It deeply clarified being on my own for me. It sort of happened a few months after my mother got all of this money, gobs and gobs of cash, from a lawsuit settlement. Prior to that, she’d been laid off from AT&T and was starting a small fashion business. So the deal was that in order to maintain owning the co-op, I would have to continue working full time. She had also found out, she’d accidentally become pregnant from a brief affair. Then she got sick, our plans to welcome the baby, her last chance, were nixed with a therapeutic abortion. So she threw herself into stretching out her savings, starting up her business and I paid for half of the household expenses/mortgage from 18 to about 21.
It wasn’t horrible. I worked at the Antique Boutique in the Village and got to go to lots of great parties and nightclubs, like Lime Lite. But I did feel weird and wistful at all of the NYU students who came through the store.
Then the money came along and I was freeeeeeeeeeee! We picked out a house and a new car and furniture for the house and had the co-op in Brooklyn and a huge house in the mountains in Pennsylvania where we’d vacationed for years and my mother organized trips/timeshares/sold real estate.
Then I went to visit a friend at SUNY Buffalo and while strolling down a grassy knoll, the Voice of God told me that Buffalo was the next spiritual move. Pointedly SUNY Buffalo. I’d already sent in my applications to Penn State and John Jay College in Manhattan but I came home weeks later and explained my epiphany. By this time we’d sat down with a financial planner and specifically a trust fund was constructed for me, to pointedly pay for college and have some left over.
However my mother said if I chose Buffalo she would erase the trust. Her reasoning was that the new house was in Pennsylvania and Univ. of Penn about 100 miles away so I could commute. Of course years later I would learn that for the first year you have to live on campus so her entanglement, enmeshment scheme wouldn’t have worked anyway. And in the relative scheme of things—-mountains and highways and such—-Buffalo is just like lower Pennsylvania to get to the mountain house or to NYC, to the apartment.
Her threat irked me. So I politely told her, for all of my sacrifice, to try and extort me—-she could go fuck herself. I would pack up 90% of my stuff and go to Buffalo——as God had instructed. Yes, I called her bluff so she relented and we took a full Amtrak car of my stuff up to Buffalo. But she played stingy on helping me get an apartment, a car, postdated a$1000 check for 2 weeks—-all to torture me.
Instead what she did with the money was she met a guy, Mike, in an AA meeting—-where she was wearing diamonds and a fur. He brought her flowers. He was a few days out of jail for selling crack to an undercover police officer. They called it love. I just shook my head and got—-that I was on my on.
Because I was 21 I was able to apply financially for Financial Aid as an adult and pretty much, except for a couple of months after school and then when she was dying, never lived with them, only visited.
And yes, they lost all of the money.
As I paid off my student loan—-in accrued dollars and interests, yup, it came to about the amount of the trust fund—-$50,000—-that was set up and erased for me.
But from the inner workings of the above, you can tell that money went to my mother’s head—-she used it to try and control people—-Mike, eventually her 5th husband—-until her and the brain trust that no one has ever mistaken Mike for—-went through potentially millions. What I learned from them was self-reliance and insight into how addicts transfer addiction to money and then eventually for her and bad health, to food.
There was a time when I briefly got sick from exhaustion in my Sophomore year that she swooped in——doctors, and all but she saw it as an opportunity to sort of cut my Buffalo experiment short. I went back to Buffalo a few weeks later, got my own apartment, stopped working 5 jobs and instead did only 2—-but back I went.
Years later, about 7 from when I left, they lost everything. They simply shopped and travelled and spent the principal until there was nothing left. Oh, did I mention he didn’t have to work at all for most of those 7 years?
What I will say, and say it to her I did, is I saw how even a small fortune can turn people, how there was no loyalty to me because of being my own person, being my own man. Yes, for almost a good decade I was angry, then I did therapy, had some spiritual experiences, and set aside the upset. She/They missed out on me, the wonderful person I am. But I also had to look at—-say I had stayed attached to her hip in some way—-in the house, the apartment? Eventually, Mike would have probably fallen off—-she used to harangue him something awful in front of me and later admitted she tried to play us against one another. But I, in the end, told him that my bare loyalty to him as she lay dying, was because he'd taken the bullet of her for me. I would have been enmeshed, supplanted, controlled by her, chipped away at, not independent, controlled—-like he was——-and boy did he simmer and resent it.
Yes, that independence costed me a lot of money and “fun” and “stuff” but I got to grow up and become a man. My own man. I often mused on how they literally lost their minds over no money and I just chugged along—-school, working, corporate America, etc.—-they never quite resolved themselves. I often felt that while I visited the house through those years—-and then got a lot of the furniture when they abandoned it—-I didn’t become addicted to money as they did, to that lifestyle so I’ve been more normal, mature with money. Yes, they constantly asked me about my money, how much I had, was earning, etc.? In really creepy ways—-there’s something in here about being the working African American in Black families who “makes it” and can help others get jobs, and I did, friends and cousins—-and the advantage, dubious and such, the greed, family have come at me with.
Mike even tried to sue me in court for money——while my mother was dying. I got to cross examine him in open court. I beat him AND his lawyer.
Money destroyed them.
No money for me meant no entangled attachments to my mother, Mike, that greed mentality. It is a deep life lesson to see the parental adults in your life clearly and their issues with money and attempts to control me/others.
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