Adjusting Down: a Becoming Theme

I finally got the chance to buy and read Michelle Obama’s Becoming, and I think it’s a wonderful book.

Michelle Obama has inspired me with her own characteristic goodness. But more than that, she inspired me by how she was able to overcome the negative voices that she internalized as a girl that suggested she might not be “good enough”—she was able to rise above questioning herself to the point that she committed herself to showing all children, especially the disadvantaged, that she believes in them, that all are “enough” in an innate way, and that she personally believes in them. I love that she has followed up on whole groups for years and keeps involved.

I love her commitment to her family, both her original family and hers and Barack’s. I love how she invested herself in his extended family as well. I love how incredibly bright and insightful she is about how to balance the needs of very different upbringings and styles.

These themes and one more made me want to write my own experience relating to them.

Adjusting Down

This theme in Michelle Obama’s book Becoming was what played out when she realized she didn’t like her career and made the jump to something she really believed in doing, with the result that she had to adjust to living on half her previous salary. She makes the point that because she had grown up making cents count, this wasn’t as hard an adjustment as it might be for people who grow up with rich privilege.

I didn’t grow up quite the same way as the Robinsons, nor were we in the privileged class. We were comfortably off, but my parents were both pretty strict with money. We kids didn’t get an allowance. We had to ask for whatever we wanted, and we learned very early that if there wasn’t a very good case for the want, then forget it. I became used to evaluating my wants against the usual lecture and deciding whether it was worth the risk to even ask. I tried never to ask for anything but something that was a certain “yes.”

What wasn’t fair about this system was that my brothers were encouraged to get paper routes and other jobs as early as they could so that they had spending money to do with as they wished. But the girls in the family were not allowed to do this. Usually my parents weren’t sexist, but this is one case they were extremely, irritatingly so. I got so angry about this, to no avail. They weren’t going to let me get a job, except babysitting, and I hated babysitting. I didn’t know the first thing about babies, so I was quite frightened deep inside by the idea of being left in charge of a baby of any kind. What was easier to do was to claim that I didn’t like little kids and stick to that story.

I did babysit a few times in my later teens. I didn’t discipline much, opting instead for taking the role of Chief of Imaginative Games. I led my little charges in piling all the cushions and pillows in the house in one room to make a huge fort from which we all fired all kinds of weapons at imaginary enemies; or lining up the dining room chairs to make a paddle boat in which we navigated huge rivers with waterfalls and rapids and every kind of water monster we could think of; or building islands all over the house and claiming that all the floors were quicksand. My method of getting them into bed was to tell them they could stay up until their parents got home, if they would help me out by getting into pajamas so we could play until then, and then they had to agree to dive into their beds at the first noise of the car in the driveway. That worked almost every time. I got asked back a lot, and mothers told me their kids loved me. I bet they did. I wonder what stories they told their parents about our adventures.

My first job was cleaning house for a lady who was dying of cancer. I did that every week until I moved away, and she died not long after I moved. I was sorry I had to quit before she was gone. She didn’t pay me much, but I did gain a real appreciation for fine things. She had a lot of money in the things in that house, and I loved working with her things, keeping everything just the way she liked it. I used to pretend that I was a rich lady and that I had all these fine things. It never occurred to me to pretend that when I was a rich lady I would hire a housekeeper. Oh no, I would clean everything myself, naturally.

Then I got a job folding tee shirts and packaging them in a silk-screen factory. The silk screener would put the newly screened tee shirts on a conveyor belt that ran through an oven-type dryer out to me on the other end. I grabbed the shirt by its neck, flipped it flat on my table, and whipped it into a neat, trifolded square. I slipped it into the plastic bag and stapled the labeled top onto the bag. One, two, three. I was very fast. We did more than a shirt a minute sometimes; I got paid 4¢ a shirt until the silk screener quit and a new one came on. He was one of the part-owners of the factory, and he reduced my wages to 3¢ a shirt. I bet now that the other two owners never knew he did that, and I was too timid to protest, although I was mad inside. I got paid in cash, you see.

Finally I developed some backbone. I was no longer living at home and had to make my expenses. I got another job at a temporary agency that sent me to work for a computer company that made floppy disks and hard disks. Floppy disks had been reduced from 8-inch diameter plastic to 5-inch, and two years after I started there, the new 3-inch disks began being made.

By this time I had decided I didn’t want to be a factory worker all my life and needed to go to college, so I was saving as much as I could. My parents couldn’t help me, they said, so I was on my own. I had to make my little salary stretch for rent, food, and other expenses. I tried to reduce “other expenses” to near zero. I rode my bike everywhere, knowing I couldn’t afford a car. My entertainment budget was zero, so if something cost, I didn’t do it. I did have friends with cars, so we went to the beach a lot and other places that were free. I thought I was doing pretty good, learning to live frugally.

But being a college student was a different reality. I had made enough money to pay for my tuition, rent, and food for the year. But books and supplies were more expensive than I had thought, and there always seemed to be other expenses that I was expected to cover. I ran out of food money about two months before the end of the school year. I had stocked up on ramen noodles and a huge bag of carrots, and that’s what I ate for those last seven weeks. People kept wanting to give me treats and lend me money and offered to pay my way, but I wouldn’t let them do anything. I was determined that I was going to do this myself, and if I had made a mistake, I was darned well going to suffer its consequences myself.

The next year I worked three months longer and delayed going back to school until I had enough. Then I got on-campus jobs the rest of my school career and by declaring myself financially emancipated, I qualified for grants-in-aid and other ways of covering school expenses. I didn’t have to take out any loans for my undergraduate degree, but graduate school was way more expensive, so I took out loans, as small as I could manage on, and was able to repay them all right afterward.

Skipping over my years of employment, adjusting downward became a theme again after I had to quit working for health reasons, and after my husband had also retired. Now we don’t have the income to indulge in whims. We don’t have the income to eat out every week. We don’t have the income to fix everything that breaks, or to replace things. We have had to make decisions between things we want to do and sacrifice one thing for another. Because of ever-rising health care costs, exacerbated by last year’s Republican party tax cuts that actually raised our taxes a good deal (a repeat of what happened back when Pres. Reagan and the Republican Congress overhauled the tax code in 1986), we are now cutting into our food budget, because there are no other budget items we can cut now. Right now this is not a terrible thing—we are no longer eating snack foods, processed food, red meats, and other junk that we are healthier without. We shudder to think what we are going to have to do when we can no longer afford medical insurance. Part of the family is on Medicare; I am not old enough yet, nor am I disabled.

I wish I could write a book that would sell well, but I’m no Michelle Obama! And I’m not someone who can write good fiction either. Ah well! I’ve learned, like Michelle, that I’m “enough”, and I have confidence that I will always find a way to have enough.