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conuly
I'm interested, so I thought I'd post the articles here.
This one is on marriage
When Richer Weds Poorer, Money Isn't the Only Difference
By TAMAR LEWIN
NORTHFIELD, Mass. - When Dan Croteau met Cate Woolner six years ago, he was selling cars at the Keene, N.H., Mitsubishi lot and she was pretending to be a customer, test driving a black Montero while she and her 11-year-old son, Jonah, waited for their car to be serviced.
The test drive lasted an hour and a half. Jonah got to see how the vehicle performed in off-road mud puddles. And Mr. Croteau and Ms. Woolner hit it off so well that she later sent him a note, suggesting that if he was not involved with someone, not a Republican and not an alien life form, maybe they could meet for coffee. Mr. Croteau dithered about the propriety of dating a customer, but when he finally responded, they talked on the phone from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.
They had a lot in common. Each had two failed marriages and two children. Both love dancing, motorcycles, Bob Dylan, bad puns, liberal politics and National Public Radio.
But when they began dating, they found differences, too. The religious difference - he is Roman Catholic, she is Jewish - posed no problem. The real gap between them, both say, is more subtle: Mr. Croteau comes from the working class, and Ms. Woolner from money.
Mr. Croteau, who will be 50 in June, grew up in Keene, an old mill town in southern New Hampshire. His father was a factory worker whose education ended at the eighth grade; his mother had some factory jobs, too. Mr. Croteau had a difficult childhood and quit school at 16. He then left home, joined the Navy and drifted through a long series of jobs without finding any real calling. He married his pregnant 19-year-old girlfriend and had two daughters, Lael and Maggie, by the time he was 24.
"I was raised in a family where my grandma lived next door, my uncles lived on the next road over, my dad's two brothers lived next to each other, and I pretty much played with my cousins," he said. "The whole concept of life was that you should try to get a good job in the factory. My mother tried to encourage me. She'd say, 'Dan's bright; ask him a question.' But if I'd said I wanted to go to college, it would have been like saying I wanted to grow gills and breathe underwater."
He always felt that the rich people in town, "the ones with their names on the buildings," as he put it, lived in another world.
Ms. Woolner, 54, comes from that other world. The daughter of a doctor and a dancer, she grew up in a comfortable home in Hartsdale, N.Y., with the summer camps, vacations and college education that wealthy Westchester County families can take for granted. She was always uncomfortable with her money; when she came into a modest inheritance at 21, she ignored the monthly bank statements for several years, until she learned to channel her unease into philanthropy benefiting social causes. She was in her mid-30's and married to a psychotherapist when Isaac and Jonah were born.
"My mother's father had a Rolls-Royce and a butler and a second home in Florida," Ms. Woolner said, "and from as far back as I can remember, I was always aware that I had more than other people, and I was uncomfortable about it because it didn't feel fair. When I was little, what I fixated on with my girlfriends was how I had more pajamas than they did. So when I'd go to birthday sleepovers, I'd always take them a pair of pajamas as a present."
Marriages that cross class boundaries may not present as obvious a set of challenges as those that cross the lines of race or nationality. But in a quiet way, people who marry across class lines are also moving outside their comfort zones, into the uncharted territory of partners with a different level of wealth and education, and often, a different set of assumptions about things like manners, food, child-rearing, gift-giving and how to spend vacations. In cross-class marriages, one partner will usually have more money, more options and, almost inevitably, more power in the relationship.
It is not possible to say how many cross-class marriages there are. But to the extent that education serves as a proxy for class, they seem to be declining. Even as more people marry across racial and religious lines, often to partners who match them closely in other respects, fewer are choosing partners with a different level of education. While most of those marriages used to involve men marrying women with less education, studies have found, lately that pattern has flipped, so that by 2000, the majority involved women, like Ms. Woolner, marrying men with less schooling - the combination most likely to end in divorce.
"It's definitely more complicated, given the cultural scripts we've all grown up with," said Ms. Woolner, who has a master's degree in counseling and radiates a thoughtful sincerity. "We've all been taught it's supposed to be the man who has the money and the status and the power."
