The rest of my household picked up a different takeaway. “There’s never any trouble here in Bubbleland” became my mother’s frequent ironic refrain, a sardonic way of expressing frustration at a situation that was set up for my parents to fail. Our neglected neighborhood was crumbling around us; my parents worked tirelessly but still struggled financially; their parents were ailing. When the weight of it all threatened to overtake her, my mother, with a lightness, would sigh, “There’s never any trouble here in Bubbleland.” It became a relief valve, a code word, a cry for help. It also served as a guiding metaphor. The world outside was troublesome, but the house and the world my parents built for us within it was a bubble. A delicate, permeable utopia.
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Utopia came at a figurative and literal price. I was aware as a child that the economics of making a life were hard. I knew it in simple ways, like “We don’t have money to add every available cereal to the grocery cart just because Eric would like to taste one spoonful and then decide he doesn’t like it.” I wasn’t sure if a cereal smorgasbord was something that happened at other people’s houses, but I knew that it didn’t happen at ours and I presumed it was because every time we asked to add something to the cart, we were informed that it wasn’t on The List. The List was a buzzkill. I did not like The List. I also knew that money was an issue for my parents, because I’d sometimes walk in on them in the middle of tense conversations, and even though I had yet to watch a Lifetime movie about hardscrabble people trying to make ends meet, I had a sense of what the air in that particular room felt like. I didn’t think that we were poor, per se. But after nearly four decades on this planet and a long, nightmarish conversation about “economic anxiety” and the “forgotten working class,” I am willing to entertain the idea that there are many kinds of poverty, that your mortgage can be paid on time and your children can be fed and you can still live in Poor America.
As an adult, I have an even clearer, more terrifying understanding of what the stakes must have been for my parents. As a child, I had no way of contextualizing how much things cost or how difficult it can be to stay on top of everything, even without kids. Now I know and I look back at the feat my parents pulled off with awe and a shiver, as I shovel one spoonful of every kind of cereal into my mouth. I also know that I’ll never fully get it. I’ll never be in their exact context: I’ll never know exactly how much the frequent ER visits for their children’s asthma set them back, exactly how many times car repairs or school uniforms or a layoff or the cost of heating a four-story house in the middle of a dilapidated neighborhood knocked them off course.
One thing I didn’t know then but now can’t forget is that my mother didn’t purchase an item of clothing for herself for over a decade during my childhood. As she explains it now, “There simply wasn’t money. My clothes didn’t make The List.” In the present, my parents will drop details about how things used to be for them with a casualness that belies how stunning those facts are. They shared a car for many years, so my father sometimes walked for miles to get home; he worked three jobs to afford school for me and my brothers, including a paper route in the wee small hours of the morning. My mother worked tirelessly to build a nurturing and educationally vigorous home for a decade and then went back to teaching elementary school, while putting herself through grad school and taking care of her ailing parents. And, for a ten-year stretch, they didn’t buy themselves clothing.
When I ask my parents about that decade, they demur. “It’s what we had to do,” they say, which, as an adult, I both recognize and refuse to accept. I tinker with my budget constantly. I download apps and spreadsheets and read blog posts and complain to friends about money all the time. I know that every money decision comes with a choice. Even a choice that is compelled is still a choice. So when they say it’s what they had to do, I know that the choice implicit in that sentence is me and my brothers. They chose us. And in so doing they created a world motivated by that choice. That’s the goal. You work hard so that your children are able to live a life somewhat free from the burdens that plagued you. That’s the gift my parents gave us, free of charge. Or, at least, I assume that’s a parent’s goal. I don’t have any kids but I want those things for my houseplants.
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Much of my family’s financial difficulty came from trying to put me and my brothers through private school, a decision that made everything in my life possible. My brothers went to a private Episcopalian school and I went to Park, a progressive K-12 school with a campus comprised of one hundred acres of woodland. It’s a remarkable place that functions more like a small liberal arts college than a traditional private school. A pond sits in the middle of campus; a stream winds between athletic fields. The students are empowered to be part of decision-making about the school but not in a ridiculous way where you end up having every kind of cereal for lunch every day. At Park, they recognize that students are people and worthy of being listened to, but they’re also a school and, as such, recognize that children are lunatics.
This lunatic thought he had died and gone to heaven when he enrolled at Park in fourth grade. It is hard to put into words how perfect an environment it was for me. The faculty saw me. That’s the whole thing. They saw my creative spirit and my curiosity and my tactile learning habits and my aversion to being outside and they affirmed all of it. Prior to Park, I’d gone to a very tiny arts conservatory that may have been a Ponzi scheme, to a Baptist elementary school, and, for three months, to public school. At the public school, one of my classmates bit me on the hand in protest for having to share computer time with me, and my mother rolled up on that place like a flash flood to whisk me and my lightly bleeding hand out of there.
The people at the school had the temerity to try to keep the computer lab fee my parents had paid at the beginning of the year. Guess how well that went over? My mother arrived at school to collect me, most of my hand, and our computer fee, wearing a black wool pantsuit with chalk stripes that I knew as “Betty Grey’s suit.” Betty Grey, a woman at our church, had befriended my mom and offered her some of her professional attire at some point. When my mother talks about it, her voice gets soft; it catches a bit. “She didn’t have to do it,” she will say. “She could have thrown them out or kept them. But she knew I needed clothes to wear to work, and that generosity has always stayed with me.”
Betty Grey’s winter-weight blazer and skirt were the most serious of the items in my mother’s closet. She wore this outfit to funerals and to meetings in which she had to set someone straight. She called it her death suit because if she was wearing it, “either someone is already dead or someone’s going to die.”
We didn’t have money in Bubbleland, but we were rich in bon mots.
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