...Growing Up, It Was In This Area:
Not too difficult to answer. With mom being home alone a lot with four kids, and me being the oldest, my mid-late teens were a learning experience for us all. We were a comfortably off middle class family, but as I hit my late teens, my dad branched out more into being self-employed, which left us a little more financially precarious than we were accustomed to. Not that I knew it, of course, but my mom certainly did.
So when I hit age 16 or so, where in England one can legally walk away from school and get a job (albeit not usually a great one), I get the impression looking back that my mother would have liked me to do that just to retain a bit more financial stability in the household. Being one of the brightest kids in school, though, I had no intention of doing so, nor did I even have a clue such thoughts might be buzzing in my mother's head. So that last couple of years of high school were fraught with lots of high decibel screaming brought on by unarticulated anxiety.
Towards the end, though, I think we both calmed down and it was finally over. Four years later when I graduated top of my class in Aeronautical Engineering at Manchester there was nobody prouder than my mother. She even got the local paper to run a little story. Strangely enough the guy who wrote it invented a sub-story about me moving to Canada, something that actually happened four years later.
Tack on another seven years for my Ph.D. graduation and it almost took guy ropes to keep my mom anchored to the ground.
So the moral of the story is - kids rarely realize the fear and uncertainty that swirls around their parents' lives until it's too late to do anything constructive about it.
