Comment on New Kid's Comment on Geeky Mom on class

I managed to make it out of my room after all and I even cleared up the crap in my room (I have floorboards! who knew?) and now I feel like writing a real post!
I've read some of the discussion about class on a number of people's blogs lately (the latest by New Kid on the Hallway, who helpfully included links to some of the previous entries) and I've been thinking about it a bit lately.
I grew up thinking we were pretty much average and we were definitely middle class, but I'm having trouble figuring out where in the middle we fit. I went to Catholic schools, but it was somewhat of a struggle to afford the fees (done for religious reasons although none of us turned out theist). I never felt deprived, but we had a tiny black and white tv until the 1990s, we bought clothes at Kmart or Target and we only once went on holiday somewhere more than an hour's drive away (thanks to the short period when multiple airlines were competing and before all but one collapsed). When I was 10, my dad left for the first time and my mum went hungry to feed us kids and we got a hamper from the church for Christmas. When dad came back, mum had started full time work so, to me, it felt like we were reasonably comfortable. It wasn't until numerous jobs later, though, that dad was paid enough that we could really relax about money. That only lasted a couple of years before he left again, though and now mum is barely making ends meet and my dad's on a disability pension.
Most of my mum's family I would say is lower class than us, just by the fact that the most educated of my cousins is a priest and only one other went to uni. My dad's father is my only grandparent who went to uni (er, college, in american) but then he was a farmer and there's a mix of education levels on that side. Both my parents went to uni, but had interrupted studies.
So, anyway, all that is just to say that I feel like I come from a fairly middle middle class background, but since starting grad school here, I feel like maybe we weren't so well off. Most of my friends here talk about similar sounding backgrounds, but then they expect that when their parents visit they can go to fancy restaurants and get new clothes etc with their parents paying for everything. Most of them have/had frequent family trips and have a secure safety net if anything were to go wrong.
I mentioned an event my dad took part in in Europe recently and my advisor seemed shocked that none of the rest of us had gone to support him, but there's no way there was money for even one other person to go. He also recommends buying a house as soon as possible, because "your parents can help with a deposit".
Right now, I may be the most affluent person in my immediate family and my grad student stipend seems pretty generous (of course, I can't admit that to any fellow students). I don't feel like I've entered a new class, really, but it does give me a tiny hint of the class bias that those from very different situations face.
I finally got around to reading "Nickel and Dimed" recently and it should really be required reading. I'm a little worried about my brother and his cultish personal development course, because he seems to now believe that individuals are ultimately responsible for their situation. He claims that mum could be comfortably well off if she'd only take responsibility for herself and figure out how to make more money (her health problems are apparently equally self-induced, or at least, self-fulfilling). This idea is seductive, because it means that I can have and do anything I want and I do often feel that I'm indulging my depression too much, but are there no extenuating circumstances ever? I'm reminded of a friend of my mum who was diabetic and had lung cancer (presumably due to her husbands chain-smoking) who was a Christian Scientist and believed she was sick because she couldn't completely forgive said husband for abandoning her for a much younger girl. The problem is, you can't tell by looking at someone whether or how much they've tried to improve their situation, but if you want to be able to distance yourself from hardship and believe that it'll never happen to you, then you have to blame the victim. Even if they used to better off, then they must have done something wrong and you'll never make the same mistakes. Here's an interesting article from the Guardian about that.