To hate being born between social classes?

[gorseclay]

Name changed for this one.

Is it U to dislike being born to parents of differing social classes?

My father is v traditional upper middle class whereas my mum is very working class. Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to have two perspectives on everything and seeing two sides to every history.

I just feel I lack a sense of “belonging” to one specific group of people. I love the friendliness and close knitness of working class people in my area but feel I don’t “fit”. Maybe this is my fault and all in my head, but they tend to view me ad a bit “posh”. Whereas the other group the other.

I constantly feel as if I’m picking sides!

I was bought up 100 percent working class in a " lower class " area which they deemed me as " posh "
Now at 27 live in a very very middle class area as working class and here it makes a difference.

My daughter attends classes at a place where all the mums are at least a decade older than me and middle class, we have no been invited once to one of their meet ups.

My 11 year olds school is the same but worse ! He is allowed to attend their sleepover, at days at their houses but never have they accepted the opposite return to stay at ours or to come out for a birthday tip etc.

@LynetteScavo, are you saying my children will just keep it hidden from me? Am I genuinely deluded in not ever thinking this is a problem?
Can I ask what problems/issues my DC may pick up but be too polite to mention? DH and I have the same level of education (PG) but he does earn far more than me. My father was a miner and I grew up in a very deprived area of Notts. DH is from Glasgow. He went to private school. His dad was a construction engineer who had also been to university and owned his own business. But all 4 GPs are dead so there’s nothing to notice in that respect.

I have genuinely only ever seen or heard this discussed on MN.

Soupdragon, that is commendable and I wish more people were like you. I too feel exempt from classification but I have an awareness that not everybody is like us. (can I do that?! can I say that :-p)

I've experienced inverse snobbery and that's usually more vocal. With normal snobbery you could miss it.

@frogsoup, when I left for university I had literally zero concept that I should only socialise with certain people or in certain ways. I was told it would be a melting pot and I treated it as such and nothing ever happened to change my initial view.
But, maybe that’s why I don’t like where I live. It all seems so vacuous- but then it’s never occurred to me it was a class thing.

Class issues are not dead but there are lots of different reason people might or might not socialise with others eg I was quite young when I had my children so none of my friends had children and I was back at work full time in weeks so I was not socialisting with other young mothers for obvious reasons, not because of snobbery or class issues. In fact there can be bigger differences in whether women work full time or part time or don't work as if you are in full time work then you are less likely to be meeting up on the school run at 3pm etc which might in some areas be something done by a child minder or nanny granny more often than the full time working mothers.

So go made some lower middle class friends. You will got right in. They are class obssessed too.

My mum's upper class, Dad's very much the lower end of working class, I can't say its ever been an issue, actually more I can get on with anyone and fit in in any social situation. I do have a weird accent though.

It's just how you let yourself feel about it. As a teenager I went to a very good state school in the next town. I was in the company of lots of people who had horses and lived in lovely villages, and had a completely different lifestyle to myself. I was from a council estate that was know for being one of the worst places to live in my town. My dad was a lorry driver and I had a SAHM. When I was younger it did bother me, and I was constantly trying to put across the best version of myself. Now I'm older it doesn't bother me at all. At the end of the day we are all people, we're born with nothing and we can't take things to the grave. All that matters really is being a good person!

Rainbow Me too! (the accent that is)

Lookingforspace universities are indeed often melting pots. They might be one of the few spaces that are. In adult life, though, can you genuinely say that your friends are an equal mix of, lets say, shop assistants, hairdressers, doctors and barristers? I don't mean to say 'among your friends, do you know a shop assistant and a barrister?' - most people do absolutely have a mix of friends from different backgrounds, unless they are crashing snobs. But on the whole people are probably likely to know and befriend people from similar parts of society, if nothing else because that's who they are likely to meet both where they work and where they live.

Also, it's easy to say class is irrelevant if you feel secure in an environment. I grew up fairly middle class (though ddad and family definitely working class), but university was a real shock, because I was the first in my family to go, and for the first time I met people from public school who saw uni as a birthright. In my first week some guy laughed at me because I mispronounced the name 'Bach'. I'd never encountered people like that in my life. All right to say 'aha how boring it is to care about class division', but it does slightly suggest you've never had to worry about being looked down on or not fitting in for not having the right background or accent.

Well as I said, I grew up on a deprived council estate and yes, I was first to go to (RG) university (although my sister followed). But I don’t remember feeling out of place at all. Maybe people sniggered and I just didn’t notice. When I met DH I don’t remember at all feeling intimidated by the fact he’d been to private school at the same time as we were virtually starving (during the strike) We got on, we laughed lots, we drank lots and we shagged lots like every other student I knew.

