privileged guilt

I'm commenting on a comment I made on Jeremy's post about privilege. That's possibly lame, but oh well. The post was this meme listing various things that can represent privilege. I said:

My brother once tried to convince me that I should feel more proud of getting
into a fancy-pants grad school because he used the 18 months we were living off
government payments and charity as a starting point. I think this meme
demonstrates why I disagreed, though; I scored 20-22, depending on
interpretation.
If the meme just asked about economic factors, I probably
wouldn’t have scored so highly, but my parents went beyond their means (and put
a lot of time into finding free/cheap alternatives) to provide us with as many
of these things as they could, specifically because they wanted us to have the
advantages of privilege. Having a parent who knows how privilege works is
obviously a pretty big privilege to begin with.

After commenting, I started thinking maybe I misremembered the extent of our poverty, because could we really have been that badly off if my mum was working a couple of days a week and receiving single parent benefits (although not the child support owed by my dad)? I didn't realise at the time that my mother was malnourished, for example (I liked french toast for dinner and was sad when that stopped being a staple). I guess my little brother was in daycare. Oh yeah, and my older brother and I were going to private schools…

We went to Catholic schools because it was important enough to my mum that we have a religious education that she was willing to go without enough food to provide it. Probably, the schools were not making my mum pay the full amount (they were Christian, after all, and it would be wrong to deprive a child of a religious education*), but it still took a lot scrimping and saving to pay the school fees, even after my dad moved back in and got a decent job, and I felt guilty at the time.

What makes it truly horrifying in hindsight, is that all of us turned out non-believers. When I was home, Mum told me she felt like a failure for not having brought us up to be good Catholics, even though she did her very best. She probably thinks that’s worse than the money. I'm not going to go to church out of guilt, but I can hardly bear to think of what those schools cost her, and the difference that money could have made (and continue to make) to her life.

I know I don't need more reasons to feel guilty. She probably doesn’t consider it a complete waste. We did, on occasion, try to convince her that she shouldn’t be sacrificing so much just for us to take religion classes (especially since my brother hated his school**), but she thought we’d be grateful in the end. And I am; we got plenty of the generic advantages of going to a private school, even if we didn’t appreciate the religious aspects. Maybe she would’ve still sent us to private schools, even if she weren’t religious,*** because she knew the kind of privilege it would confer. Or maybe we would’ve just had more new clothes and appliances and holidays that involved planes and hotels and she wouldn’t be any better off, anyway.




*Possibly the only two my mum would have answered yes to (aside from those due to being an only child) are her parents owning a house (with a mortgage, the down-payment for which was won on a horse race) and going to private school, because it would have been a sin not to go to a Catholic school.

** My brother probably felt the lack of money more than I did, since he was at a school with very rich people. My school was much more middle class. At the time, I was jealous of the opportunities his school offered, but also glad that mine wasn’t such a burden.

*** Possibly even the same schools, since there’s only one non-religious private school in my hometown.