I fell in love and married a man who went to private schools from k-8, graduated from an Ivy League university, and whose parents are both doctors. Being asked to marry him was one of a lengthy list of “I made it” moments.
The first “I made it” moment that immediately comes to mind was the time in sixth or seventh grade that I ordered with my own money an outfit from the J.C. Penney’s catalog. I cannot recall what the top looked like, but I remember that the red skirt was of that newly popular parachute material, and most importantly, I ordered a pair of white tights with red polka dots on them. These items were not coupled in the fairly stately catalog, and it was one of many eyebrow raising fashion decisions that I would make. What was more important to me at the time, however, was that the clothes were new. I’d ordered the pieces, placed them on lay-away, and I had worked the hours in the greenhouse making enough money to pay for the outfit.
Ironically, one of a far future “I made it” moments would be when i found myself painting the walls of our recently purchased condo in “stone” Gap, button fly pale khakis with fraying hems from frequency of wear. Pants that I had bought off the shelf at a brand store and that now I had demoted to home repair clothes. I was reminded of looking agog at the women of the Land’s End catalogs gardening in what looked to me to be clothes you would wear for school photo day. But here I was, wearing good clothes, to “work” in.
Growing up we had three types of clothes: school clothes, Sunday clothes, and play clothes. All of the adults to whom I was related except one favorite and remote aunt, had two types of clothes: Sunday clothes and work clothes. Another way to put it: I knew I had “made it” when I showered in the morning before work, rather than in the evening after work.
I am quite certain that my sons have no idea where most of their clothes come from. With the exception of the beginning of the school year/birthday ironic T-shirts they open with glee every year, clothing just magically appear and disappear. From time to time, they express a need, and I figure out a way to meet it, but mostly, I manage their size, observe their tastes, hangups, and style, and work with a plethora of hand-me-downs coupled with Amazon or Target, leaving their drawers are brimming with more clothing than they need. Most of this clothing is ubiquitous wear – the same clothing that they wear to school, to play, to camp, to dig in the dirt in the backyard. They do not attend a church or temple, so the few nice-ish shirt and pants that they have are crumpled in the back of their drawer and only worn under duress for weddings, attending plays or performances with Grandma and Grandpa, or for school and musical concerts.
I don’t tend or mend their clothes especially well, so I am quite certain that those of the parents who don’t know us at the private school my sons attend assume that we are financial aid students. Perhaps this disgruntles them because we offer no obvious of diversity being as thoroughly, almost ashamedly white, as possible. I speculate this because this morning my younger son went to school wearing a pair of aqua blue and coral tennis shoes with a slight hole in the toe and velcro that no longer completely closes, mis-matched socks with loose elastic, a matching pair of aqua long underwear with a hole in one knee and sooty stained wrists, a pair of red, also stained red athletic shorts that his older brother and someone else’s child had worn before him. He was, at least, wearing a newish ironic t-shirt that was a staple for the men in the family that states, “I can leap from a tall building in a single bound. Once.” His now long red hair tangled and uncombed, and his face and hands grimy even though I asked him to wash before school.
I personally cannot envision a future where either of my son’s will ever feel the astonishment of having crossed over the line to haves from have nots. One only “makes it” when there is a line to cross. But realistically, I suspect that they will. I see my husband secretly calculating the distances between lines. It has taken me decades to appreciate that as soon as one line is behind you, another appears before you, which is how I can even have “I made it” moments. The difference between my husband’s moments and mine, I suspect, is that the distances between lines increases exponentially.