I went to a local comp in a socially deprived area. DD is Y7 at one of the top performing grammar schools in the country. We’re currently taking turns to read a chapter each of Anne of Green Gables just like I did with my mum at the same age. Yet DD has two professional parents and mine were a miner and a SAHM. Yet I’m still surprised to read that my children may be feeling awkwardly caught between perceived classes.

And using state education has meant that my older two children have mixed (certainly at secondary) with bright children from more deprived homes. My youngest DS has SN and that really is a melting pot.

I'm with you OP.

Too posh for my WC family, although I do consider myself WC but you could hardly say I fitted in with the UMC ones either.
Its perculiar to feel like an outlier within my own family.
I empathise with you completely.

As if someone asked, how did those classes collide? Do you think WC are hid away somewhere only able to socialise with other WC folk?

My father is v traditional upper middle class whereas my mum is very working class. Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to have two perspectives on everything and seeing two sides to every history. I just feel I lack a sense of “belonging” to one specific group of people.

Have you ever done your family tree? What you usually find is that when you get back to the early 1900's, almost everyone in the UK is working class.
What you might think of as being 'traditional upper middle class' will probably not have been the case 100 years ago.

As if someone asked, how did those classes collide? Do you think WC are hid away somewhere only able to socialise with other WC folk?

Yes. Have you never seen the film Titanic? Things haven’t moved on much since then apparently

I've been doing my family tree. In 1900 my mother's family were things like blacksmiths, miners etc. My father's had people at sea, master mariner and two who did professional qualifications - my grandfather's oldest sister in about 1893 did nurse training in Birmingham and practiwsed for 20 years in Wapping and the oldest boy qualified as a solicitor and practised in Leeds from about 1892 although my grandfather himself was just a self taught auctioneer and valuer although he did become a JP and was a local councillor. His mother's family had had a shop and another one a pub.

I have found it very interesting going back and looking at who did what. In the earlier 1800s quite a few of the men were at sea. One ran the first steam packet ship thing from Hull down to London so I suppose that bit of the famly might have been reasonably well off but certainly the best they got to were one or two live in servants and a few went to boarding school including my uncle aged only 4 which is dreadful, in the 1920s.

All right to say 'aha how boring it is to care about class division', but it does slightly suggest you've never had to worry about being looked down on or not fitting in for not having the right background or accent.

This is what I think too frog, although I don’t have anything to compare it to so don’t know if I’m making massive assumptions! I know a lot of people who feel like this (as in out of place) and are all people from WC-type backgrounds now in professional roles - but that might just be me mixing with other people like me my friends from other backgrounds don’t seem to think about this anywhere near as much, which so far I’ve put down to what you’ve said above.

Beforeihit30: Just for the statistics. I am not working class at all and often feel out of place between professionals. I just don‘t get the world view many of them seem to have which seems to be all about money and career, well but typically I do not tell them.

I agree frog. When I arrived in London from the North aged 19 I thought I was just "normal" not any particular class..then I met people who had been to private schools, and who went skiing, and who genuinely thought that I must be thick and backward because of my accent. I also realised I was poor when it turned out I was the only one of my flatmates paying my own rent!
I also know a fair few people nowadays who are so solidly middle class, and have dinner parties with other solidly middle class people and they probably think they are friends with a "wide selection" of people because they know me 😂 (not realising that I am so very respectable these days.)

Apart from my doctor and a few other professionals. I've never met anyone who isn't working class

I know how you feel. One of my grandfathers was a baronet and university professor. The other a joiner from Bolton who left school at the age of 12. I was born in Blackburn where my mum and grandmother grew up.

My parents met at university (then both dropped out), got married and emigrated to The Canary Islands when I was four. I don’t think I ever felt unwelcome growing up but certainly didn’t feel like I fit in. I now live in Kent and speak with a fairly neutral RP accent but without the same vocabulary that’s common amongst other people my age as I grew up speaking Spanish. I mostly just feel a bit weird and awkward.

I also grew up fairly poor but I’m a vet now, so don’t really know where I fit in.

I agree about fitting in being the issue, my grandmother was disowned by her family when she married down in the early 1920's. There was a shortage of men due to WW1. Along with the vote it changed society forever. I read a fascinating book about the surplus women in society after WW1 Singled out by Virginia Nicholson.

I remember my Grandmother being an incredibly gracious elegant woman though poor. After she died we found photos from when she was young. Beautiful pictures of her in fabulous beaded evening gowns.

I have a social sciences background and did study the effect of being born poor and educational outcomes.

I was the only child in my family to go to University, I met DH there he is form a solid MC background. My life is very different to my siblings. I bucked the trend of my own research.