It Took Me 50 Years to Realize We Were in the Struggle

One day it just hits you.

You're sitting there in your fifties thinking about your childhood when suddenly you realize something that never occurred to you as a kid.

We were in the struggle and I never even knew it. The Reagan era was especially hard on my parents. My dad owned a small business, and there were times I'm sure he wondered how they were going to make it, and even came close to closing business. 

Mom and Dad never sat us down and talked about money problems. They never complained. They simply figured it out. They protected my brother and me from the stress so we could have what every kid deserves, a childhood.

As a kid, I never noticed any of that. I used to brown bag of my lunch from the time I was in first grade. When I finally got a metal lunch box, it was the only one I would ever have during the rest of my time spent in school. It was my black Star Wars lunch box from the late seventies.

Every school year I would see other kids showing up with shiny new lunch boxes from the latest movies and cartoons. I wanted one too. But looking back now, I understand why I never got one.

That money was going toward school clothes, shoes, groceries, and bills.

Mom had a way of stretching everything. Ham hocks turned into stew. Ground beef became a week of meals. Government cheese became quesadillas cooked right on the electric stove burner because we did not have a microwave. 

Every night after working all day cooking for hundreds of school kids, Mom would come home and cook another meal from scratch for us.

I thought that was just life.

Maybe it should have been.

We never went without food, but we also never wasted anything. My dad taught me something that stuck with me even more over time. If something broke, you fixed it. If something still had life in it, you kept using it. He had that old saying in spirit, "use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without".

 I didn’t realize it then, but that wasn’t just about saving money. It was about respecting what you already had. Sometimes he even made things better than they were before, not by replacing them, but by repairing them and learning how to take care of them. 

Dad Had a nacht for improving on a components design, making it better than the factory did and preventing it from breaking or wearing out again!

Our vacations were not fancy. They were camping trips or drives into the Colorado mountains. Sandwiches packed from home. Simple days that cost almost nothing.. but somehow gave us everything we needed. Peace, quiet, and time together.

My grandmother took that same idea even further. A Depression era Oklahoma farm girl, she could make something out of nothing. She sewed clothes for family, baked pies from fruit she had canned herself, and kept a pantry that could carry a family through winter. Nothing was wasted. Everything had a purpose.

As I got older, I drifted away from that mindset for a while. Like a lot of people, I started thinking happiness was tied to more. More money. More things. More status. I had to learn the hard way that it does not work that way.

My dad used to tell me to lead a simple life as much as I could.

It took me decades to understand what he meant.

These days I can sit down with a couple pieces of toast, a little butter and cherry preserves, and a cup of coffee and feel completely content. Not because life is perfect, but because I finally understand what I was given.

I was not raised with abundance because we had a lot.

I was raised with abundance because my parents and grandparents knew how to create it out of almost nothing.