When he met Ms. Woolner, Mr. Croteau had recently stopped drinking and was looking to change his life. But when she told him, soon after they began dating, that she had money, it did not land as good news.
"I wished she had waited a little," Mr. Croteau said. "When she told me, my first thought was, uh oh, this is a complication. From that moment I had to begin questioning my motivations. You don't want to feel like a gold digger. You have to tell yourself, here's this person that I love, and here's this quality that comes with the package. Cate's very generous, and she thinks a lot about what's fair and works very hard to level things out, but she also has a lot of baggage around that quality. She has all kinds of choices I don't have. And she does the lion's share of the decision-making."
Before introducing Ms. Woolner to his family, Mr. Croteau warned them about her background. "I said, 'Mom, I want you to know Cate and her family are rich,' " he recalled. "And she said, 'Well, don't hold that against her; she's probably very nice anyway.' I thought that was amazing."
There were biases on the other side too. Just last summer, Mr. Croteau said, when they were at Ms. Woolner's mother's house on Martha's Vineyard, his mother-in-law confessed to him that she had initially been embarrassed that he was a car salesman and worried that her daughter was taking him on as a kind of do-good project.
Still, the relationship moved quickly. Mr. Croteau met Ms. Woolner in the fall of 1998 and moved into her comfortable home in Northfield the next spring, after meeting her condition that he sell his gun.
Even before Mr. Croteau moved in, Ms. Woolner gave him money to buy a new car and pay off some debts. "I wanted to give him the money," she said. "I hadn't sweated it. I told him that this was money that had just come to me for being born into one class, while he was born into another class." And when he lost his job not long after, Ms. Woolner began paying him a monthly stipend - he sometimes refers to it as an allowance - that continued, at a smaller level, until last November, when she quit her longstanding job at a local antipoverty agency. She also agreed to pay for a $10,000 computer course that helped prepare him for his current job as a software analyst at the Cheshire Medical Center in Keene. From the beginning, the balance of power in the relationship was a sufficiently touchy issue that at Ms. Woolner's urging, a few months before their wedding in August 2001, they joined a series of workshops on cross-class relationships.
"I had abject terror at the idea of the group," said Mr. Croteau, who is blunt and intellectually engaging. "It's certainly an upper-class luxury to pay to tell someone your troubles, and with all the problems in the world, it felt a little strange to sit around talking about your relationship. But it was useful. It was a relief to hear people talk about the same kinds of issues we were facing, about who had power in the relationship and how they used it. I think we would have made it anyway, but we would have had a rockier time without the group."
It is still accepted truth within the household that Ms. Woolner's status has given her the upper hand in the marriage. At dinner one night, when her son Isaac said baldly, "I always think of my mom as having the power in the relationship," Mr. Croteau did not flinch. He is fully aware that in this relationship he is the one whose life has been most changed.
The Woolner-Croteau household is just up the hill from the groomed fields of Northfield Mount Hermon prep school - a constant local reminder to Mr. Croteau of just how differently his wife's sons and his daughters have been educated. Jonah is now a senior there. Isaac, who also attended the school, is now back at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon after taking a couple of semesters away to study in India and to attend massage school while working in a deli near home.
By contrast, Mr. Croteau's adult daughters - who have never lived with the couple - made their way through the Keene public schools.
"I sometimes think Jonah and Isaac need a dose of reality, that a couple years in public school would have shown them something different," Mr. Croteau said. "On the other hand I sometimes wish I'd been able to give Maggie and Lael what they had. My kids didn't have the same kind of privilege and the same kind of schools. They didn't have teachers concerned about their tender growing egos. It was catch-as-catch-can for them, and that still shows in their personalities."
Mr. Croteau had another experience of Northfield Mount Hermon as well. He briefly had a job as its communications manager, but could not adjust to its culture.
