December 5th, 2019

Heritable Privilege or, the Story of My Futon

Yeah, so I didn’t post for six months and I also did not finish my novel, but SURPRISE, I did try to finish my novel and this at least resulted in my thinking a lot about it.

One of the things the book is about is inheritance, in a more literal fashion than novels tend to take on this topic–what does inherited wealth and attitudes towards wealth look like and what happens when there isn’t any? (it’s actually kind of a funny novel, I swear–this is only a small aspect of it!) A way I work on fiction, and probably one of the reasons why it takes forever, is to look at what my characters are going through and try to see how that same issue is played out in my own life, or how it could be–is that autobiographical writing or the exact opposite of autobiographical writing???? I don’t know.

SO one thing I’ve been looking at is thrift. I am extremely thrifty–I am organized and responsible about money and I like to save, sometimes to a silly degree. I have the time and energy to invest in thriftiness almost like a mini-hobby, which is of course the result of middle-class privilege. People who are in more precarious financial situations do no have the time or focus to work on getting the best possible deals or finding a way to do without certain costs by putting in time or energy. I’ve become increasingly aware as adult that my ways of saving money are the result of having a bit of it to start with.

A very simple example of this sort of thing is insurance premiums and deductibles. With most insurance plans, what portion of any insured cost (say, damages from a car accident) I would have to pay (the deductible) is determined by how much my monthly payment is (the premium). So if I can pay only $100 a month, my deductible might be the first $1000 of any repair costs, but if I am willing to pay $150 a month, maybe the deductible would only be $500 (these numbers are pretty random, I’m not an actuary–it’s just an example). Basically, if I can float a bit more on the monthly cost, I can prevent a giant emergency cost down the road. Who can afford that? Not everyone.

But all insurance is a gamble, and this is strictly a dollars game–I wanted a richer example that’s more about inherited privilege and family support. Here is something I remembered from my own life, which I think demonstrates what I’m driving at a little better:

When I was in first-year university, I lived in residence but in second year I moved into an apartment with three friends–cheaper, more freedom, more fun. My parents helped me get some furniture before the semester started and instead of a bed I asked for a futon. That way I could have both a bed and a couch for the price of one! I also asked for a slightly nicer futon–I remember the bottom-of-the-line futon and frame cost about $250 and mine was over $300, because I wanted it to last a long time. I was able to do this, of course, because my parents bought it for me, helped me transport it to my apartment, and set it up.

Then it was my bed/couch for three years, until I left Montreal, and here is where the story gets a little extra. When I moved back to Ontario, I opened the phonebook and found a mover to ship all my battered university girl sh*t back home for me. I had too much stuff for anyone to take it in a car but not really an entire moving van’s worth of stuff, and anyway, no one wanted to drive it for me. Most people I know who left the city sold all their stuff they couldn’t carry for a few bucks or just gave it to friends who were staying or left it on the street on moving day for whoever wanted it.

Not me! I shipped a used dresser I had bought for $20 and which had the date 1984 painted on it, my kitchen table and chairs, several bookcases, lamps, all my kitchen stuff, a coffee table, even my broom and mop, a tv, and yes, that futon. All this cost me several hundred dollars, which was probably far more than the street value of the contents of the load but crucially, would be far far less than it would cost to buy it all again, not to mention the time and effort associated with doing so.

Obviously, I took money from my parents to do this, since I was unemployed at the time, and then I stored all that stuff in their garage for months while they parked their car in the driveway and I looked for a job and we all studiously avoided talking about where this situation was leading. Then eventually I did get a job (two actually) in Toronto and I lined up an apartment I could pretty much pay for and my parents took my stuff out of their garage and drove it to me in their station wagon a little bit at a time until I was reunited with all my belongings and became what we all pretend to understand as an independent woman, since I stopped living with or taking money from parents at that point.

But hahaha, right? Sure, I was working and paying for my own apartment but my apartment was full of furniture my parents had helped me buy and assemble and ship from another province and store and then brought to me??!?! Also through it all, I had tonnes of emotional support and encouragement and cheerleading, which is another kind of privilege. I should point out, the employment situation I moved to Toronto for was fairly precarious, and someone from a less privileged and supportive background, someone who didn’t know she was free to fail and retreat to her childhood home might never have tried it in the first place–and I wound up with a fairly awesome career because I did try and persisted trying. Hmmm…

And that futon persisted too! I’m not sure at what point this moves from being an interesting point about inherited privilege to a sad story about a woman who lives with all her furniture from the 90s, but here is the rest of the history of that futon: It was my bed and my couch in my first, bachelor apartment in Toronto, and then graduated to being my couch in the living room of my one-bedroom, and it is now that couch in my home office. I sleep on it occasionally, if I’m sick and too cough-y to be pleasant company in the marital bed, and it’s definitely not what it once was, but it’s still comfortable enough for a decent night’s sleep, and allows me to be reasonably hospitable to others when they need a place to crash. FYI!

It’s also the reason I didn’t by my first actual non-futon couch until I was 35 (when Mark and I moved in together, he had one, but then the cats destroyed it). I guess I have low standards and don’t necessarily get charmed by new stuff unless the old stuff has disintegrated, but of the things that were in that moving truck in 2001, I kept the bookcases, the microwave, and cutlery until I moved in with Mark in 2011, and I still have 1.5 of the lamps (1.5 broke along the way), the shoe rack, the coffee table, the kitchen table, two chairs, many books, a plastic cupboard, and the futon.

I’d say I got my money’s worth. Which in itself is an interesting expression, isn’t it?