[Parenting] What Money Can't Buy
Written for IndieWeb Carnival September 2026: Parenting hosted by winther blog.
Content warnings: rich people capitalism problems, parental emotional abuse, psychiatric abuse, suicidal thinking. (Yep, this is how it goes when you ask me about my parents.)
On a material level, in the present day, I'm very lucky to have the parents I have. I'm moving to a nearby city by the end of the month, and they're going to pay for all my living expenses there. Not because I have any kind of work or school opportunity, just because I want out of their house. Nobody gets to expect their parents will be as rich and indulgent as mine. I don't intend to take those advantages for granted.
On the other hand... when I say I want out of their house, I mean that as long as I live in their house I will be living with the kinds of grief, anger, and fear that give me two choices. I can deaden my emotions to the point that I also cut off my ability to feel motivation, curiosity, and joy, or I can be tense and irritable enough that I can barely handle being in the house, let alone in the same room as them. For most of the last decade (since graduating high school), I've chosen the first option. Starting this year, I've found myself unable to stop myself from choosing the second one. I've had exactly enough communication with them to determine that they're willing to pay my way to the city, so that's where I'm going.
And like... socioeconomic classes are not monoliths, but the kinds of people you surround yourself always shape your beliefs and actions to some extent. My parents were less achievement-obsessed than many of my classmates' parents, but they still sent me to school in a district with spectacularly impressive test-score metrics and an absolute disregard for actual learning and growth. And when that system started breaking me, well, there's plenty of professionals who could be paid to fix me.
They wouldn't have put it like that then. When I say those kinds of things to their faces now, they don't argue, which is probably why I get to move to the city on their dime. But I only get to play that card because it took them so long to realize what they were doing to me. The abusive therapists, the drugs, the institution. Sure, once I was off at "boarding school" in Utah they didn't have eyes on me; I understand how they were easier to con by that point. But they had years of me crying and begging them not to make me go talk to the therapists who were "helping me". Years of watching me spiral downwards no matter what new drug or what dose increase they tried. They looked the other way every time I said they were hurting me, because I said it loud and angry, and the people with the degrees and the clipboards gave them calm promises and eloquent explanations.
It's not as simple as "rich people trust society to work, and professionals to help." It's also got a lot to do with my mom's own life story, where the mental health industry seems to have done okay by her, and so they trusted that the same would be done to me. But it's also... I know that if I'd grown up in a lower income bracket, I would have had different problems. Maybe worse ones. But for all the financial stressors my parents never dealt with, there's more to raising a child than throwing money at their problems.
So I'm of two minds about moving to a big city, specifically with a better arts and activism scene. I have zero qualms about letting my parents cover my needs. I'm pretty sure at this point they're not going to take the money back, or add more strings than they've already put. On the other hand, if I'm doing indie arts stuff, and trying to get involved in mutual aid and local activism, I know I'm going to meet lots of people who didn't grow up rich and privileged, and who might not expect to get along with someone who's not used to most people's economic realities. I'll either have to dodge the question of "so what do you do for work" a bunch, or figure out how to spin the truth in a way that emphasizes how I'm trying to use what I have to make things better. Which of course puts me on the hook to get out there and make things better. That's a good thing, but it's also a little stressful to hit the ground running with.
The other answer, of course, is to get a job or get back in school or something. I don't do well at either of those things. Remember up top how I mentioned that trying to repress all the bad emotions, the problem-behavior ones, deadens me to the point where I don't have much motivation? Yeah, I don't expect that to go away all at once as soon as I'm farther from home.
Plus I'm still trying to get off those psych drugs, which will take the better part of a decade if I do it as slow as the psych-survivor groups recommend. I can keep myself safe and physically cared for at slightly higher dose reductions, but only if I can handle the potential that I'll be functionally useless for about two weeks every couple months. That makes it possible to mostly keep up a creative practice. Maybe even some sort of freelance work, or self-paced online training? But not any kind of regular employment or education. When I said I wanted to get involved with the local arts and activist communities, partly that's because those things are interesting to me and useful to the community, but also because those are the kinds of groups that are less likely to demand a minimum time dedication.
I think I'd also like to set aside some of the budget my parents are giving me, and dedicate it to mutual aid and local nonprofit projects. They tried to teach me and my brother to set aside part of our allowance for tzedakah when we were younger. (The Hebrew word for the Jewish responsibility to share with those who have less.) But when we lived in such a rich little bubble, the idea of "helping those around us" was kind of abstract, just a ritual of dropping money in a jar every week and not really thinking where it was going to be donated. I'm going to a Rosh Hashanah event this weekend, run by a Jewish-led anti-Zionist/pro-Palestine activist group; I don't know much about the organization, but it'll be a good way to start feeling out what people are up to in the city, in that group and in others. It would be nice to mean something to someone outside myself.
...if I stayed in their house feeling half-dead for so many years, it's because I felt like the stress of living in the world would break me. Why care about anyone else when just living my own life hurt so much I was already on the edge of suicide so often? I decided the only real good I could do in the world was not die, because the only people I really mattered to anymore were my parents, and they didn't want to outlive me. Otherwise I was just a statistic; one more rich kid eating up a disproportionate amount of resources, but still just one out of many.
I think I had it backwards the whole time. What's good for me, what's good for the world. Maybe even what's good for my parents. I haven't really cared about their well-being for a long time, outside of their ability to fund my continued existence. But for the sake of the other people around them, once I'm gone, maybe it will help someone else if my parents learn their lesson from me. Money and good intentions may be necessary to fix certain problems, but they are rarely sufficient.