"There were all these Ivy Leaguers," he said. "I didn't understand their nuances, and I didn't make a single friend there. In working-class life, people tell you things directly, they're not subtle. At N.M.H., I didn't get how they did things. When a vendor didn't meet the deadline, I called and said, 'Where's the job?' When he said, 'We bumped you, we'll have it next week,' I said, 'What do you mean, next week? We have a deadline, you can't do business like that.' It got back to my supervisor, who came and said, 'We don't yell at vendors.' The idea seemed to be that there weren't deadlines in that world, just guidelines."
Mr. Croteau says he is far more comfortable at the hospital. "I deal mostly with nurses and other computer nerds and they come from the same kind of world I do, so we know how to talk to each other," he said.
But in dealing with Ms. Woolner's family, especially during the annual visits to Martha's Vineyard, Mr. Croteau said, he sometimes finds himself back in class bewilderment, feeling again that he does not get the nuances. "They're incredibly gracious to me, very well bred and very nice," he said, "so much so that it's hard to tell whether it's sincere, whether they really like you."
Mr. Croteau still seems impressed by his wife's family, and their being among "the ones with their names on the buildings." It is he who shows a visitor the framed print of the old Woolner Distillery in Peoria, Ill., and, describing the pictures on the wall, mentions that this in-law went to Yale, and that one knew Gerald Ford.
Mr. Croteau and Ms Woolner are not the only ones aware of the class divide within the family; so are the two sets of children.
Money is continually tight for Lael Croteau, 27, who is in graduate school in educational administration at the University of Vermont, and Maggie, 25, who is working three jobs while in her second year of law school at American University. At restaurants, they ask to have the leftovers wrapped to take home.
Neither could imagine taking a semester off to try out massage school, as Isaac did. They are careful about their manners, their plans, their clothes.
"Who's got money, who doesn't, it's always going on in my head," Maggie said. "So I put on the armor. I have the bag. I have the shirt. I know people can't tell my background by looking."
The Croteau daughters are the only ones among 12 first cousins who made it to college. Most of the others married and had babies right after high school.
"They see us as different, and sometimes that can hurt," Maggie said.
The daughters walk a fine line. They are deeply attached to their mother, who did most of their rearing, but they are also attracted to the Woolner world and its possibilities. Through holidays and Vineyard vacations, they have come to feel close not only to their stepbrothers, but also to Ms. Woolner's sisters' children, whose pictures are on display in Lael's house in Vermont. And they see, up close, just how different their upbringing was.
"Jonah and Isaac don't have to worry about how they dress, or whether they'll have the money to finish college, or anything," Lael said. "That's a real luxury. And when one of the little kids asks, 'Why do people sneeze?' their mom will say, 'I don't know; that's a great question. Let's go to the museum, and check it out.' My mom is very smart and certainly engages us on many levels, but when we asked a difficult question, she'd say, 'Because I said so.' "
The daughters' lives have been changed not only by Ms. Woolner's warm, stable presence, but also by her gifts of money for snow tires or books, the family vacations she pays for and her connections. One of Ms. Woolner's cousins, a Washington lawyer, employs Maggie both at her office and as a housesitter.
For Ms. Woolner's sons, Mr. Croteau's arrival did not make nearly as much difference. They are mostly oblivious of the extended Croteau family, and have barely met the Croteau cousins, who are close to their age and live nearby but lead quite different lives. Indeed, in early February, while Ms. Woolner's Isaac was re-adjusting to college life, Mr. Croteau's nephew, another 20-year-old Isaac who had enlisted in the Marines right after high school, was shot in the face in Falluja, Iraq, and shipped to Bethesda Medical Center in Maryland. Isaac and Jonah are easygoing young men, neither of whom has any clear idea what he wants to do in life. "For a while I've been trying to find my passion," Jonah said. "But I haven't been passionately trying to find my passion."
Isaac fantasizes about opening a brewery-cum-performance-space, traveling through South America or operating a sunset massage cruise in the Caribbean. He knows he is on such solid ground that he can afford fantasy.
"I have the most amazing safety net a person could have," he said, "incredible, loving, involved and wealthy parents."
On the rare occasions when they are all together, the daughters get on easily with the sons, though there are occasional tensions. Maggie would love to have a summer internship with a human rights group, but she needs paid work and when she graduates, with more than $100,000 of debt, she will need a law firm job, not one with a nonprofit. So when Isaac one day teased her as being a sellout, she reminded him that it was a lot easier to live your ideals when you did not need to make money to pay for them.
