Growing up lower-middle-class builds a body that flinches at parking fines for the rest of your life—even when the money's been there for decades
I want to tell you about my mother, who is, at the time of writing, in her early seventies, financially comfortable, married for over fifty years to a man who provides well, and—on a particular kind of Tuesday afternoon—will still spend twenty minutes deciding whether to buy a six-pound jar of olives because she's not sure if it's an extravagance.
The olives are not the point. The olives are a symptom.
My mother grew up in a household where money was tight in the specific lower-middle-class way that doesn't quite count as poverty but is, in many ways, more psychologically corrosive than actual poverty. There was always enough. There was rarely extra. The lights stayed on, but the conversation about whether the lights should be turned off when you left a room happened, in some form, every day. The fridge was full enough, but the small drama of whether a particular item could be replaced this week or had to wait until next week ran in the background of every kitchen interaction.
That kind of childhood, I've come to believe, builds a particular nervous system that is almost impossible to retire later in life. My mother retired her financial circumstances about thirty years ago. She did not, and could not, retire the nervous system she'd built around them.
The flinching
I want to describe what I mean by a financial nervous system, because I think it's a more specific thing than the general "scarcity mindset" you read about in self-help articles.
It's a series of involuntary physical reactions to financial stimuli, which were calibrated when the stakes were genuinely high, and which continue to fire even when the stakes are no longer there.
The flinch is the most recognizable of these. My mother flinches when an unexpected expense arrives. A boiler that needs servicing. A small fine on a parking meter. A trip to the dentist that wasn't on the calendar. The expense itself is, by any reasonable metric, easily absorbable. Her bank account does not notice it. Her life does not notice it. But her body notices it. Her face changes, briefly. Her shoulders rise. There's a small, almost imperceptible bracing, as if the news has just arrived that something significantly worse is about to follow.
This flinch was, in my mother's childhood, an entirely rational response. An unexpected expense in the household she grew up in really did mean something would have to give. The flinch was the first signal in a sequence of recalculations that would, in her teenage years, end with someone going without something. The body learned, very young, to brace at the first sign.
The body has not, fifty years later, learned to stand down. The signal still fires. The recalculation still begins. By the time her conscious mind has caught up and reminded her that the boiler is fine, she's already, on a physical level, prepared for impact. The preparation costs something even when no impact arrives.
The coffee calculation
The other thing I want to describe is what I think of as the coffee calculation, which is the one I find most poignant when I notice my mother doing it.
The coffee calculation is what happens when someone with this nervous system buys a small luxury. A coffee at a nice café. A magazine they don't strictly need. A pastry. The calculation isn't, in any rational sense, about whether the purchase is affordable. The calculation is a kind of internal audit that runs every time the wallet comes out for something non-essential.
The audit asks: do you really need this? Could you make this at home for a fraction of the price? Is this the right time to be spending five pounds on a thing that will be gone in fifteen minutes? What would your mother have said about this purchase? What would she think if she knew you were spending five pounds on a coffee?
The audit is, in my mother's case, often resolved in favor of buying the coffee. She gets the coffee. She enjoys it. But the enjoyment, I've come to notice, is slightly compromised by the audit having happened at all. The pleasure of the small luxury is contaminated by the brief but real internal interrogation that preceded it. Researchers who study scarcity have found that the experience of having less than you feel you need captures and compromises the mind in subtle ways that persist long after the shortage itself has ended. The coffee gets drunk. The mind that drinks it isn't quite free.
I never had this calculation, growing up. My parents had, by the time I was old enough to register the family finances, moved into the comfortable middle class. The coffee calculation was something I watched my mother run on herself, while I, in the same café, ordered without thought and drank without audit. The class difference, in this very small daily way, ran straight down the middle of my own family.
The windfall problem
The third feature of the financial nervous system, and the one I find most heartbreaking, is the way it relates to good news.
Good financial news, for someone with this nervous system, doesn't produce relief. It produces vigilance. The bonus arrives. The unexpected refund. The small inheritance from a distant relative. The instinct, instantly, is not to enjoy the windfall. The instinct is to figure out where it should be tucked away so that whatever inevitable shortage is approaching doesn't take it away.
My mother, when something good happens financially, becomes, briefly, more anxious rather than less. She starts looking around for where the bad news is going to come from to balance the ledger. The good news can't, in her nervous system, just be good news. It must be a setup. Something is about to happen that requires this windfall to absorb the impact of. The windfall is not a gift. It's a reserve, urgently being deployed against the shortage that is, in her bones, always coming.
