Financial Independence

My room is dark despite it being 3:00pm on a Tuesday in the middle of July. I closed my blinds two weeks ago to stave off the guilt of staying indoors for days on end, remembering what it was like to be depressed. But I’m not depressed, it’s just summer.

The pale pink walls of my childhood bedroom look closer to gray in this light. The discarded pile of dirty pajamas on my floor is a system of caves with which my friends the spiders have made their home. The air smells lived in; not unclean but the distinct scent of an always occupied room. Stale.

I’ve been in the same position for hours. The second hand green and yellow plaid loveseat holds my sprawled body, double chin and all. My feet extend off the torn cushion and rest on the loose supporting beam of the painted white chair from my childhood desk, now functioning as a table. My laptop rests atop the tea ring stained seat of the chair, the headphone wire extending from the side of the keyboard stretched to its wits end.

I don’t know what I was watching, whose voices were bleeding through the speakers of my clunky headphones. If I had to take a guess it would be a YouTuber that is too embarrassing to admit in a public forum. All I know is that when I heard my bedroom door handle squeak open painstakingly slowly in place of a polite knock, I threw the headphones off and changed the tab and pretended like I was applying to grad school.

My dad and I are the only two at home. My mom at work or maybe an art class and my brother at summer school. I’d already said my polite hello when he got home early from work, taking the stack of dirty dishes into the kitchen the second I heard his car pull up so it would seem like we just happened upon each other. So he wouldn’t come into my room and say hello Grace, disappointed and judgmental.

I sat up and hunched my back like I had scoliosis to prove I was being productive. I glanced up as if his entrance surprised me.

“What?” I ask like he was interrupting something important.

“I have something for you,” he says, walking into my room, taking half hearted pains to avoid stepping on my dirty underwear. Before pulling out what he’s hiding behind his back he says, “Jeez, it’s like a minefield in here.”

“It was your choice to come in,” I fire back with familiarity. We both laugh, though behind our smiles we’re both irritated in each other’s general directions. Each of us gets over it quickly for the sake of brevity.

He removes his hand from behind his back and hands me a book. I don’t know what to think before seeing the title. It’s mostly confusion. My hopeful idea is that this is one of the rare novels he’s read and wants me to read it so he has someone to talk about it to. A hopeful thought.

I take the book. It has a blue cover with big red letters in an official looking serif font, with a sentence longer than the silence in the room beneath it in smaller white letters.

Financial Independence

How To Manage Personal Finances: Feeling Safe and Secure Without Anyone Else’s Help

The thin paperback flops in my weak grip, feeling ten pounds instead of a few ounces.

My face must contort into a visibly disgusted expression because my dad says, “Don’t make that face.”

I don’t respond. I blink blankly at him a few times, knowing he has paragraphs more to say and would rather listen to the sound of his voice than mine.

“I want you to read this,” he continues right on cue.

“Okay,” I say to make him leave me alone with the financial planning book I’ll never read.

This is his favorite word. When I was younger I refused to say it because that meant he had power over me, that he’d won. Now I use it frequently because I know the power I hold in myself.

“This isn’t one of those things you say you’re gonna do and then put it in a drawer and forget about it. I need you to actually read this.”

I let a huff of air out of my nose as a substitute for something akin to laughter.

“I will, I will,” I lie.

The moment I saw the word financial I knew I never planned on looking at this book again. I’d spent too many hours in economics classes calculating the present value of a loan in perpetuity to ever want to participate in capitalism ever again.

He’d made me do that, too. You need to be responsible about your major. This isn’t the time to have fun. You need to secure your future.

Cut to me standing in the middle of the living room two and a half years later, staring at him horizontal on the couch as I hold back tears saying, I hate econ.

Then why did you choose it? Why am I wasting thousands of dollars on something you hate? He condescends, obviously forgetting his own words years previous: You should be a business major. Oh they don’t have it? Economics is the next best thing. Do that.

Do that.

Do that.

What would you have picked? He says not out of curiosity but as a challenge.

Without missing a beat, creative writing. The tears start falling.

You should have picked that, do you know how many jobs you could get with a writing degree?

I ugly cry. He yells. I cry louder. I am twenty one years old. I wasted my college career on a degree no one wanted.

I wasted my college career calculating rates for a perfect scenario economy that will never exist. I wasted my college career wishing the person my dad saw and the person I was were one and the same. Writing novels instead of my thesis, staring at girls just as much as boys, taking strong and purposeful steps to the left. Nothing I could let my father see.

“You say you will, but I know you don’t mean it. I know you won’t read it,” present day dad says, speaking it into the universe, “But I need you to anyways.”

“I don’t care about money,” I say stubbornly.

“You don’t get to not care. You young people think everything is about having fun. The world isn’t fun, the world is hard, and you need to know how to survive in it. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it buys stability which is the same thing. You need to learn how to manage your money so you can be financially independent.”

My vision goes blurry as I let my eyes unfocus, seeing only the air in front of him. He doesn’t care if I look him in the eyes as long as I’m a captive audience.

Does he not think I can do it? He forced me to learn about nothing but money for three years of my life and he still doesn’t think I know enough to be responsible. Realistically I don’t know the things that book is going to say, but does he not believe in me enough to educate myself as the need arises? Without his forceful hand?

Handing me a book and saying you have to read this is much different than saying this book will help you when you need it.

I can feel rage bubbling in my chest like my heart was plunked into a glass of Mountain Dew. Carbonated and festering with unwanted chemicals. But I stir my finger through the liquid and release the bubbles forming at the edges. I say nothing.

But he can tell I want to. His gaze softens for the first time. He angles his body towards the door in preparation to leave, because he knows I want him to.