And there are moments when the inequalities within the family are painfully obvious.
"I do feel the awkwardness of helping Isaac buy a car, when I'm not helping them buy a car," Ms. Woolner said of the daughters. "We've talked about that. But I also have to be aware of overstepping. Their mother's house burned down, which was awful for them and for her and I really wanted to help. I took out my checkbook and I didn't know what was appropriate. In the end I wrote a $1,500 check. Emily Post doesn't deal with these situations."
She and Mr. Croteau remain conscious of the class differences between them, and the ways in which their lives have been shaped by different experiences.
On one visit to New York City, where Ms. Woolner's mother lives in the winter, Ms. Woolner lost her debit card and felt anxious about being disconnected, even briefly, from her money.
For Mr. Croteau, it was a strange moment. "She had real discomfort, even though we were around the corner from her mother, and she had enough money to do anything we were likely to do, assuming she wasn't planning to buy a car or a diamond all of a sudden," he said. "So I didn't understand the problem. I know how to walk around without a safety net. I've done it all my life."
Both he and his wife express pride that their marriage has withstood its particular problems and stresses.
"I think we're always both amazed that we're working it out," Ms. Woolner said.
But almost from the beginning they agreed on an approach to their relationship, a motto now engraved inside their wedding rings: "Press on regardless."
And on growing up in two worlds.
Up From the Holler: Living in Two Worlds, at Home in Neither
By TAMAR LEWIN
PIKEVILLE, Ky. - Della Mae Justice stands before the jury in the Pike County Courthouse, arguing that her client's land in Greasy Creek Hollow was illegally grabbed when the neighbors expanded their cemetery behind her home.
With her soft Appalachian accent, Ms. Justice leaves no doubt that she is a local girl, steeped in the culture of the old family cemeteries that dot the mountains here in East Kentucky. "I grew up in a holler, I surely did," she tells jurors as she lays out the boundary conflict.
Ms. Justice is, indeed, a product of the Appalachian coal-mining country where lush mountains flank rust-colored creeks, the hollows rising so steeply that there is barely room for a house on either side of the creeks. Her family was poor, living for several years in a house without indoor plumbing. Her father was absent; her older half-brother sometimes had to hunt squirrels for the family to eat. Her mother married again when Della was 9. But the stepfather, a truck driver, was frequently on the road, and her mother, who was mentally ill, often needed the young Della to care for her.
Ms. Justice was always hungry for a taste of the world beyond the mountains. Right after high school, she left Pike County, making her way through college and law school, spending time in France, Scotland and Ireland, and beginning a high-powered legal career. In just a few years she moved up the ladder from rural poverty to the high-achieving circles of the middle class.
Now, at 34, she is back home. But her journey has transformed her so thoroughly that she no longer fits in easily. Her change in status has left Ms. Justice a little off balance, seeing the world from two vantage points at the same time: the one she grew up in and the one she occupies now.
Far more than people who remain in the social class they are born to, surrounded by others of the same background, Ms. Justice is sensitive to the cultural significance of the cars people drive, the food they serve at parties, where they go on vacation - all the little clues that indicate social status. By every conventional measure, Ms. Justice is now solidly middle class, but she is still trying to learn how to feel middle class. Almost every time she expresses an idea, or explains herself, she checks whether she is being understood, asking, "Does that make sense?"
"I think class is everything, I really do," she said recently. "When you're poor and from a low socioeconomic group, you don't have a lot of choices in life. To me, being from an upper class is all about confidence. It's knowing you have choices, knowing you set the standards, knowing you have connections."
In Pikeville, the site of the Hatfield-McCoy feud (Ms. Justice is a Hatfield), memories are long and family roots mean a lot. Despite her success, Ms. Justice worries about what people might remember about her, especially about the time when she was 15 and her life with her mother and stepfather imploded in violence, sending her into foster care for a wretched nine months.
