Final Part: Let's Talk About Money

A not so loving letter to money

Photo by Julia Joppien on Unsplash

Dear Money,

I’m breaking up with you. I've gone through so much because of you and I don't know how we can continue being in relationship any longer.

I feel confined by you, imprisoned even, you've used people as tools to hold me captive; my mother, my ex-husband, all the bosses I've had.

Why do you want to keep me small? so my ideas won't grow because I spend most of my time worrying about surviving rather than creating?

Sometimes I just hate you..

Did that hurt? Good. I'm going to be as petty as I can be.

You know why? Because you've isolated me. The moment I ran out of my own money, things started to get ugly. And by the way I spent that money on buying things to get married and therapy to break the cycle of trauma and not pass it to my kids.

You see, this whole dynamic would have been okay if I wasn't a grown up – let alone a parent, a single parent. I don’t want to do that anymore.

I have had to ask my little sisters for money, that's after I tried to reach my mom and couldn’t. That's also after my father sent me money. I know in a different time/place/dimension, this wouldn’t be the case, I actually don’t think it’s you you, it’s capitalism. But you’re part of it too – there shouldn’t be shame attached to asking, there shouldn’t be any mothers who do it alone. We should be doing this together.

I’m tired of their faces looking at me like that, and their muttered whispers – loud enough for me to hear, hurtful enough for me to never want to go back. The other day, my sister asked me to send her back the money I had asked for because I had none. My mother asked how could I even have used that much electricity, because I asked for more money.

It's almost as if I shouldn't breathe out because someone else is cleaning up the carbon dioxide I exhale. T o g e t h e r. Remember? We do this together – air is air because there's us and trees.

If I were to live without you, do I deserve to exist at all? Or does deservingness only flow to where you are?

Remember when my ex asked me to go back to my father’s house when I was pregnant?

He said “go back to your father, you’re eating too much for me to feed you, I can’t keep up.” I don’t think I'll ever forget that.

I remember it to this day, our daughter is almost 2 and I hesitate everytime I add something to my supermarket cart. If it's for me, knowing that he pays for groceries, I put it back.

His money feeds his children – but who will feed me?

I’m trying so hard for you to come to me in exchange for my own work and words and not through my family or ex-husband. When you come through them, you hurt me. Always and a lot. You hurt me deeply.

Why do I have to depend on someone else for you to arrive? It comes with so much shame, so much resentment. It comes with an expectation for me to comply with (implicit) desires or ways of being that don't align with my current season in life.

I have to feed myself and the kids, take my son to practice, pay for utilities and maybe even have some fun (!!!) so I can be human and somehow still feel alive on 10,000 Egyptian pounds a month which I receive in weekly increments. I mean, really?

Do you want to make peace or not?

This is an ultimatum. Because it’s either we make up or break up. I’m lonely anyway. So your presence – or lack thereof – wouldn’t make much of a difference. I can be a hermit, I can be the crazy mother who never leaves the house.

When I'm receiving you for someone else, you come easy. But now it's hard to keep that boundary between my money and someone else's money because I don't have any of my own. That's not the integrity I was raised to have. This needs to stop.

I'm tired.

I'm tired of having to watch myself make judgements about how people who have plenty of you choose to spend you (recklessly, if you ask me) and feel resentful because I need you and you're not there.. I need you..

For myself.

For my kids.

For Hala.

For the students.

For clothes and shoes that fit. To get a new phone if I need it. For prescription glasses. To renew my driver's license.

I want to be able to give gifts, cook for friends and restock the fridge without having to worry about how I'm going to make it through the rest of the week. It's stressful, you know? It sucks that I go to sleep some days worried about whether we’ll have electricity through the night. (we have a prepaid meter)

It was fine to run out of money when I lived with other adults, now I'm the only adult and I have dependents.

I am anti-capitalist at heart, that's true. But there are little luxuries of technology and modernity that I like to indulge in.

Things like Substack subscriptions, cloud storage, scheduling links and zoom pro. Fun little luxuries that I like to give myself that don't require the pain of negotiating time for myself with a pseudo-community¹.

Capitalism and I aren't working either. I want to parent first and grind later (or never, really) - so how about we find a way for us to meet online?

Let me list the “skills” for you to decide where we could meet:

• Transformative Energy Facilitation as trained by Kenneth Jover (one of the reasons I want us to meet is to send some of you his way)

• Integrative Change Work as trained by Melissa Tiers and Simone Seol, this is incredible work and it works.

• The Work that Reconnects Facilitation. I want us to meet there so I can contribute to the scholarship fund and offer the workshops more freely.

• Offers and Needs Markets Facilitation can you guess all the things we can do if we meet there?

• Writing - yum!

• My brain babies: the Not Yet Lab and Feral Sessions

• Designing delightful courses and workshops and writing scripts for visualizations and meditations

Can we?

I mean, I'm not used to being rejected like that… But I've also spent years in toxic dynamics…

Can we heal together?

Do you think if we do this, life would work out? And maybe, just maybe, I can find a love that feels safe?

Until next time,

Sara

1. Pseudo-community I use here to refer to my family. Only related by blood but have long forgotten what it means like to be family. In fact, I don't feel any sense of belonging around them or towards them, with the exception of my father. Even my birthdays are performative and done out of duty, I guess, and I remain tethered to them due to financial need. Except that, similar to how you would treat a beggar, I get their scraps.

I caught my mother looking at me in disgust the other day, and as a master brush-off-er, I pretended I didn't notice. I always pretend I don't notice because if I address it, it gets loud and dramatic.

My pseudo community also includes my ex husband, except that one of the main reasons I got a divorce was his lack of participation in parenting. And no, he wasn't working either, so there was no money to hire out support. Without doing the healing I need to do, my body doesn't feel safe around my ex and I have to be around him for co-parenting and well, that's another story for another time.