Unentitlement Mentality

If you think this is going to be one of those right-wing Republican diatribes in which I go off on how my tax dollars support no end of entitlement programs and how it JUST ISN’T RIGHT, well. You’re wrong. Ha! I don’t often start a blog post by telling you you’re wrong, do I?

Hey, it’s Friday, and I’m feeling like kicking up my heels. :)

No, I’m not going to point fingers here, except at myself. And, technically, Doug’s self, too. And maybe my own kids, but not yours, so don’t worry! You are safe, but of course free to apply anything I might say here to your own situation. I’m generous that way.

There’s a great article over at MSN Money by an personal finance writer I admire, Liz Pulliam Weston. I haven’t read the whole thing, because I didn’t want it to influence what I write here too much. But the gist of it is this: She suggests if we want to create a fantastically workable budget for ourselves, we might consider basing it on how our parents lived back in the day.

In other words, which things do we now consider ourselves entitled to (we call them necessities, by the way) that either didn’t exist at all back then, or were considered luxuries only the wealthy could afford?

I won’t lie. My family always had a honkin’ console TV, in a nice walnut cabinet which blended attractively with the used furniture Mom and Dad purchased when they got married in 1950. That’s right—used. They got a green couch, matching club chair, coffee table, dining room table, chairs, china cabinet, double bed and dresser for $500, and they were set.

And I mean set for life. When my mother moved out of her last house five years ago, I inherited the green chair. Of course, it had been reupholstered many times over the years, but you did not get rid of a chair with good bones for want of new fabric. My daughter uses the dresser that was my father’s (made in the depression era) and several others of their “original” used pieces survive, as well.

A TV, though, was a new purchase. And we didn’t have just one, either. We had a tiny black and white portable in the breakfast room, where we ate all our meals. Once a week, it got turned on during dinner and we watched Let’s Make A Deal together over fish sticks or spaghetti. (I always rooted for Door Number Three, don’t ask me why.)

So there you have it. A television was our only non-necessity. Unless you count a washing machine. We had no dryer the entire time I lived at home. I’ve hung more diapers on the line outside than I can count—and that was before I had my own kids (who also largely wore cloth diapers…)

Until I was ten, we had no car. NO CAR, people! We lived on the bus line so my father (who never learned to drive) could get to work, and near church, school, and the grocery store so we could walk there every day. And yes, we walked to the grocery store EVERY DAY. Mom always had a pram with a new baby to push. The back of the pram had a metal basket retrofitted to hold one paper grocery sack. The heaviest bag went into it.

One bag of groceries per day might have cut it, even for a large family, but we also often had to carry Dad’s dry-cleaned suits home from the cleaners! So it took the whole pack of us, every day. On pay day, we celebrated. Mom pushed the pram containing the carton of 16-oz glass Coke bottles, our big treat for the month. Then Liz, Mary, and I each hefted a small bag of food.

Twice a year, when Easter or School Picture Day beckoned, we’d go into the Jay Kay Shop. Mrs. Jay Kay helped Mom choose one new outfit for each of us to add to our sketchy wardrobes. My mother would not purchase cheap clothing or shoes for us, period. Quality all the way! So we had VERY few clothes.

Of course, we wore uniforms to school. Navy blue jumpers with white blouses and saddle oxfords. The jumpers could go awhile without being laundered, but those white blouses got put through their paces, let me tell you. Iron City, every day of their poor overworn lives. And the saddles? Polished EVERY night, and not only that. The shoe laces were removed and SCRUBBED BY HAND on a bar of soap at least twice per week. Dirty shoelaces were a mark of particularly poor breeding, and while I suppose we were lower middle-class, we had instilled into us the Pride of Shoelace Ownership.

Houses were small and crowded. Three kids per bedroom? Normal. No such thing as privacy, unless you count a single dresser drawer as “having your own space.” Closets were unbelivably minuscule in those days. If we’d had more than two outfits per season and more than three pairs of shoes (school shoes, play shoes, and church shoes), times three kids to a room, those puppies would have overflowed!

It goes without saying that Mom washed her own dishes, peeled potatoes every night with a sharp knife, and made everything from scratch. I was married before I even knew there was such a thing as “instant mashed potatoes” or “instant pudding.” I can literally count on ONE HAND the number of times my parents took us out to eat when I was growing up. (Now, my grandparents, that was different. They were rich, and did give us some of the things my parents couldn’t.)

Vacations? Not so much. OK, once, to the Ozarks. I was in the fourth grade. It was a blast. I had a two piece (not bikini, but still) pink swimsuit and I thought I was something. Got a horrible sunburn because I didn’t know any better than to “lay out” for most of an afternoon. My parents didn’t know any better, either! Heck, they’d never been on a vacation!