"I was always in the lowest socioeconomic group," she said, "but foster care ratcheted it down another notch. I hate that period of my life, when for nine months I was a child with no family."
While she was in foster care, Ms. Justice lived in one end of a double-wide trailer, with the foster family on the other end. She slept alongside another foster child, who wet the bed, and every morning she chose her clothes from a box of hand-me-downs. She was finally rescued when her father heard about her situation and called his nephew, Joe Justice.
Joe Justice was 35 years older than Della, a successful lawyer who lived in the other Pikeville, one of the well-to-do neighborhoods on the mountain ridges. He and his wife, Virginia, had just built a four-bedroom contemporary home, complete with a swimming pool, on Cedar Gap Ridge.
Joe Justice had never even met his cousin until he saw her in the trailer, but afterward he told his wife that it was "abhorrent" for a close relative to be in foster care. While poverty is common around Pikeville, foster care is something much worse: a sundering of the family ties that count for so much. So Joe and Virginia Justice took Della Mae in. She changed schools, changed address - changed worlds, in effect - and moved into an octagonal bedroom downstairs from the Justices' 2 year-old son.
"The shock of going to live in wealth, with Joe and Virginia, it was like Little Orphan Annie going to live with the Rockefellers," Ms. Justice said. "It was not easy. I was shy and socially inept. For the first time, I could have had the right clothes, but I didn't have any idea what the right clothes were. I didn't know much about the world, and I was always afraid of making a wrong move. When we had a school trip for chorus, we went to a restaurant. I ordered a club sandwich, but when it came with those toothpicks on either end, I didn't know how to eat it, so I just sat there, staring at it and starving, and said I didn't feel well."
Joe and Virginia Justice worried about Della Mae's social unease and her failure to mingle with other young people in their church. But they quickly sensed her intelligence and encouraged her to attend Berea College, a small liberal arts institution in Kentucky that accepts students only from low-income families. Tuition is free and everybody works. For Ms. Justice, as for many other Berea students, the experience of being one among many poor people, all academically capable and encouraged to pursue big dreams, was life-altering.
It was at Berea that Ms. Justice met the man who became her husband, Troy Price, the son of a tobacco farmer with a sixth-grade education. They married after graduation, and when Ms. Justice won a fellowship, the couple went to Europe for a year of independent travel and study. When Ms. Justice won a scholarship to the University of Kentucky law school in Lexington, Mr. Price went with her, to graduate school in family studies.
After graduating fifth in her law school class, Ms. Justice clerked for a federal judge, then joined Lexington's largest law firm, where she put in long hours in hopes of making partner. She and her husband bought a townhouse, took trips, ate in restaurants almost every night and spent many Sunday afternoons at real estate open houses in Lexington's elegant older neighborhoods. By all appearances, they were on the fast track.
But Ms. Justice still felt like an outsider. Her co-editors on the law review, her fellow clerks at the court and her colleagues at the law firm all seemed to have a universe of information that had passed her by. She saw it in matters big and small - the casual references, to Che Guevara or Mount Vesuvius, that meant nothing to her; the food at dinner parties that she would not eat because it looked raw in the middle.
"I couldn't play Trivial Pursuit, because I had no general knowledge of the world," she said. "And while I knew East Kentucky, they all knew a whole lot about Massachusetts and the Northeast. They all knew who was important, whose father was a federal judge. They never doubted that they had the right thing to say. They never worried about anything."
Most of all, they all had connections that fed into a huge web of people with power. "Somehow, they all just knew each other," she said.
Ms. Justice's life took an abrupt turn in 1999, when her half-brother, back in Pike County, called out of the blue to say that his children, Will and Anna Ratliff, who had been living with their mother, were in foster care. Ms. Justice and her brother had not been close, and she had met the children only once or twice, but the call was impossible to ignore. As her cousin Joe had years earlier, she found it intolerable to think of her flesh and blood in foster care.
So over the next year, Della Mae Justice and her husband got custody of both children and went back to Pikeville, only 150 miles away but far removed from their life in Lexington. The move made all kinds of sense. Will and Anna, now 13 and 12, could stay in touch with their mother and father. Mr. Price got a better job, as executive director of Pikeville's new support center for abused children. Ms. Justice went to work for her cousin at his law firm, where a flexible schedule allowed her to look after the two children.
