Essay About Money

Here is another blog that spent a couple of years stored on Google without being published. This one I did not edit. I decided just publish it as is.

Everybody has some kind of a relationship with money. Some people try to save, some people try to spend, some people lend and the others borrow. We also have some kind of emotions towards the issue. The longer I live the more important the issue becomes.

I came from a country where we "didn't have money". Strangely, everybody worked, everybody had some salary, but the money was not an issue in the Soviet Union. There were hungry people, I think, but they were hidden somewhere so the general population could not see them. If we could not get something it was because "that" was not in the stores, not because we didn't have money for "that". Somebody might have a different image, but this is how I remember my youth.

When we came to America, money was not a big issue for us anyway. We had what we had and my husband soon developed a theory that, here you always have enough money for what you want: if you want to work on something you can get the tools to do the job, if you want to do sports you can get all equipment in the world, if you want to go camping, stop by the nearest department store and get yourself a tent and the matches. So we always did what we wanted for the lowest price we could afford.

This is why I was completely in shock when I read my daughter's essay about money. She wrote it in 4th grade in her English class. Imagine a little girl, 8 or 9 years old, writing about how bad money is, how money turns people into greedy creatures, how people should stop using money and life would become beautiful. Both, my husband and I, started to explain to the little thing that we tried that, we lived in a country without money and it was not beautiful. We talked and we talked, and we came back to the subject again and again. She didn't argue. She could not argue. We were so persuasive, knowledgeable, experienced. So we thought she understood.

Time passed by, my husband died, my children grew into adults, recently we came back to this conversation. Turned out She remembers it differently than I do. She says we were screaming like crazy, she couldn't say a word, so she decided not to talk to us about the issue, but she still believes the money makes people greedy and envious. This time, I could not completely disagree with her. The issue seems much more complicated now than it seemed 20 years ago.