One telephone, pink princess, in the breakfast room. My father believed that phones were created for “emergencies only.” He was shocked when his daughters wanted to talk to their friends on the phone at night after being with them all day. I can’t tell you how many times he’d walk through the kitchen in disgust and say, “What’s that pink thing growing out of your ear? Get off the phone! There might be an emergency!”

Books were a luxury we could not afford except for special occasions, but reading was a necessity for all of us. The public library was my favorite place in the universe. I could not fathom my good fortune when the librarian informed me I’d be able to check out eight books at a time! Why, that number would last me for…eight days! My poor mother had to walk me there (before car) to get my stack of books, a mile each way, pushing the pram and with the non-reading tots in tow, OFTEN. If I could canonize her Saint Mom, I would.

There are a million and one other things my parents managed without. A gym membership would have been laughable (they got all the exercise they needed, thanks…), and a power mower too much to maintain (Dad pushed a rotary mower and never complained…). Until I was thirteen, the house had a single room air conditioner in the 8x10 family room. On very hot nights in those upstairs bedrooms (maybe 40 nights per year), my sisters and I, whose beds were against the three windowed walls, slept with our heads in the sills, the attic fan pulling in refreshing roasted air.

My parents did not think they were poor, and in fact, they weren’t. They chose to spend their money on Catholic schools, an excellent value for their dollar, by the way. They paid off a twenty-year mortgage in eleven years. The house only cost $17,000, but doubling up on payments still represented a considerable accomplishment.

I don’t want to ditch my car or my microwave or my DVD player. What I do want, though, is to be more honest about what’s really necessary in this life. What’s truly valuable. What I do want is to spend less time and money gathering stuff unto myself, cleaning it, displaying it, sorting it, storing it, cateloguing it, filing it, wasting it, and then throwing it away.

What I do want is to have more time and money (and strength!) available to help those with less.

Jesus had those two female friends named Mary and Martha, remember? Sisters. One of them liked to throw lavish parties but she got worn out easily trying to keep up with it all, especially when Mary sat down for a spell to visit with Jesus.

The Lord had to let Martha know that while all her frenzied party preparations were OK, her sister Mary had chosen the “better part.” And then He said, “and it won’t be taken from her.”

I’ve still got so much to learn. In thinking back to the sacrificial way my parents were content to live, I’ve got to ask myself: In my own quest to acquire that to which I’m obviously “entitled,” have I missed out on the Better Part?

Because He’s the last thing in the world I’d want taken from me.

Posted by Katy on 04/27/07 at 06:21 AM

Fallible Comments...

What a great post! We would all do well to remember what we can do without.

Have you read, "A Girl Named Zippy"? If you haven't, you must. Give it a few chapters, but there are some stories in there that I can almost guarantee you will love. Your post today reminds me so much of that book.
Posted by Anna on 04/27/07 at 11:59 AM
I feel like you peeked a little into my own childhood. What you describe is so similar to my experience, we really MUST be sisters in a parallel universe. Yes, I remember. I remember not having a remote and getting up to change the TV channel. I remember not having a car until I was 10. Walking to school and food from scratch. Vacations up in the mountains in a cruddy cabin where we did all the cooking. But we thought it was heaven. They had a real swimming pool!

It's unbelievable what "progress" has done to our world. People actually complain about how long the microwave takes to heat up dinner, and when Netflix takes more than one day to send a movie.

Progress. It's given us everything the world has to offer, and taken the godly virtues of patience and contentment away from us forever.

I miss some of those old days when we got by on getting by, don't you?
Posted by Suzan on 04/27/07 at 04:29 PM
We got most of our clothes out of the Good Will. It was collected from the townsfolk at the church where my dad was the pastor. Before the Good Will truck came to pick everything up, we could go through the stack of boxes for clothing, etc. The problem was, it was a small town (250 people), and people noticed if you were wearing something they had recently donated to Good Will.

Once a year we got new (not Good Will) shoes and mom would make us an Easter dress out of fabric we bought from a catalog. Mom was and still is an excellent seamstress, but the results were still sometimes a little embarrassing.

