Our Little Geekling

It’s National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) and I’m participating!

NaBloPoMo Prompt for Today: When was the first time that you realized that your home was not like other people’s homes? (Guest Post by Catherine Gildiner, author of After the Falls)

These questions are weird. Is it asking when, as a kid, I realized my family had a nicer house than some of my peers and a not-as-nice house as some of my peers? I guess that’s the question I’ll answer since I can’t ask anyone to clarify. (I am assuming that the question isn’t asking when I realized my house was made of wood and stone and other houses were made of brick. Although the answer to that question would be fairly young. I was a smart kid.)

Erm. I think I realized in elementary school that some of my peers had very little money and that my family was doing okay. I don’t think I realized until middle school that my family was strictly middle-class in a town where wealth abounds. My hometown is… weird. There’s a lot of money here. A lot. And my family always had enough, but never an abundance. We had everything we needed and most of what we wanted. I knew that my grandparents were wealthy. I knew that my dad was doing alright. But my dad also had his own mortgage and wife and a child from his second marriage and child support to pay to my mom. I think that even though I was very irresponsible with money when I was old enough to earn my own, that I always had a pretty good idea of what things cost, what others had, and what we didn’t. While there IS a lot of money in town, there are also those families that clearly do not have a lot. I feel like the line between the rich and middle class is kind of blurry, but the line between the middle and lower classes is blurry. It’s a college town, so there is a large transient population, which makes for a strange distribution within the economy. There is a mental hospital that is quite large, and a lot of the rehabilitated patients live here in low-income housing. There are areas that were pretty nice when I was growing up that have become run-down and are kind of sad now. And there are areas that were kinda “ghetto” that have been built up or torn down and rebuilt that are really nice now.

Does that answer the question?

(Note to self: don’t do the NaBloPoMo prompts next year; just resolve to write every day in November.)

_____________________________________

Who needs toys when you can play with DIAPERS?