And yet for Ms. Justice the return to Pikeville has been almost as dislocating as moving out of foster care and into that octagonal bedroom all those years ago. On a rare visit recently to the hollows where she used to live, she was moved to tears when a neighbor came out, hugged her and told her how he used to pray and worry for her and how happy he was that she had done so well. But mostly, she winces when reminded of her past.
"Last week, I picked up the phone in my office," she recalled, "and the woman said who she was, and then said, 'You don't remember me, do you?' And I said, 'Were you in foster care with me?' That was crazy. Why would I do that? It's not something I advertise, that I was in care."
While most of her workweek is devoted to commercial law, Ms. Justice spends Mondays in family court, representing families with the kind of problems hers had. She bristles whenever she runs into any hint of class bias, or the presumption that poor people in homes heated by kerosene or without enough bedrooms cannot be good parents.
"The norm is, people that are born with money have money, and people who weren't don't," she said recently. "I know that. I know that just to climb the three inches I have, which I've not gone very far, took all of my effort. I have worked hard since I was a kid and I've done nothing but work to try and pull myself out."
The class a person is born into, she said, is the starting point on the continuum. "If your goal is to become, on a national scale, a very important person, you can't start way back on the continuum, because you have too much to make up in one lifetime. You have to make up the distance you can in your lifetime so that your kids can then make up the distance in their lifetime."
Ms. Justice is still not fully at ease in the other, well-to-do Pikeville, and in many ways she and her husband had to start from scratch in finding a niche there. Church is where most people in town find friends and build their social life. But Ms. Justice and Mr. Price had trouble finding a church that was a comfortable fit; they went through five congregations, starting at the Baptist church she had attended as a child and ending up at the Disciples of Christ, an inclusive liberal church with many affluent members. The pastor and his wife, transplants to Kentucky, have become their closest friends. Others have come more slowly.
"Partly the problem is that we're young, for middle-class people, to have kids as old as Will and Anna," Ms. Justice said. "And the fact that we're raising a niece and nephew, that's kind of a flag that we weren't always middle class, just like saying you went to Berea College tells everyone you were poor."
And though in terms of her work Ms. Justice is now one of Pikeville's leading citizens, she is still troubled by the old doubts and insecurities. "My stomach's always in knots getting ready to go to a party, wondering if I'm wearing the right thing, if I'll know what to do," she said. "I'm always thinking: How does everybody else know that? How do they know how to act? Why do they all seem so at ease?"
A lot of her energy now goes into Will and Anna. She wants to bring them up to have the middle-class ease that still eludes her. "Will and Anna know what it's like to be poor, and now we want them to be able to be just regular kids," she said. "When I was young, I always knew who were the kids at school with the involved parents that brought in the cookies, and those were the kids who got chosen for every special thing, not ones like me, who got free lunch and had to borrow clothes from their aunt if there was a chorus performance."
Because Ms. Justice is self-conscious about her teeth - "the East Kentucky overbite," she says ruefully - she made sure early on that Anna got braces. She worries about the children's clothes as much as her own. "Everyone else seems to know when the khaki pants the boys need are on sale at J. C. Penney," she said. "I never know these things."
As a child, Ms. Justice never had the resources for her homework projects. So when Anna was assigned to build a Navajo hogan, they headed to Wal-Mart for supplies.
"We put in extra time, so she would appear like those kids with the involved parents," Ms. Justice said. "I know it's just a hogan, but making a project that looks like the other kids' projects is part of fitting in."
Ms. Justice encouraged Will to join the Boy Scouts, and when he was invited to join his school's Academic Team, which competes in quiz bowls, she insisted that he try it. When he asked her whether he might become a drug addict if he took the medicine prescribed for him, she told him it was an excellent question, and at the doctor's office prompted him to ask the doctor directly. She nudges both children to talk about what happens in school, to recount the plots of the books they read and to discuss current events.
