Oregon Humanities

Spring Break

Why some kids go to Europe and other kids stay home

Mary Rechner

It was Friday afternoon at Laurelhurst Elementary School. Spring break had begun and there was more joy on the playground than usual. Even we usually harried parents seemed relaxed. Maybe we could take it easy because all the major school fundraisers were behind us: Carnival, Sock Hop, and the Laurel Ball. I chatted with a few parents on the playground, making tentative plans with families who, like ours, were home for break.

My younger son, Oliver, and I got ready to leave. As soon as we started walking home, he became grouchy.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Are you hungry? Tired?” I tried to reach for his hand, but he’s eight now and often steps away from me when he’s upset.

At home, at the dining room table, with a plate of crackers and cheese in front of him, Oliver finally looked at me directly, his eyes full of tears. “Why aren’t we leaving the country?” His voice was full of accusation.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Why aren’t we going anywhere?” Oliver was sobbing, but I could tell he wasn’t simply sad; he was outraged. All of his buddies were going somewhere for spring break: one to Mexico; another to Norway; another to Sweden.

“But why don’t we ever leave the country?” Oliver was still sobbing.

“You have left the country,” I told him. “Remember when we went to Vancouver? British Columbia is in Canada!” I knew this was one of those “teachable moments,” and yet I could feel myself switching over to something more deeply rooted than motherly compassion.

“That was too long ago! I don’t remember it!”

“Can you remember a few months ago? Can you remember Christmas break? Remember skiing in Idaho?” My husband’s family has a house share in McCall; we went for a week. Despite the fact that I’ve lived in the West for over a decade, and am myself a skier, somewhere deep down I still associate skiing with the rich kids on Long Island who went to Aspen and Vail.

“A lot of kids went away at Christmas and they’re going away again!” Oliver pushed the cheese against the crackers on his plate.

“Some people have more money than we do!”

During this exchange my ten-year-old son Dan let himself into the house, poured a bowl of Grape-Nut Flakes, sat down at the dining room table, and began reading the comics in the Oregonian.
“Why don’t we have more money?” Oliver demanded.

“Some people make more money than others,” I said. “Some people are doctors and lawyers. Your dad is a forester. I’m a writer.”

“Ollie, she’s right,” said Dan, laughing. “Most writers live in dumpsters.”

“That’s not true!” I wanted to explain to my sons that the inherent value of an activity does not always have a correlating monetary value.

“Listen, Ollie,” said Dan wearily, as if he had figured out the whole thing a long time ago. “If Mom and Dad worked all the time, we might be rich, but then we’d never see them.”

Oliver and I looked at each other. I thought my husband and I did work all the time, and Oliver and I both knew that several of the most well-traveled kids also had stay-at-home moms. Did I have to spell it out for them?

“Some people come from money,” I said. “Some people inherit it from their rich families.” The boys perked up, intrigued by my negative, judgmental tone of voice. “All of your grandparents were basically pretty poor.”

My sons have read innumerable folktales. They know about greedy rich people and hard-working poor ones. Still, what was I saying? That money was bad? That it was good to be poor? I wanted to teach my sons that following their passions and valuing whatever they choose to do or be are more important than accumulating wealth, but what was I doing? It felt like I was teaching them to be bitter.

Ollie started eating his crackers. Dan poured another bowl of cereal. I felt sad for Oliver. He’s competitive, and in the rest of his eight-year-old world, he can compete: he’s tall; he’s smart; he can throw a football really far. I felt sad for Dan, too; he loves to read and is a really good writer. Writers live in Dumpsters? Had I transmitted my anxiety about my work to him?

I thought about the lessons my parents taught me about money: that happiness can’t be bought; that the most important thing in life—love—is free; that money isn’t important. While I counted the first two lessons among my deepest beliefs, I disagreed with the third. “Money isn’t important” was an ideal that wasn’t even true in my own family. Maybe what I wanted for myself and my children was to have a healthy relationship with money.

It sounded like a tricky business. Wasn’t I a bit of a striver? Hadn’t I wanted my kids to go to Laurelhurst because it was rated “exceptional”? Wasn’t I secretly glad that they were already skiers, still for me a potent symbol of success? As I watched the boys eat, I remembered a short story I love, “Eleven,” by Sandra Cisneros. In it, Rachel has just turned eleven, but reflects that “when you’re eleven you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one.” In the story Rachel remembers all the things she did and ways she felt when she was younger.

Though I want a healthy relationship with money, inside me still exists a self that believes that not having money is something of a badge of honor. When you don’t have a lot of money, you learn to be tough; you learn to be scrappy. I’d like my boys to have at least a little of that toughness; I’d like them to be at least a little bit scrappy. I don’t want them to take things like traveling, going out to eat, or buying new clothes for granted.

Another self still thinks magically about money. It fears that having money will make me a different person, one that I don’t like as much, one that other, less fortunate people will judge and envy, the way that I have judged and envied, because what went along with not having money (and being surrounded by people who did) was a sense of shame. I’d like to spare my children that. I’d like to be able to say yes to most of the opportunities that come their way, the ones I often had to say no to when I was growing up, because there wasn’t money for art class or acting camp.

The boys were finished with their snacks. “Money is relative,” I told them. “Americans are richer than most other people around the world.” I was still trying to teach them something.

“We know, Mom,” Dan said. They grabbed their basketball and went outside. I felt like I had taught them nothing. Luckily, parenting is a process. There will be no shortage of chances to teach both my sons and myself.

After they left, I remembered a book Oliver and Dan had loved when they were small, Joseph Had a Little Overcoat, by Simms Taback. It was based on a Yiddish folk song with a refrain that went, “You can always make something out of nothing.”

From the Summer 2008 “Class” issue