I never had a new "store-bought" dress until I was a Sophomore in High School. Winnie Mears (about 70 years old) came to our house one day and told us she had bought this dress for herself and realized it was too young for her and maybe I would like it. It was a sleveless pink linen dress with scallops and it fit perfectly and I loved it. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized Winnie bought that dress with me in mind. She's long gone but I will always love her for that gift - not just for the dress, but for pretending it was not charity. It was the first time I ever felt normal.
Posted by alison on 04/30/07 at 08:44 AM
This post reminded me of something a friend told me...she and her 5-year-old son were looking at a Sesame Street DVD, I believe, and she mentioned that it's been on since she was his age. (uh, we're 30-somethings.) And he wanted to know what other movies she bought in the store when she was little.

When she told him that you couldn't buy movies/TV shows in the store then, he just couldn't wrap his little mind around it. What? You had to actually wait until it was on?

My 4-year-old daughter refers to when I was her age as the "old, old days," and it gets me every time. (Grandma's time was the "old, old, OLD days" and before that was the dinosaurs.)
Posted by Jennifer on 05/01/07 at 01:26 PM
Anna--Thanks for recommending A Girl Named Zippy. I'd seen it in the store but hadn't looked at it. Now I will, and I've added it to my wish list. Fun!

Suzan--You are right!! I am not a huge fan of "progress" myself. It breeds anxiety and ungratefulness, IMO.

alison--GREAT story about Winnie's dress! What a lovely lady to be so kind to you. I taught myself to sew in the fifth grade, and made my own clothes for many years. For some reason, Mom couldn't afford a new dress for me, but she didn't mind spending a few dollars for fabric.

Jennifer--Kids!! One of my great-nephews, by age 18 months, was taking credit cards out of his mother's purse and swiping them between the couch cushions! That's how familiar he was with "swiping." I'm afraid I grew up in the Old, Old, OLD days.....
Posted by Katy on 05/01/07 at 02:37 PM
Types of financial investments include shares, other equity investment, and bonds (including bonds denominated in foreign currencies). These financial assets are then expected to provide income or positive future cash flows, and may increase or decrease in value giving the investor capital gains or losses.
Posted by stock update on 11/02/10 at 02:56 PM

