Today I am thinking about money. ODSP cut me off last month – again – and although I was able to get reinstated with no great difficulty the deposit did not arrive in my bank until this morning. I would have been in the position of having to draw further on my line of credit to pay my rent if it had not come when it did.
As a child I considered myself rich, but I was very distrustful of money. In grade three I was “befriended” by a girl who was by far the dirtiest and most unsavoury character I had met up until that point. I was in a way her captive audience as I was wheeled about in those days in a manual wheelchair over which I had no control. I imagine that adults, including my parents, threw us together because neither of us had friends and they felt we deserved each other. One day Mother gave me a quarter and sent Darlene and I off to the library to register and get a book. Along the way Darlene took the quarter and with that sort of persuasion that goes: “You really want to do this, don’t you!” bought ice cream. I don’t recall eating any ice cream or what lie we concocted to explain why we came back without a book. I do recall the fear, intimidation and disgust.
As a young teenager my aunts and uncles, particularly Uncle Ted, would give my two brothers and myself dimes and quarters whenever they visited. I couldn’t get out to spend any of it and I enjoyed hoarding it in any case, so the stash in my underwear drawer grew to be $20.00 more than once. However, both my parents would “borrow” from my wallet with promises to repay. Often they didn’t keep those promises.
At sixteen the government of Ontario decided to give me a “Disabled Child Benefit” which meant that a small amount of money went to my parents on my behalf – something like $100 a month. When this started my Mother told me that I was essentially paying rent now and that I could ask for some things to be done differently. After that moment nothing changed and I never saw any part of the money either.
I know now that my parents paid out lots of money on my behalf and that they often struggled financially especially in the early years of their marriage. There is no person more generous than my Father is and my Mother was. These stories come to mind, not to put anyone down, least of all my parents, but by way of seeing why money means so little to me. I think I basically learned that money could get me into real trouble and that it never really belonged to me in any case so why bother thinking too much about it.
When I went to university the situation changed radically. First, I had a scholarship and secondly I had a benefit under the vocational rehabilitation section of the welfare department with “disabled adults” in its mandate. Thirdly, I had a different allowance from the same Ministry which gave me the capacity to hire students for a few hours every day to give me personal assistance. I had the great good fortune to be supervised by a social worker who interpreted her regulations in the most generous way possible. This meant that even when I worked during summers between terms, or sometimes mid-school year my benefits were never cut. I paid my own tuition, living costs, other people’s and my own beer and had friends!
Skip the dark years of the nursing home and chronic care hospital. $60 a month from the government as a “comfort allowance”. Even then I earned some $$’s on “the side”.
When I fundraised for, founded and became the first Coordinator of Special Services for Handicapped Students in 1977 I paid myself $19,000 a year. The University doubled the next Coordinator’s salary.
I did alright – never brilliantly – in the financial world until 2006 when I decided to retire from a job within which I could do nothing that made me happy. I had savings, a small grant from the Marsha Forest Centre, a small pension and I continued to have self employed income. I co-owned a house and three times renegotiated the mortgage over ten years to give myself another pot of money to draw on.
I left the job in 2006 to give myself a fighting chance to do what I really wanted to do with my life. That turned into being an artist and founding the World Peace through Inclusive Transformation.
I have NO regrets and I am on the edge of bankruptcy. For fourteen months I have marvelled month by month that I have found ways to pay my rent.
I wonder, and my friends do too, what happened to my capacity to have money. Now that I am writing this I see that I may have returned to thinking that money is something I have no control over and that it would pervert me through the Darlene’s of the world if I had it. But I am not eight and I have a very different perspective on what can make someone choose to be a dirty thief. I owe Darlene, her mother and mine an apology.
Now, let’s make some cash!
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