Being the ‘poor part’ of the family

[Swartzie]

Is anyone else the poor relations?

When I was growing up, my parents were the poor relations. All my wider family were richer and better educated.
My parents were both privately educated at boarding school, became left wing, and became state school teachers. I was sent to a state school.

When they went on skiing trips and over to Florence for a weekend, we waited all year for a beach holiday to spain. When they large detached houses with live in cleaners, we lived in a 3 bedroom terrace house. I never felt adequate.

I'm sure you had advantages that your cousins did not have. No?

Why did it make you feel inadequate- did you absorb that from your extended family or from an inferiority complex from your parents?

I was in a similar situation but a lot poorer than you describe. I never felt envious although I was curious why family never shared their wealth. I'm happy with what I have now, a meaningful well earning job but I love sharing it with people and donating to charity.

Wait.... I just saw we are not most people. Wtf. Why do I keep posting on wind up/ fake posts?

Think you need to work on yourself and your stop comparing yourself to others.
Do you have nice people in your life and a job that you enjoy which enables you to have a good quality of life by the average standard - if so count your blessings.
Youre not going to gain anything but resentment/envy by comparing yourself to others.

Sounds like you correlate being an 'adequate' human being when material wealth.
Are you and your parents good people? Kind, loving, intelligent, happy?

Think this is just a wind up

This thread will not end well 😂

This isn't a financial background problem, this is a self esteem problem. You shouldn't feel inadequate because you're less well off than relatives. We're in an almost identical situation to how you grew up and I'd hate to think that anyone felt inadequate. I think my kids feel lucky because they haven't been brought up in a bubble and have had exposure and experience of different lifestyles. I wonder if your feelings of inadequacy are deeper rooted and you should look at those?

@Swartzie is the thread just about your feelings of not fitting in as a child? Or are there other issues with your parents? Do you think they put political beliefs above your comfort or happiness?

I found your post interesting because when I was small, round us only the really rich holidayed abroad. A week in Spain once a year was what the really really rich family in our village did, and no one else. I remember the year they went and it poured with rain all week there and we basked in 27degree heat. They did laugh at themselves though, I remember the Mum (who was friends with Mum) watching us children play in our paddling pool and making us all laugh with the descriptions of how they ran from their hotel room to the swimming pool.
They were seriously rich and I never remember feeling inadequate with them. They were just our friends who had different things to us.

We used to go down the road for a week on a farm, and that was considered quite exotic.

I think what I'm reading from this is you need to separate your experience off from comparing to others. If you compare to others then you will always find someone who does something better than you.
Other people were probably envious of you.

I do read things like this though and wonder. We were better off than my cousins in most ways, mostly through parent circumstance-partially choice I suppose, although not entirely. They had a pretty rubbish time for a good few years, and although money was tight for us, not in their level.
I hope they didn't resent us, I don't think they did. We were just 6 children playing together when we got together as children, and they still seem to like to see us now as adults. I envied them their freckles though. I really wanted freckles like them...

Basically the OP is moaning she had a well off comfortable upbringing, rather than a stinking rich one like some of her family. The poor little flower.

OP - are you bragging?
I would have given anything to have your life.

I had no father, my mother wasnt college educated at all she had a very low pay job, and we lived in emergency accommodation at times.

I would have loved to have had two teachers as parents.

I can't believe you are complaining about that. Unbelievable really.

I was always the poor one in our family. And when I say poor - I mean REALLY poor. I had children very young and didn't have any qualifications so didn't earn very much, my husband was either out of work or earning minimum wage. My siblings both got professional qualifications and married professionals.
However - I went back to college as a mature student and got my degree at 36. I worked hard and ended up with a fairly good job - still on the lower end of the pay scale but perfectly adequate. I married a man who, while not earning a huge amount, would do anything to ensure our security. Because I never had any money I budget very carefully and don't spend what I don't have. I inherited enough from my parents to pay off our mortgage. My siblings inherited the same amount. We prioritised our spending on insulation, double glazing, solar panels etc. so we have a warm and comfortable home.
My siblings have always lived up to their incomes, or more, and one in particular is now in considerable financial difficulty, so despite our income always having been less than theirs we are in a much better financial position than they are now.
It was really difficult in the past, especially as my siblings didn't understand that I couldn't just put spending on my credit card if I didn't happen to have the spare cash that month. There was never any spare cash. But my many many years of having to be frugal have paid off. We are now in a very comfortable position, we still don't spend a lot on holidays or new cars, but we can go on holiday or stay in a hotel overnight if we have a long journey and we don't have to worry if the car needs repairing or we need to get in an electrician to mend something.
Being the poor part of the family is a state of mind I think - if you have enough to live on then that is all you really need.

In a nutshell hey? All the tears