when my parents met, my mother was a waitress of some sort and my father was a tax collector at a private collections firm that no longer exists. he took a detour into tech support, but he died doing collections for the government. he spent something like 30 years in the collections industry. it became more lucrative as time went on, but when i was born he was making something close to minimum wage.
my parents split up when i was four, and my mother has been on welfare ever since. so, i spent the next ten years of my life in subsidized housing; i was my mother's cash cow, the thing she needed to get paid. i was never homeless - i was not poor by global standards - but i was about as poor as a kid in canada got in the 80s. and, the other kids knew it, too.
my memory is a little blurry around 5 or 6, but, iirc, my dad ended up quickly remarrying - and he married a step up. he may have spent some time on friends' couches; what i actually remember, in the period right after the breakup, was that he just disappeared for months - until he started coming over, and we'd hang out in the basement. and, then he had a new house in britannia bay....
i grew up in trapper's park, and i talk about it being rough; my dad grew up on ritchie street, and that was even worse.
i know that talking about the ghetttos of ottawa is going to produce eyerolls, but this is what happens when you google ritchie street in 2021:
i'm going to guess it's probably full of syrians nowadays. when i was a kid, it was full of somalis. when he was a kid, growing up there, it was full of italians, native americans & jews - which he was all of, in varying amounts.
so, he was dirt fucking poor. no intergenerational wealth. at all.
wife #2 seems to have been better off, but it was short-lived and my memory is pretty sketchy. his father - a literal mason, a brick-layer - died in that period. but, she seems to have owned the house because he ended up with a roomate in a condo in kanata...
wife #3 lasted the longest, by far - i guess it was around 25 years, give or take. she was wealthy. she had intergenerational wealth. he snagged her on the rebound, from what i hear (the guy that dumped her ended up being my grade 10 math teacher). and, she was strictly white, of apparent irish-french extraction. her surname started with "de", indicating actual noble background - and deep wealth, going very far back, back to feudal or potentially roman timeframes...
when i knew her, she was a lab tech and then a middle manager at the red cross.
so, i got to experience an upper middle class existence, for a few years of my life - about the ages of 15-22, give or take. but, that wealth was hers, and strictly hers; there was a pre-nup, and he died young. the will left it all to her - and there wasn't anything that was his, besides debt, regardless.
the last traces of wife #3 on the internet dry up in 2018. i wonder if she's dead. i don't know. i've heard nothing, and don't expect anything.
what about my mom?
well, i don't know, actually. i've barely spoken to her since i was 13. i know her "father" worked in the rcmp and pretty high up; if he's not dead, he's in florida. i haven't seen him in 25 years. the thing is that everybody knows he's not her actual, biological father. my grandmother won't answer questions, but my mother (who was born in saskatchewan) is quite visibly of plains indian extraction - a bizarre truth given that her mother is irish-norse and her supposed father is scots-welsh. the guy knew she wasn't his daughter, and he did horrible, vicious things to her as a child; i talk of my mother being a drug addict, and the truth is her life was damaged from the start. so, there's wealth there, but my mother has never had access to it and there's no reason to think i ever will, either. my aunts both inherited quite a lot...
my grandmother worked as an investment banker and ended up as a sort of mistress for an extremely wealthy italian property magnate in ottawa, and had access to quite incredible wealth as a result of it - something i again had a glimpse of, growing up. but, that wealth stayed in his family. i presume he died of prostate cancer a few years ago. she's in a retirement home in bc nowadays, suffering rather badly from alzheimer's. i keep meaning to call her, but it's clear enough that this wealth, whatever exists of it, is going directly to her youngest daughter - who is going to hand it off to her own son.
and, i had as much opportunity as a person with my background could ever hope for, but i threw it away to live a life of freedom; the irony is that i could exist so close to such wealth, and be told i had to work for a living, and then throw it away. i used to tell this to my father, to his bafflement, all of the time: i'd rather be free than rich. that made no sense to him, growing up the way he did - all he ever wanted was a way into the middle class. but, growing up the way i did, a stable middle class job was just giving up...i wanted meaning and purpose and the freedom to seek it.
and, so i am desperately poor, because i threw it all away to chase art and experience.
i don't regret it, in the bottom of the pandemic.
i just want my freedom back - because that trade-off has lost it's meaning, right now, as i sit at home in a pollution filled basement.