There is one worldly word of wisdom my dad Brad often gave me more than any other. Don't let a woman marry you for money, although at the time I was 14, and he couched his remarks in less matrimonial terms.
Marcia, one fears, was a bit of a gold digger, a skill nana had mentored. Marcia was, at least ostensibly biologically, an orphan, i.e. she didn't have to care a wit about the unhealthy, unnatural conventions passed down from her biological parents. She did have a debt2Dot, and she honoured that debt only too well until one day she didn't. Sound familiar?
Brad also, after losing Marcia, would harp on about having done his stint, paid his debt forward, etc. As Sigmund Freud said, no boy is a man until his father's dead, to which Jung replied, there are many forms of death. My dad, post Marcia, had died, at least to some extent. Nonetheless, when he did pass decades later, I now realise, Freud wasn't wrong either.
Dad's advice was adhered to so scrupulously that, in my teens and twenties, I rarely had a few thousand dollars to my name. I often feel as though money is something I'm supposed to spend so I can see from whence the next dose will arrive. I also appreciate the value of pimping my citizenship. The cha-ching in Wendy's eyes would have been ne'er so bright had I been a Kiwi.
The 90s put my frugality on steroids. Not only did I have mountains of debt accruing, despite YouCon's very generous full ride for the first two years and most of the third, my eligibility had increased, which exacerbated my leverage.
My father never admitted to me that yes, a spouse has a good reason to believe that xhe will be kept in a standard to which xhe has become accustomed. Perhaps that is why I married women with apparently modest backgrounds. Then again, I was an attorney egg in my first marriage and a rooster in my second. Incoincidentally, at the time I met my second spouse, I was consistently earning more than she, an income level and stability which I'd not achieved before, or since.
forever my home
