Wealth: A Subjective Term

Since the month of July, I have been tasked with balancing two part-time jobs, hobbies, family time, and any me time I could get a hold of. By then, I got a second job, one at Bill Jacobs Land Rover of Hinsdale. As a porter who is the essential backbone to any car dealership, I work with a bunch of Mexicans. And I have no reason to have anything against this, or any other ethnic group for that matter. But this group of guys in particular stick next to me as if they were a swarm of moths to an incandescent light as I regale the tales of my family's "endless" (or so they think) wealth. And this disturbs me.

I think nothing of the prospect of my father owning multiple hotels and a restaurant, as I never have. This simply has been my upbringing. But to some, it is a fairy tale from which enormous jealously stems. I say that my house has four central air-conditioning units, my parents both drive Mercedes, and I drive a BMW, they all "ooh" and "ah" at my decadent lifestyle. I do my best to proclaim that numerous other people have a great deal of more wealth than my own family, and that my "luxuries" mean nothing in this day and age with people's home theater systems, swimming pools, basketball and tennis courts, fountains effacing their driveways and what have you.

I have attempted rather meekly for them to sympathize with me. I reason that I have never received an allowance, that I do chores for little to no money in return, that my house is not in fact equipped with a home theater system or any of the other aforementioned marks of wealth. I have never sought a cushy job from my father's business, and instead have desired to be independent so as to not have to get involved in the troublesome family (feud of a) company and want to be paid fairly apart from my family, and to get a sense of the real world. No such sympathy has been returned despite my earnest efforts of understanding their own modest living and financial conditions.

I am intensely tired of having to talk of my family's "extravagant" living conditions. We have no [especially] fancy or fast cars, no wonderfully expensive utilities around our house, and for that matter, haven't even finished paying off our house.

I cannot count the number of times I have been asked how much money my father makes, nor the number of times I have shook my head and ignored the question. My family is just like any other family, we have financial responsibilities, enormous taxes to pay, education to fund, and currently are in an even more sizable amount of debt to take care of and thus, don't have great loads of money for leisure to spend.