This is, I now understand, a deeply rational response to the conditions she was raised in. In her childhood, good financial news really was almost always followed by something that absorbed it. The slightly larger paycheck would be eaten by the boiler that broke the next month. The small bonus would be eaten by the school trip that needed paying for. The pattern was so consistent that her nervous system internalized it as a rule. Good news is, structurally, the prelude to expense. The body, fifty years later, still believes this is true.
What's so cruel about this
I want to say something honestly, because I think this is the part that doesn't get said enough.
The cruelest thing about growing up lower-middle-class isn't the deprivation itself. The deprivation is real but it's, in some sense, finite. It happens during a particular period of your life. It ends when you, or your spouse, or some shift in your circumstances, makes it end.
The cruel thing is that the deprivation builds a nervous system that doesn't know the deprivation has ended. The body keeps the score, as the phrase goes, but it keeps it on a clock that doesn't reset. My mother is, in any reasonable accounting, fine. She has been fine for thirty years. The financial nervous system she built between the ages of, roughly, six and eighteen has never gotten the memo. It still fires. It still flinches. It still runs the audit. It still treats every windfall as something about to be taken away.
What this means, in practice, is that the comfort she finally has access to can't quite reach the part of her that was trained, at eight, to brace for the next shortage. She has the money. The money cannot, by itself, undo the training. The training was done in the body, by experience, over twelve years of childhood, and there is no amount of bank balance that can reach back into that body and tell it the training is over.
My mother has, in some real sense, been financially comfortable and financially anxious simultaneously, for her entire adult life. The first state describes her actual circumstances. The second describes her experience of those circumstances. The two have not, at any point, fully synchronized.
What I've watched her try
I want to be honest about what works and what doesn't, because I've watched my mother try various things over the years, and the results have been mixed.
What hasn't worked is anything that tries to talk her out of the flinching directly. My father has, on occasion, gently pointed out that the parking fine doesn't matter, that the boiler is fine, that they have plenty of money, that she doesn't need to worry. The pointing-out doesn't reach the flinch. The flinch isn't a thought. It's a body event. You can't reason with it. The conscious mind agrees, immediately, that the boiler is fine. The body, in the meantime, has already braced.
What has worked, slowly, is something more like exposure. My mother, in her late sixties, started—deliberately, almost as an experiment—buying small unnecessary things and noticing what happened in her body. The coffee. The magazine. A second pastry. Therapists who work with this describe a similar approach—gradually retraining the nervous system through small, repeated experiences of safety. She would buy the unnecessary thing, and she would sit with the audit, and she would notice that the audit happened and she didn't die. Over months, she told me, the audit got quieter. Not gone. Quieter.
The other thing that has, partially, worked is the simple act of naming what's happening. When she flinches now, sometimes, she'll say out loud—to my father, to me, to herself—"that's the flinch, that's not real." The naming doesn't make the flinch go away. But it puts a small distance between the flinch and her conscious experience of it, and the distance, she says, makes the flinch slightly less expensive to live with.
What I'd say to anyone reading this who recognizes themselves
If you grew up lower-middle-class, or with the texture of perpetual financial vigilance even if your family didn't strictly qualify, you may have built a financial nervous system that you have not yet retired. The retirement of it is not automatic. The arrival of comfort does not, by itself, reach the body that was trained in scarcity.
You may be in your fifties or sixties, sitting on more security than your parents ever had, and still flinching at small unexpected expenses. You may be calculating the cost of a coffee. You may be treating windfalls as setups for the next shortage. None of this means you've failed to learn how to live in your new circumstances. It means the old circumstances did their work too thoroughly to be undone by mere comfort.
The work of retiring this nervous system is real. It's slow. It's mostly done in the body, not the mind, through small repeated experiences of spending, receiving, and not being punished for it. It's helped, sometimes, by therapy, especially the kind that takes the body seriously. It's helped by naming, by patience, by the willingness to notice the flinch and not be ashamed of it.
What it isn't helped by is the pretense that you're past it because your bank account says you should be. The bank account is one organ. The nervous system is another. The two communicate poorly. The work is to translate, slowly, between them, until the body finally believes what the spreadsheet has been trying to tell it for decades.
My mother, last Christmas, bought herself a small, expensive thing. A piece of jewelry she'd been admiring for over a year. She told me about it on the phone afterward. She'd done the audit. The audit had taken about three days. She'd bought it anyway.
She said, "I think I'm finally allowed."
She is in her early seventies. She has been allowed for thirty years. The fact that the body is only now, slowly, starting to believe it doesn't make the moment less significant. It makes it more so.
That's what retirement of the nervous system actually looks like, when it works. Not a sudden lifting of the old training. Just a small, late, hard-won permission to live, finally, in the comfort that's been there all along.
