a personal side of my privilege.
my parents never really had money. i don’t remember ever not being in debt. 3 kids, pets, and a car or 2 (that were always at least 10 years old) and my mom’s student loan payments were always draining our income. they owned a house and of course had to pay bills, etc. even though my mom was an occupational theoropist at a hospital owned by Healtheast she didn’t have healthcare, and from 8-16 neither did i. i don’t remember ever going to the denist and after we moved to Minnesota all our doctor’s visits were based on how much money they had. and they were all at the sliding scale neighbourhood clinic where you weighted about half an hour. we rarely had money to fix plumbing/heating/electricity problems in our hundred year old house and most winters i couldn’t sleep in my room because it was so cold. the neighbourhood we lived in had one of the highest crime rates in our city and the year i moved back to austin (when i was 19) the highest homocide rate (4 alone in the month of january).
like i said before, i have feel i was very privileged. no matter what money problems we had, or how little i actually got to spend time with my parents or how often our cars worked or whatever, i always got a lot of love. from them and my sister and brother. i had most likely the most emotionaly supportive family of anyone i knew.
my siblings were a lot older than me and wrote me letters after they went to college. my sister made me a little book out of pink construction paper about my life: from peeing on the floor and blaming it on the dog to my future of traveling and charming everyone i met. my brother sent me specail stationary to write him letters, when i went vegan (at 11) my sister sent me her old cookzines. they called me often and told me how much they loved/missed me.
my parents weren’t consistant in their attention and could be kind of self invovled and neglectful. but they were supportive of my choices and were intelligent, loving and very liberal. my earliest memories are of my dad putting me in one of his shirts to wear to bed, putting on an old blues or Velvet Underground record and letting me dance around our living room until they put me to bed.
most of my life i spent watching PBS, hearing/reading articles about science, politics, music and literature. my mom had worked for Planned Parenthood and talked to me about sex education and the importance of abortion and birth control. my father studied history and talked to me about labor movements, the civil rights movements and the impact that music had. they both talked to me about who they might vote for (although there were many times my dad didn’t vote because he had to work all day and was too tired to go vote on his breaks) and why. my mom was on the board of PFLAG and led the transgendered support group. both of my parents had been councelers at different points in their lives.
they taught me about art history, greek history and music history. my dad still calls me when he hears a radio show or sees something on PBS he thinks i would want to hear about (usually something about women in music or anceint cultures or silent films). we watching foreign films, 60’s art films, silent movies, 50’s scifi flicks and documentaries.
when i was 15 (and none of us had health insurance) my mother had surgery to remove a tumor in her brain, the first time. we had over $90,000 in medical bills. later in high school my parent filed for bankrupcy, for the second time. even with all the medical problems both my parents have had, even when i lent them them money, even when my dad worked 60 hours a week and my mom worked 30 and we still barely had enough money for food, even when i made all the meals and sometimes even bought the meals, even when i was afraid to walk down the street in my neighbourhood, even now when me& my siblings pay for my parents to visit, even now when i work my ass of, even now when i fight sexism daily and save almost all my money for school, i will never deny my privilege. what i wanna know is how come other people can’t claim their privilege?
while having a loving, supportive, intelligent family is a right a child has, not every child gets it. not every adult gets it! just like being paid the same for the same amount of work is right we have, but don’t get. so, while all these things we talk about as “rights” are indeed rights that doesn’t mean everyone has them. growing up in a supportive household where you can be out to your parents and you are raised to be critically minded and watch/read intelligent things is more than many of my friends who grow up in more stable households with more money got.
so, on this very personaly level, i feel like i had all the privilege in the world…
