The Privilege of Parental Love

Allison Moon wrote a great post about a new kind of privilege she realized she carries.

Growing up I never had to wonder if my parents loved me. I never doubted they respected me or my choices. I never felt abandoned or ignored or dismissed. My folks have had to deal with a lot of information in their parenting lives. I’ve come out as bisexual, then lesbian, then queer, then polyamorous, then partnered to a queer, poly, cis-man. I think they stopped paying too much attention after “queer.”

...Listening to the speeches at the [annual LA Gay & Lesbian Center Gala], I became acutely aware of another privilege: parental love. Parental love means that I never had to apologize to my family for who I was and who I wanted to be. Parental love meant that I was only girl in my catholic school to wear pants, with my mom’s enthusiastic blessing. It meant that when I told them I wanted to quit my job to write a novel, they told me what a great writer I was and how proud they were of me. I means that they still send some of my blog posts to their friends to brag about me, even though a lot of my choices aren’t exactly easy for them to read about. It means that no matter where I am in the world, and what kind of life I lead, I can always, always go home to my parents if I need to.

If there's a single kind of privilege that I feel more definitely than any other, it's this. So many people I've known, including some of the closest friends and lovers I've had, did not have any kind of support from their parents. They had to make their way alone, without any kind of financial or emotional safety net from their families of origin. I've always had that net.

I've got a kind of certainty in my actions that I know leads to my success in many ways. I can approach jobs or relationships with the attitude that I will always be okay. I know that my parents will be there to catch me no matter what happens.

This saves me from an air of desperation that I know can undermine people in so many ways. I come off as confident and capable, which I know is attractive. I've been given a lot--jobs, good grades, forgiveness--as a result. Hell, probably the biggest reason I got out of my abusive high school relationship before it turned physical was that he couldn't succeed in undermining my relationship with my parents. They were too loving and accepting and too much a voice of reason against his attempts at control.

I think this privilege of parental love affects me even more meaningfully than the fact that my parents are wealthy. It wouldn't matter much what their net worth was if they didn't use any of it to support me. I've known plenty of people from families richer than mine who enjoyed less of the resulting privilege because their parents were unsupportive assholes.

This kind of privilege is emotionally fraught. It's even more awkward to talk about my supportive parents with folks whose families aren't like that than it is to talk about having money with someone who grew up poor. I guess, ultimately, emotional wealth does carry more weight than monetary wealth. I'm just glad Allison pointed it out, because I think the most important thing with privilege is to be aware of it and to use it for the greater good. Now maybe I can find ways to do that.

NYC and my Fiscal Politics

About three months ago, I had an experience in the subway that really blew me away and solidified my fiscal politics. I didn't write about it at the time because I was feeling writer's blocked, but it seems important enough to reach back a little bit.

I was riding the subway home from a fancy dinner with my parents, who were in town for Thanksgiving. I was carrying a bag full of various leftovers they'd given me, which I planned to gleefully eat over the next week. I'm not exactly flush with cash, so free food was a luxury I was looking forward to.

As I was sitting there in a half-dozing, full-stomach, late-night stupor, a woman got on the subway and began one of those hat-in-hand speeches that you often hear from bedraggled people on the trains. She was missing most of her front teeth and had graying hair sticking out from the sides of her head. She said, "You're all I've got and I'm hungry and thirsty." She started to ask for whatever pocket change we could spare.

Well, I was sitting right next to her and I had all this food, so I just handed her a big thing of risotto that my parents had given me.

She stopped mid-sentence. Probably mid-word. She looked the container over, opened it, and started eating right there with her hands. She didn't really look at me, except once because I was watching her (I said, lamely, "Happy Thanksgiving,") and she got off at the next stop, still wordlessly eating.

I was so struck by her facial expression and the way she took that food. This woman was clearly starving. She had not eaten in days. It was obvious, and my heart just broke.