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Personal blog of christian writer & fallible mom Katy McKenna Raymond in Kansas City, Missouri Katy is represented by Greg Johnson at WordServe Literary Read more Katy at LateBoomer.net Follow Katy on Twitter Follow Katy on Facebook 123 Recent Posts Try Becoming Brenda Starr Off Beat Scattered That’s It So I’ve Finally Signed With An Agent. Now What? The Spoon Sciatica Sweetheart A Woman’s Train of Thought Has No Caboose However much we own, we are all still living on borrowed time After all, when restaurants shrink portions, they don’t shrink prices. As with everything in life, balance is key. Slow down, you move too fast… Yeah, I know. I have issues. Search Advanced Search Syndicate Login E me at katy @ ngenius.com	Unentitlement Mentality If you think this is going to be one of those right-wing Republican diatribes in which I go off on how my tax dollars support no end of entitlement programs and how it JUST ISN’T RIGHT, well. You’re wrong. Ha! I don’t often start a blog post by telling you you’re wrong, do I? Hey, it’s Friday, and I’m feeling like kicking up my heels. :) No, I’m not going to point fingers here, except at myself. And, technically, Doug’s self, too. And maybe my own kids, but not yours, so don’t worry! You are safe, but of course free to apply anything I might say here to your own situation. I’m generous that way. There’s a great article over at MSN Money by an personal finance writer I admire, Liz Pulliam Weston. I haven’t read the whole thing, because I didn’t want it to influence what I write here too much. But the gist of it is this: She suggests if we want to create a fantastically workable budget for ourselves, we might consider basing it on how our parents lived back in the day. In other words, which things do we now consider ourselves entitled to (we call them necessities, by the way) that either didn’t exist at all back then, or were considered luxuries only the wealthy could afford? I won’t lie. My family always had a honkin’ console TV, in a nice walnut cabinet which blended attractively with the used furniture Mom and Dad purchased when they got married in 1950. That’s right—used. They got a green couch, matching club chair, coffee table, dining room table, chairs, china cabinet, double bed and dresser for $500, and they were set. And I mean set for life. When my mother moved out of her last house five years ago, I inherited the green chair. Of course, it had been reupholstered many times over the years, but you did not get rid of a chair with good bones for want of new fabric. My daughter uses the dresser that was my father’s (made in the depression era) and several others of their “original” used pieces survive, as well. A TV, though, was a new purchase. And we didn’t have just one, either. We had a tiny black and white portable in the breakfast room, where we ate all our meals. Once a week, it got turned on during dinner and we watched Let’s Make A Deal together over fish sticks or spaghetti. (I always rooted for Door Number Three, don’t ask me why.) So there you have it. A television was our only non-necessity. Unless you count a washing machine. We had no dryer the entire time I lived at home. I’ve hung more diapers on the line outside than I can count—and that was before I had my own kids (who also largely wore cloth diapers…) Until I was ten, we had no car. NO CAR, people! We lived on the bus line so my father (who never learned to drive) could get to work, and near church, school, and the grocery store so we could walk there every day. And yes, we walked to the grocery store EVERY DAY. Mom always had a pram with a new baby to push. The back of the pram had a metal basket retrofitted to hold one paper grocery sack. The heaviest bag went into it. One bag of groceries per day might have cut it, even for a large family, but we also often had to carry Dad’s dry-cleaned suits home from the cleaners! So it took the whole pack of us, every day. On pay day, we celebrated. Mom pushed the pram containing the carton of 16-oz glass Coke bottles, our big treat for the month. Then Liz, Mary, and I each hefted a small bag of food. Twice a year, when Easter or School Picture Day beckoned, we’d go into the Jay Kay Shop. Mrs. Jay Kay helped Mom choose one new outfit for each of us to add to our sketchy wardrobes. My mother would not purchase cheap clothing or shoes for us, period. Quality all the way! So we had VERY few clothes. Of course, we wore uniforms to school. Navy blue jumpers with white blouses and saddle oxfords. The jumpers could go awhile without being laundered, but those white blouses got put through their paces, let me tell you. Iron City, every day of their poor overworn lives. And the saddles? Polished EVERY night, and not only that. The shoe laces were removed and SCRUBBED BY HAND on a bar of soap at least twice per week. Dirty shoelaces were a mark of particularly poor breeding, and while I suppose we were lower middle-class, we had instilled into us the Pride of Shoelace Ownership. Houses were small and crowded. Three kids per bedroom? Normal. No such thing as privacy, unless you count a single dresser drawer as “having your own space.” Closets were unbelivably minuscule in those days. If we’d had more than two outfits per season and more than three pairs of shoes (school shoes, play shoes, and church shoes), times three kids to a room, those puppies would have overflowed! It goes without saying that Mom washed her own dishes, peeled potatoes every night with a sharp knife, and made everything from scratch. I was married before I even knew there was such a thing as “instant mashed potatoes” or “instant pudding.” I can literally count on ONE HAND the number of times my parents took us out to eat when I was growing up. (Now, my grandparents, that was different. They were rich, and did give us some of the things my parents couldn’t.) Vacations? Not so much. OK, once, to the Ozarks. I was in the fourth grade. It was a blast. I had a two piece (not bikini, but still) pink swimsuit and I thought I was something. Got a horrible sunburn because I didn’t know any better than to “lay out” for most of an afternoon. My parents didn’t know any better, either! Heck, they’d never been on a vacation! One telephone, pink princess, in the breakfast room. My father believed that phones were created for “emergencies only.” He was shocked when his daughters wanted to talk to their friends on the phone at night after being with them all day. I can’t tell you how many times he’d walk through the kitchen in disgust and say, “What’s that pink thing growing out of your ear? Get off the phone! There might be an emergency!” Books were a luxury we could not afford except for special occasions, but reading was a necessity for all of us. The public library was my favorite place in the universe. I could not fathom my good fortune when the librarian informed me I’d be able to check out eight books at a time! Why, that number would last me for…eight