of nothing, I did spend a significant portion of my money one semester going tanning, for reasons that make no sense to me, other than I got addicted and had SAD — it WAS Syracuse, after all, which is effing DARK)

And all this is before I brought home a boyfriend and we visited my best friend from high school (who is, ironically, now quite famous in certain circles) and when we walked into her house — which was a disaster, with ratty, ancient furniture and peeling paint and falling-down cabinets in a way that I’d realized he’d probably never seen — and I saw it through his eyes, and it was a little like my whole world just fell away. I’d never NOTICED those things before, because this was just a house I spent time with my best friend in. And there I was, mortified for her, for me, for everything. Over nothing, really, for it was all quite meaningless.

I still kind of hate myself for that moment.

What’s crazy is that I still haven’t really gotten over this, and it is, I think, solely responsible for the Mount Rushmore-sized chip I carry around on my shoulder every day. My economic situation has changed, certainly, and I’m happy and we’re comfortable, and I honestly don’t want for anything — it’s not that I WANT Shitloads of Money, it’s that I am strangely afraid and hostile about the people who HAVE Shitloads of Money, because I assume that they are like the adolescents of my college experience, who were, in a word, assholes, by the simple fact that they were too young to know any better. This is, obviously, totally wrong. Well, sometimes, anyway.

I have no idea where I’m going with this, and I recognize that this is the most poorly written and thought-out thing I’ve put up here, but I wanted to work through it and think about it and be honest with myself about why I’m such a douche about this and VOILA! Here we are. Incoherent thoughts on why I’m an asshole about People With Money, by Jonna.

Have a great weekend! Twice a week, anyway, despite promises of three. Improvement?

PS, I’m glad I went to Syracuse for a lot of reasons. It pushed me to be competitive, to move beyond my comfort zone and to be better at … everything. So it was a good choice, really it was. And I met Adam there, after all, so … (Adam, for the record, had a COMPLETELY different school experience, likely because he was both a) a male; and b) came from at least some small ‘m’ money.

*Gwen Stefani

89 comments October 28th, 2010