What were your parents like when you were a young adult?

With earnestness she looked me in the eyes, “I just don’t want you to have to worry about squeezing the last bit out of the toothpaste tube.” 

I’d lost my job and temporarily moved into my parents’ house while I looked for a new one. My wife would join me two weeks later, and within a month, we had our own apartment and new jobs. But Mom really didn’t want us to move out of her house. At the time, I thought it was because she had trouble letting go or because she felt guilty she’d led me to the lost job. However, those reasons were just a small piece of the truth.

In April, my wife and I sold our house and moved across the continent to be near our grandchildren and adult children (but mostly our grandchildren). We have been living in our son’s guest room for almost three months. Last week, we found the house in our price range. It is a good house at a fair price that we can afford on our fixed incomes. Nonetheless, my big purchase anxiety bubbled up as we thoughtfully considered the purchase. 

This was unsurprising. Buying a new phone, a car, purchasing Christmas gifts, or going out for a nice meal often gives me pause. This is not about spending too much, it is a resident anxiety that bubbles in my stomach and flows up my body until it squats in my mind, tightening my jaw and neck. This time, I’d had enough. I challenged the squatter head-on. In a meditative state, I sought an answer. “Why do I react this way even when it is a sound decision?”

And then I had an epiphany! Forty-odd years after my mother took an interest in my toothpaste, I found clarity. This is not my anxiety. It belongs to her!

She grew up poor with an alcoholic father. Spending money was a risky proposition. She had seen it squandered and experienced the resulting hunger. As an adult, she escaped dire poverty but raised three children with a lower-middle-class income despite her education. Although she and Dad both worked full-time, we had less materially than the other families in our neighborhood. And it nagged at her self-worth.

Until I was in college, we had the living room furniture gifted to Mom and Dad before I was born. I sometimes wore shoes with holes until payday. The tiny black and white TV I’d bought with my paper route money became the family’s when the family TV stopped working. My brother and I shared a room for most of our growing-up years.

We weren’t poor. We were clothed, never hungry, and had plenty of playthings. Mom and Dad loved us unconditionally and modeled taking that love into their professional lives, though it meant lower pay. I grew up in a home where the things that mattered were extravagantly abundant and shared with the world.

In my early twenties, Mom’s deep love for me, coupled with her childhood poverty and not-quite-enough lower-middle income, caused her to fixate on my toothpaste. I forgot about the incident until this week, when I questioned my irrational worry about buying a home. My mother’s fiscal anxiety growing up poor in an unstable household remains alive in me twenty-four years after her death. I carry her trauma within me.

This epiphany gave me insight and relief. My brain and jaw relaxed. My belly calmed as if I’d taken an antacid. Though my uneasiness with big purchases is not absent, I am learning to discern which fiscal concerns are my own and which are irrational vestiges of my mother’s past. And, if I still sometimes squeeze the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube, we’ll call it an act of honoring my mother’s struggle.