It's so impossible to understand living in this city. You can walk up Park Ave and see all the fancy shops and the women with obvious plastic surgery and fur coats and fancy cars with drivers. I collect hundreds of dollars sometimes in single donations on the street. And yet, there are people here who are starving.

Starving.

So, it became immensely clear to me that there's no reason that the kind of extreme wealth that's on display in this city should even exist. There's just no sense in it when we could tax those people into a semblance of reasonable life and be able to feed and house the people who need it.

I'm not saying people shouldn't be able to build up money and that there shouldn't be fiscal rewards for work. I do think it's important to have a bell curve of socio-economic status. I just think we need to cut off the ends, eliminate the outliers. So yeah, still pay doctors more and let people at the top have higher salaries, but there's just no reason for anyone to have gold dinner plates or private jets or whatever. It's just gratuitous.

So I guess that makes me something of a socialist, although not an extreme one by any means. That's something I'd shied away from for a long time because I felt like our fiscal politics were very, very complicated and trying to take a stance when I don't fully understand them would be silly. But really now, I can at least grasp a general concept and think it's close to the right thing to do.

Quitting (Longish post)

Well, I quit sex work.

It's a little more complicated than that. I took myself off the schedule at the dungeon a few weeks ago. As an (apparently very) submissive woman I was having trouble effectively meeting the needs of my clients, and I didn't like the work that much. It was a fun learning experience and it gave me a lot of time and some experiences through which to mull over BDSM and my feelings towards it, but I was done with it.

My intention was to go back to stripping, and I found a small-ish club in Queens where I felt reasonably comfortable and the house fees weren't too high. I even auditioned there and worked for a night. (They have 8-hour shifts, 8pm-4am. Ouch!) I bought a gown to fit the dress code there, and packed all my g-strings into my rolling stripper bag.

But when I went in for my second shift, I just didn't want to do it anymore. I knew what I had to be doing to make money. I needed to go around the room and find the men who glanced at my ass, look deeply into their eyes, flirt mercilessly, all the usual. I needed to play the game. And I just had no interest in it.

I normally have an overabundance of sexual energy. I think about sex all the time and talk about it and have it and I've got this great store of positive juice in my batteries when it comes to physical love. As a stripper, I was able to use and play with that energy to keep things interesting and engage with men and even have fun.

These days, I'm a little low on that energy. I think a big part of that is having a full time canvassing job that's not in line with what I want to be doing. We're not even canvassing for Planned Parenthood anymore; now I spend all day having conversations with people who don't give a shit about human rights but will cry and throw thousands of dollars at "homeless" (ie feral ie wild) household animals. It's draining, on a soul level.

I also think I've probably learned everything I'm going to learn from stripping. I understand the dynamics of it and I have a feel for the industry. Sure, I could always learn to be a better stripper, but that's not really who I want to be. I was never a lifer.

Most importantly, though, I always promised myself that the second I really didn't want to be a sex worker anymore, the second it started to hurt me, I would stop. I've seen the consequences of staying in it past that point, and they're not pretty. I don't want to damage myself that way. I want to have more respect for myself and my feelings than that. I'm lucky enough to have a day job so I can, kind of, afford to leave.

Things are admittedly going to be financially difficult for me for a while until I figure out what to do instead. I'm going to try to go back to babysitting. Instead of another physically and emotionally draining job on top of my first one, I'll get to be around kids. That's like a battery charger; I love them.

I'm also looking for a different full time job. I came here meaning to canvass for only a little while as I looked for something else, but I was overwhelmed with moving and being on my own so I didn't have the extra initiative that took. Now I'm settled, and I'm going to dedicate myself to that for real.

I'm not really sure where I'll end up with all of this or how it'll go, but I've got some money saved and I've got a new determination to find work that's fulfilling, at least on a basic level. Wish me luck everyone, and I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

Money

A disorganized and possibly rambling continuation of my thoughts on my privileged stupidity when it comes to money: how did I get this way?

