Previous Thoughts

B.C.'s Thoughts: Class Distinctions

People Who Live in Class Houses

Recently, on one of my favourite newsgroup, there was a discussion about class distinctions -- we were talking about how coming from certain classes has affected our outlooks on life, and (more importantly) the ways that we communicate. This discussion prompted me to write the following as an e-mail to a sweetie.

When the conversation started, I mentioned to my partner that I couldn't figure out what social class I came from. That struck me as pretty stupid as soon as I voiced it, 'cause where money is concerned I came from a pretty straight-forward middle-class family.

My parents married at 20 years old, because my mother was pregnant. I only barely remember the early days when my mother was supporting the family. For most of my childhood, my mother worked in a medical lab -- the people who tested blood samples taken by doctors and hospitals. She had wanted to be a nurse, but couldn't afford to go to nursing school. She supported the family when my father was training to become an electrician.

My father was an electrician with one of the chemical companies in Sarnia. Chemical companies were the major industry in Sarnia. Trivia point for you: a few miles outside of Sarnia is the town of Petrolia, where oil was first discovered in North America. Both of my parents were salaried, and it was a two salaried family, which was unusual in Sarnia. We had a house with a swimming pool. There were some important lucky breaks along the way, but I guess I'm a child of the middle class.

But neither of my parents came from the middle class. My father grew up on a farm: the farm that my great-great-grandfather bought when he got off the boat from Ireland. My father was one of seven kids living in a three bedroom farmhouse outside of Sarnia. I recall once talking to my aunt Janey, who was the youngest of the seven, about how destitute they were at times.

My mother's father died very shortly after they moved to Petrolia; my grandmother ran a greasy spoon to make ends meet until she married my step-grandfather, who, among other things, was once the mayor of Petrolia and a middle-management-type in one of the chemical plants. My step-grandfather, therefore, always struck me as relatively affluent, but I didn't really internalize the idea that it wasn't always that way. There was weird money stuff going on in that family, too. I once heard my mother say that my step-grandfather wouldn't give her the money to go to nursing school because she wasn't his daughter.

I guess what's starting to register for me is the fact that I grew up in a transitional class. I grew up with parents who were reared in a particular class, but amongst peers who were largely middle class (or even upper middle class). My closest friends in high school were the sons of doctors and the people in charge of the chemical plants. And suddenly I'm starting to understand some things about a sense of there being a gap between me and my peers.

I've also been thinking about the role of money in my family. I have a real button about the suggestion that only childs are "spoiled".  I'm an only child, and I didn't get very much attention, or love, and I bristle when people say that people like me are spoiled. If anything, 'neglect' describes my home life as a kid. But the 'spoiled' phrase came up a lot when I was growing up, because my parents are pretty much the only parents in the extended family that had only one child. I always had a lot of things, and my aunts and uncles and cousins would tell me that I was spoiled. Suddenly, I think I understand a few things about why my parents tried to show their love by giving me things.

And now there's me, the second University-educated person in my whole family (my aunt Janey was the first). I'm thirty-four years old, well-employed, and I'd once planned to be rich. But there're whole aspects of my upwardly-mobile peers that are so completely foreign to me. Insert fish-out-of-water cliche here.

My partner comes from a far less ambiguous working class family (in Toronto, where the dollar doesn't stretch quite as far as it does in Sarnia). We've often joked about how our backgrounds are so different, and yet I think that there's some very comfortable common outlook/way of looking at the world/language between us that I've never been able to account for before.

I haven't yet figured out what any of this means. There's no structure. But the neuron fire has been illuminating.

Copyright © 2001 by B.C. Holmes. Last updated April 15th, 2001

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