I have been on TFFN for quite some time. Matt put it well, I am not near so much a fighter as a flighter. My best experience as an Army brat is how easy it is to leave and start over.
I have a hard time writing here because I find at this time in my life I can't take meaness in any form. It is just too painful. I also have a hard time but do understand that a lot of what I see as meanness is failure to understand in an empathetic way.
So as you start this diary remember I am brain damaged, not good technologically, and I have had some of the same experiences as Matt with people looking for gotcha more than I hear you.
Barbara Enhreich is one of favorite writers and researchers. I would like to emulate her. After she came out with Nickled and Dimed, I considered it because one of the things she said was that she could not really break into the intercircles of the rich to see how they really lived and what they really thought. I have been graced with that experience from both sides now. I think some of these stories need to be told to bring more understanding. The rich fear telling them, people who live on the rich won't, and the many only see thru a veil darkly.
I was born poor white trash--their labels not mine. I have married rich twice. I have lost everything twice. I have had it given in spades and I have earned it with sweat of my brow. I have also had it stolen from me big time twice. Thus, I have spent a lot of time asking what was my part in all of this first and what is the powers that be. It is my hope these stories will be interesting.
In 1990, we moved from Las Vegas to San Antonio, Texas. We did that to survive bankruptcy and to live on 30% of what we formerly earned. We lived a comuter marriage in San Antonio on $ 75,000 a year. In LA, that is small potatoes, in San Antonio that was in the top 2%. Besides this, growing up poor I really know how to get the most pop for my buck.
Like most parents, we tried to keep a lot of things from our daughter Maxx, and like all kids she was always listening in all the sneaky ways she could find like listening in the extentions etc. unknown to us. Her ability to understand was compromised by both her youth and inexperience and our not wanting her to know. I guarantee you that Matt's family also functions that way.
Maxx almost totally blew herself out of the water her first year in our new house which took me almost a year to build. It was in the Bellair of San Antonio. It was 4000 plus square feet with five bedrooms, four bathrooms, a library, two living areas, etc. It had Italian marble in the 15foot diameter master bath, the dining room and the entrance way. It had all kinds of molding etc. It cost me $ 254,000 to build. I considered it my PhD in Design.
In LA, we bought our first home together for 280,000 in 1982 and sold it in 1988 for 450,000 all cash and moved to Las Vegas. My husband got into thinking he was on such a role at 65 that he bought the oldest casino on the strip and essentially bankrupted us with it. That story can wait.
Having never failed a business publicly before my husband wanted to return to LA and we had many a discussion about how you could not buy a dog house for 250,000. So we built near but away from my parents in New Braunfals and Sequin. More stores about that later.
Considering where my husband came from, he considered himself poor. Considering I did UCLA Interior and Envrionmental Design program and toured many a home of the really "in" with Jody Greenwold--once you have seen a 350,000 kitchen in 1985, you are never going to get excited over a 250,000 house. So everything is relative.
Everything went down in 1990 for us when Gulf War I came about and for a year no real estate was moving in LA and Las Vegas. Besides, my husband was getting desperate from loosing so much. The first day we put our 240,000 house on the market, my husband was offered 425,000--we had done 50,000 in improvements and I am quite good at what I do but my husband wanted 625,000. It finally sold 18 months later for 325,000.
So Maxx has been hearing since she was 7 what it means to face bankruptcy. So she is in a high class neighborhood school where the average house is 125,000 and she is telling people she is poor and lives in a poor house. She is ten. When people walk in my house, they are so surprised their jaws drop down. When Maxx was five and went to her first big birthday party we went throught two gates, never saw the main house and the party was held in 5,000 square foot cabana by the pool. She came back not talking about rich but "filthy" rich.
My business was antiques as investments and I have stuff acquired serendipously that are both rare and exquisite and above all artistic. Most of my neighbors think art is Thomas Kincaid number 350 out 1,000. I know that sounds snark but again I have seen it all from both sides.
When my husband's New York City relatives first came to visit, they literally took my paintings off the wall and scratched and sniffed them. So to my way of thinking gauche comes from all sides. One of my other great memories is being at big affair in Palm Springs and having just gotten back from Hong Kong I have a new big aquarmarine ring. An older woman across the table asks to see it, I hand it over and she brings out a lorngette (sp) to look at it.
My father worked as a caddy for rich people since he was ten. The thought of even being near a rich person sends him into rants. Nothing can change his belief that all rich people are crooks and no good nicks. Loathe would be a mild word. I have heard that the whole time I was growing up.
Lucky for me I started working for really rich Jackie Onnass friends in San Francisco as a private duty nurse at 26. I learned for sure that they are no happier, maybe more fearful of loosing their money and place, and in competition all the time. That experience let me marry rich the second time knowing the how, the whys, and wherefores. There was ten years between my first and second marriage.
Matt is just as shocked about many things right now. I can tell you that nothing right now is as he expected it to be. Because he does write well and is exploring and doing; it is hard to remember he is barely twenty and no experience with the real world. It is part of why he is here. His pain is real. Maxx's pain was incredible and I often thought she didn't have it near as bad as I who knew real poverty. Maxx left a lot of writing behind that may be other stories.
Highly intelligent and sensitive young people are really shocked to find that real poverty is the poverty of the soul and the lack of justice. Sex is about who you are not what you do. Today's youth struggle with that in a totally different way then us oldsters who were never allowed to talk about it in any meaningful way.
In many ways this is a beginning. I will try again to contribute what I think does matter. I am not near into politics as I am into policy which is both run by and ruined by good people who never really look to the depth of unintended consequences.