One day while visiting home in North Carolina–I had married and was living in Boston–my mother, while picking out a dress to wear to a funeral commented that she had refused her first proposal because the man who had requested her hand did not, she believed, own enough financial capital.
Financial capital for my mother consisted of money and land.
My father, the son of a farmer was potential heir to over three hundred acres. My mother worked strenuously and continually, during my father’s lifetime, to prevent my father’s nine siblings from selling the farm and for my mother and father to gain full ownership of the entire three-hundred acres.
She secured forty-acres at the time of my father’s death. The farm to this day has yet to be sold.
The man whose proposal she refused, my mother explained, went on to start several businesses, all lucrative, she emphasized. My mother rarely praised anyone’s efforts without evidence of their deserving it.
I cannot imagine she would say anything untrue in this regard concerning the person whose offer of marriage she forewent, a man then on to secure enough capital to afford his wife to, in my mother’s words, “Do nothing.”
The phrase, “Do nothing,” meant the woman was a fulltime wife and mother.
The man whom my mother refused to marry–the person who had taught her how to drive the first car my mother purchased with funds from her salary as a teacher–went onto have with his wife, two children–children who were adults, married and with their own children when their father died. I was fifteen when my father died, he sixty-five, my mother fifty-five.
My mother had given birth to me at age forty, my brother at age forty-two.
My mother gained her financial security. She had her own money, kept her own bank account, held her own credit history, not that my father did not have his.
All that secured us, the home we lived in stood and was grounded upon financial capital gained from his work as a farmer. And as with most farmers, my father worked hard.
I am not certain as to whether my mother achieved the freedom she was searching for.
The funeral to which she was going, the one for which she was searching for the appropriate dress to wear was for the man who had asked her to marry him, the one who had not secured enough capital for her to agree to become his wife.
As with other aspects of her life, my mother did not state her true feelings. And yet, I heard regret in her voice. A re-thinking, a second consideration of what she had turned down, left and abandoned.
My mother respected what her old fiancé had accomplished and done with his life. He had built a family of sons who, like their father had gone on to become successful entrepreneurs, and he had made money to boot.
What a boon!
My father had been a successful farmer.
But he had died leaving my mother with a 15-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son who would died less than two years after her husband’s demise.
I have not viewed capital quite the same since that day.
My mother’s statements evidenced what Freud asserted nearly a century earlier–that money and emotions are intimately interwoven; and where we place and invest our money, so too there lies our heart.
The only question that remains is, “Where lies our heart when we invest our efforts, money and time in gaining money?”
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