days! My poor mother had to walk me there (before car) to get my stack of books, a mile each way, pushing the pram and with the non-reading tots in tow, OFTEN. If I could canonize her Saint Mom, I would. There are a million and one other things my parents managed without. A gym membership would have been laughable (they got all the exercise they needed, thanks…), and a power mower too much to maintain (Dad pushed a rotary mower and never complained…). Until I was thirteen, the house had a single room air conditioner in the 8x10 family room. On very hot nights in those upstairs bedrooms (maybe 40 nights per year), my sisters and I, whose beds were against the three windowed walls, slept with our heads in the sills, the attic fan pulling in refreshing roasted air. My parents did not think they were poor, and in fact, they weren’t. They chose to spend their money on Catholic schools, an excellent value for their dollar, by the way. They paid off a twenty-year mortgage in eleven years. The house only cost $17,000, but doubling up on payments still represented a considerable accomplishment. I don’t want to ditch my car or my microwave or my DVD player. What I do want, though, is to be more honest about what’s really necessary in this life. What’s truly valuable. What I do want is to spend less time and money gathering stuff unto myself, cleaning it, displaying it, sorting it, storing it, cateloguing it, filing it, wasting it, and then throwing it away. What I do want is to have more time and money (and strength!) available to help those with less. Jesus had those two female friends named Mary and Martha, remember? Sisters. One of them liked to throw lavish parties but she got worn out easily trying to keep up with it all, especially when Mary sat down for a spell to visit with Jesus. The Lord had to let Martha know that while all her frenzied party preparations were OK, her sister Mary had chosen the “better part.” And then He said, “and it won’t be taken from her.” I’ve still got so much to learn. In thinking back to the sacrificial way my parents were content to live, I’ve got to ask myself: In my own quest to acquire that to which I’m obviously “entitled,” have I missed out on the Better Part? Because He’s the last thing in the world I’d want taken from me. Posted by Katy on 04/27/07 at 06:21 AM Fallible Comments... What a great post! We would all do well to remember what we can do without. Have you read, "A Girl Named Zippy"? If you haven't, you must. Give it a few chapters, but there are some stories in there that I can almost guarantee you will love. Your post today reminds me so much of that book. Posted by Anna on 04/27/07 at 11:59 AM I feel like you peeked a little into my own childhood. What you describe is so similar to my experience, we really MUST be sisters in a parallel universe. Yes, I remember. I remember not having a remote and getting up to change the TV channel. I remember not having a car until I was 10. Walking to school and food from scratch. Vacations up in the mountains in a cruddy cabin where we did all the cooking. But we thought it was heaven. They had a real swimming pool! It's unbelievable what "progress" has done to our world. People actually complain about how long the microwave takes to heat up dinner, and when Netflix takes more than one day to send a movie. Progress. It's given us everything the world has to offer, and taken the godly virtues of patience and contentment away from us forever. I miss some of those old days when we got by on getting by, don't you? Posted by Suzan on 04/27/07 at 04:29 PM We got most of our clothes out of the Good Will. It was collected from the townsfolk at the church where my dad was the pastor. Before the Good Will truck came to pick everything up, we could go through the stack of boxes for clothing, etc. The problem was, it was a small town (250 people), and people noticed if you were wearing something they had recently donated to Good Will. Once a year we got new (not Good Will) shoes and mom would make us an Easter dress out of fabric we bought from a catalog. Mom was and still is an excellent seamstress, but the results were still sometimes a little embarrassing. I never had a new "store-bought" dress until I was a Sophomore in High School. Winnie Mears (about 70 years old) came to our house one day and told us she had bought this dress for herself and realized it was too young for her and maybe I would like it. It was a sleveless pink linen dress with scallops and it fit perfectly and I loved it. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized Winnie bought that dress with me in mind. She's long gone but I will always love her for that gift - not just for the dress, but for pretending it was not charity. It was the first time I ever felt normal. Posted by alison on 04/30/07 at 08:44 AM This post reminded me of something a friend told me...she and her 5-year-old son were looking at a Sesame Street DVD, I believe, and she mentioned that it's been on since she was his age. (uh, we're 30-somethings.) And he wanted to know what other movies she bought in the store when she was little. When she told him that you couldn't buy movies/TV shows in the store then, he just couldn't wrap his little mind around it. What? You had to actually wait until it was on? My 4-year-old daughter refers to when I was her age as the "old, old days," and it gets me every time. (Grandma's time was the "old, old, OLD days" and before that was the dinosaurs.) Posted by Jennifer on 05/01/07 at 01:26 PM Anna--Thanks for recommending A Girl Named Zippy. I'd seen it in the store but hadn't looked at it. Now I will, and I've added it to my wish list. Fun! Suzan--You are right!! I am not a huge fan of "progress" myself. It breeds anxiety and ungratefulness, IMO. alison--GREAT story about Winnie's dress! What a lovely lady to be so kind to you. I taught myself to sew in the fifth grade, and made my own clothes for many years. For some reason, Mom couldn't afford a new dress for me, but she didn't mind spending a few dollars for fabric. Jennifer--Kids!! One of my great-nephews, by age 18 months, was taking credit cards out of his mother's purse and swiping them between the couch cushions! That's how familiar he was with "swiping." I'm afraid I grew up in the Old, Old, OLD days..... Posted by Katy on 05/01/07 at 02:37 PM Types of financial investments include shares, other equity investment, and bonds (including bonds denominated in foreign currencies). These financial assets are then expected to provide income or positive future cash flows, and may increase or decrease in value giving the investor capital gains or losses. Posted by stock update on 11/02/10 at 02:56 PM Page 1 of 1 pages Commenting is not available in this weblog entry. Next entry: Getting To Know You, Getting To Know All About You Previous entry: Toe Gross-Out! << Back to main


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Unentitlement Mentality

Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri