How I Killed My Inner Girlboss, Part 2
Start from the beginning here.
When I was a little girl, I remember the exact moment I came into the conscious realization of money, its existence, and the implications of its existence. My mom was never the type for self-pity, but she did like to drop little quips here and there throughout my childhood about how my dad’s side of the family spoiled me and made me think that “money is no object,” and even though I didn’t even know what that phrase meant at the time, I certainly knew what emotion she was intending to evoke with it.
She definitely had reasons to be resentful, having had me at 16 and raised me on her own since she was 21. My dad’s family did have money (in the 90s, anyway. That all changed in 2008, but let’s not lose the plot here). A lot of that money was spent on undoing the consequences of my dad’s addict behavior. And my mom had spent a lot of time and resources undoing the financial damage she’d sustained from her marriage to my father. So, while I was never made to feel bad about the way we lived, I was often not-so-subtly shamed for my access to nice things and the experiences I got to enjoy as the only child and grandchild in the entire family, at the time.
I remember being 6 or 7 years old and sitting on the floor in my bedroom one day, in a duplex in Long Beach, California, looking in the mirror, thinking, When I’m an adult, I’ll probably have to think about money. And money is a good thing to have. I never want to not have money. In that moment, I resolved myself to becoming “good at money,” understanding somehow that it was a game I would be forced to play and deciding I was going to play it well. I would not struggle. I would not be clipping coupons in my retirement. I would not feel stress when it came time to pay bills. I would win at this game. I had seen failure, and it wasn’t an option.
I knew that my paternal grandmother (the one with the money) had been the original 1980s version of a girlboss, raising two teenagers while driving 4 or 5 hours every single day to commute from Anaheim to San Bernardino for her high-powered VP of sales position. They never wanted for anything (except a healthy father figure) and to this day, she still has a house that screams “money”. When my aunt got married last year, she wore a tie made of pearls. It was my grandmother’s. She used to wear it to work.
In my eyes, I would grow up and be exactly like my grandmother, but better, because I would do all of the girlbossing and make my fortune before I became a mother. I really had it all planned out. It seemed imperative–not like a goal to chase, but a requirement for life.
Read part 3 here.