He begins his parting words. “I just want you to be prepared. So many kids go into life unprepared for these kind of things. As a woman I worry about you- I mean- I know you’re strong. I just want you to be knowledgeable where other people your age aren’t. But I don’t want you to have to rely on anybody else to handle your finances. I don’t want you to be dependent on a man.”

He doesn’t wait for a response. He turns and leaves, dragging my bedroom door lightly behind him. In the time it takes the door to close, the festering in my chest slows. I stare at the red, white, and blue cover of the financial planning book and open it.

I read the first few sentences. They are entirely unimpactful, the beginnings of some witty anecdote about the author’s personal life interspersed with some not so humble brags about her financial superiority over the reader.

As my eyes glaze over the words I hear the locking mechanism gently tap the doorframe, but not close. Then suddenly the door swings back open again and my dad peaks his head back in my room like he forgot something. An afterthought.

“Or any other significant other.”

He leaves the door open when he walks away.

I drop the financial planning book into my lap, my heart racing.

What compelled him to make that addendum? My eyes focus and unfocus ever so slightly to the beat of my heart as I try to come up with anything that contradicts the answer I know to be true.

Maybe he’s just trying to be woke, I think to myself, the voice in my head which is usually so steady and unwavering sounding unconvinced. I doubt he even knows the word. If I asked him he’d respond, “of course I’m awake.” I’ve fought him on his opinions about gay people for as long as I’ve known that the word didn’t mean happy anymore. So maybe he’s trying to prove he’s changed, even if only a little bit. I mean, he voted for Trump so maybe he thinks this is the least he could do to make up for it.

But no. He proves he’s awake (although still drowsy) when he tells me stories about his boss and her wife without looking uncomfortable but still sprinkling in a few, “she’s gay, which is totally fine with me” remarks. We both know how far he’s come. But he hasn’t come far enough. Not far enough for me to tell him. Queerness is fine with a parent as long as it’s only an other. As long as it’s not infecting his family.

That’s what I tell myself late at night when I have a momentary lapse in judgement and consider telling my parents I’m not their perfect straight daughter they thought they had. I never thought about the possibility that I didn’t have to tell them. That I wouldn’t get to tell them.

Panic seared through my veins and scalded my arterial walls as I acknowledged reality.

He knew.

He knew.

He knew.

I immediately started planning my life without a family. Who would come to my wedding, who would walk me down the aisle, who would dance with me in my father’s stead. It wouldn’t matter if the other person at the altar was wearing a white dress along with me, the sheer possibility of it would leave me alone, the only one of my blood in attendance.

My own mind was cast out ten, fifteen, maybe even twenty years into the future. It was in an empty void somewhere in front of me while my body still laid hunched over with a red, white, and blue financial planning book in my lap. I heaved my thoughts back into the present. It didn’t matter what happened at my wedding right now. Only what would happen when I entered the living room, kitchen, anywhere outside my room and saw him. What would I say.

I thought back over his words. Or any other significant other. Each syllable as nonchalant as his choice to leave the door open. Like he didn’t care, it was just another option. The panic shifted. It didn’t slow but it felt a little more like relief, but more fast paced. Maybe it was hope. Because indifference is not the same as prejudice.

I inherited my inability to express emotion from my dad. Feelings don’t jive with us the same way jokes or complete ignorance does.

But I also inherited my intense need to be right from him. The need to argue a point until the other person gives in or gets so mad at me they have to walk away and not return for days. The need for everybody to see things my way, no matter how big or small, important or not.

Needless to say, disagreements between my dad and me are no small thing. Any difference between us turns into an all out brawl, no exceptions. And I couldn’t help but notice that this was not that. Not even a lingering tone of passive aggression, of disappointment or stifled anger. He was calm, cool, and collected; all hats Jim Deaton does not often wear.

Him nor I particularly enjoyed being vulnerable. If he were to say the words, “I know you’re queer,” that would spark a conversation neither of us wanted to have, complete with tears and expressions of emotion whether they be positive or negative. We would be forced to linger on the topic, closing off any escape route he might try to find.

I put myself in his brain, the panic subsiding with every passing second. I knew he loved me because my mom told me he did. Despite every time he pushed me to be perfect, more than perfect because perfect wasn’t good enough for him, he was happy with me. He was proud of me. He couldn’t throw all of that away on the washed up word of a God he didn’t even believe in? No.

I don’t know how he figured it out, or how long he’s known. Maybe he heard me and my friends talking at two in the morning during a sleepover; I think I have a crush on Ingrid. Maybe he embraced his inner helicopter parent and read my texts. this homework is homophobic bc im gay and i dont wanna do it LOL. Maybe my brother found my high school Tumblr account and told him. Grace // aries // bisexual. I guess it doesn’t matter in the end.

I’ve thought about it long and hard, how low the bar is for people who haven’t been oppressed. But I refuse to strip away any kind of positive feelings revolving around my sexuality and my parents, I don’t deserve that.

Another parent would storm into my room the second they found out and tell me how unnatural I am. But he kept it to himself. I like to imagine he was waiting for me to say something when I was ready. But I guess he got impatient. I like to think he wanted me to feel comfortable enough to tell him. He must have realized I would never reach that point if something didn’t change on his end. He had to let me know it was okay to tell him if I wanted.

I sink even farther into my hand-me down couch and its tattered cushions, reaching up lazily to tug at the string attached to my blinds. Bright light washed over my two weeks dark room.

I didn’t call after him. I knew I would sooner read that damn book than confront him about this. But I relax knowing someday I could. I don’t know when, and I don’t know how, but someday maybe I would. Maybe someday I’ll let him read this.