I try to be fairly open about the fact that I come from a very privileged family. For starters: I'm white, started out as Catholic, and my family has a lot of money. My dad is an executive for start-up biotech companies, which means he does very well financially. My mother works very part time and doesn't make much; she could afford to make that choice. Both of my parents are college educated. They both came from upper-middle-class white families. My background is a continuation of theirs.

We did not talk about money in my family when I was growing up. Apparently, it's partly because my father really hates to. I think it's a combination of his being proud of how much he makes and wanting to spend it on his wife and children (quite the patriarchal sentiment, that) and feeling awkward about being richer than most people and living in luxury. Not ridiculous luxury, but luxury nonetheless. There's a nice big dose of white, wealthy guilt in my family and the way it manifests itself is that we DO NOT talk about money.

My dad hands his credit card to waiters at restaurants before they bring him the check, and he just signs it. My mother doesn't check the price tags of things we buy at the grocery store or jeans at the mall. I don't know how much money my dad makes in a year, or in a month, or in a week, or in an hour. I don't know how much our mortgage costs. I don't know how much our food costs. Off the top of my head, I don't even know how much this computer cost.

Maybe sharing all of this is just rubbing the privilege in people's faces, and I shouldn't. I guess my point, though, is that things really shouldn't be this way. One of the things about privilege is that it allows you not to be aware of things like money or race or gender or sexuality.

If you're white, that's supposedly the default race and most white people don't even have to think about their race until they're confronted with a minority person who's bringing it up. I think white people who give in to this option of ignorance are socially irresponsible. I think financially privileged people who give in to the option of ignorance about money are socially irresponsible.

I hate that my parents didn't talk about money just because we didn't have to talk about it. Just because we didn't need to discuss what we couldn't afford or what we needed to miss out on due to lack of funds doesn't mean we shouldn't have been talking about what we could afford and how special that was. It's something I needed to be aware of.

Yes, I heard from time to time that we were lucky people and that we shouldn't take it for granted, but the taking for granted was happening on a daily basis and that's a much stronger message.

I probably won't ever be truly poor. I won't know what that's like. I don't want to let that stop me from feeling empathy for people who are poor or from appreciating what I have. I don't want to let it spoil me, which it seems in part to have done. I don't want it to keep me from being a good, responsible person. I don't want it to stop me from helping people.

So I've got to figure this shit out.

Freaking Out

So I had a series of banking fuck ups which led to my bank charging me around 100 dollars that I can't afford in fees because I was absent-minded and kept forgetting to deposit a couple of checks I'd gotten in the mail and also forgot about an automatic charge that was coming up.

This, and my reaction to it, has made it finally apparent to me that I'm completely freaked - over the moon - at the concept of being a real adult and having to be financially responsible for myself. Yes, I have a degree, and I know how to work and how to study and how to learn and some stuff about how to have relationships and I know how to make money. I just have no fucking clue how to manage money or save it or otherwise ensure that I'm not always broke and screwing up with overdraft charges and fucking up my credit. This is something I have not yet learned at all.

And that's really scary. I have a stay of execution of sorts in staying with my parents for the summer - no rent. After that, though, I'm on my own and with almost no idea of how to pull that off.

I realize now that I desperately need help, a teacher of some sort in how to do this. Soon. Now. And I need to save a lot this summer and get it under control. If I screw up my credit (I don't have cards, thankfully, so it hasn't happened yet), that's very hard to undo. I do not want that.

Also, I'm completely broke now and don't get paid until next week. It's so ironic and stupid to be this privileged, living in a nice house, typing on a nice computer, with a pretty degree I'm lucky enough not to have paid for myself, and yet to be so clueless with money that I can't even handle small life expenses. It's such a product of being spoiled, and I'm frankly ashamed of it.

What good can I do with my privilege if I just destroy it by being spoiled and ignorant? I need to get this shit figured out so I can devote my time (and time is money) and money and life to doing good things and helping people.