It is this kind of guidance that distinguishes middle-class children from children of working-class and poor families, according to sociologists who have studied how social class affects child-rearing. While working-class parents usually teach their children, early on, to do what they are told without argument and to manage their own free time, middle-class parents tend to play an active role in shaping their children's activities, seeking out extracurricular activities to build their talents, and encouraging them to speak up and even to negotiate with authority figures.
Ms. Justice's efforts are making a difference. Will found that he enjoyed Academic Team. Anna now gets evening phone calls from several friends. Both have begun to have occasional sleepovers. And gradually, Ms. Justice is coming to terms with her own life. On New Year's Eve, after years in a modest rented townhouse, she and her husband moved into a new house that reminds her of the Brady Bunch home. It has four bedrooms and a swimming pool. In a few years, when her older cousin retires, Ms. Justice will most likely take over the practice, a solid prospect, though far less lucrative, and less glamorous, than a partnership at her Lexington law firm.
"I've worked very hard all my life - to have a life that's not so far from where I started out," she said. "It is different, but it's not the magical life I thought I'd get."
This one is on marriage
When Richer Weds Poorer, Money Isn't the Only Difference
By TAMAR LEWIN
NORTHFIELD, Mass. - When Dan Croteau met Cate Woolner six years ago, he was selling cars at the Keene, N.H., Mitsubishi lot and she was pretending to be a customer, test driving a black Montero while she and her 11-year-old son, Jonah, waited for their car to be serviced.
The test drive lasted an hour and a half. Jonah got to see how the vehicle performed in off-road mud puddles. And Mr. Croteau and Ms. Woolner hit it off so well that she later sent him a note, suggesting that if he was not involved with someone, not a Republican and not an alien life form, maybe they could meet for coffee. Mr. Croteau dithered about the propriety of dating a customer, but when he finally responded, they talked on the phone from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.
They had a lot in common. Each had two failed marriages and two children. Both love dancing, motorcycles, Bob Dylan, bad puns, liberal politics and National Public Radio.
But when they began dating, they found differences, too. The religious difference - he is Roman Catholic, she is Jewish - posed no problem. The real gap between them, both say, is more subtle: Mr. Croteau comes from the working class, and Ms. Woolner from money.
Mr. Croteau, who will be 50 in June, grew up in Keene, an old mill town in southern New Hampshire. His father was a factory worker whose education ended at the eighth grade; his mother had some factory jobs, too. Mr. Croteau had a difficult childhood and quit school at 16. He then left home, joined the Navy and drifted through a long series of jobs without finding any real calling. He married his pregnant 19-year-old girlfriend and had two daughters, Lael and Maggie, by the time he was 24.
"I was raised in a family where my grandma lived next door, my uncles lived on the next road over, my dad's two brothers lived next to each other, and I pretty much played with my cousins," he said. "The whole concept of life was that you should try to get a good job in the factory. My mother tried to encourage me. She'd say, 'Dan's bright; ask him a question.' But if I'd said I wanted to go to college, it would have been like saying I wanted to grow gills and breathe underwater."
He always felt that the rich people in town, "the ones with their names on the buildings," as he put it, lived in another world.
Ms. Woolner, 54, comes from that other world. The daughter of a doctor and a dancer, she grew up in a comfortable home in Hartsdale, N.Y., with the summer camps, vacations and college education that wealthy Westchester County families can take for granted. She was always uncomfortable with her money; when she came into a modest inheritance at 21, she ignored the monthly bank statements for several years, until she learned to channel her unease into philanthropy benefiting social causes. She was in her mid-30's and married to a psychotherapist when Isaac and Jonah were born.
"My mother's father had a Rolls-Royce and a butler and a second home in Florida," Ms. Woolner said, "and from as far back as I can remember, I was always aware that I had more than other people, and I was uncomfortable about it because it didn't feel fair. When I was little, what I fixated on with my girlfriends was how I had more pajamas than they did. So when I'd go to birthday sleepovers, I'd always take them a pair of pajamas as a present."
Marriages that cross class boundaries may not present as obvious a set of challenges as those that cross the lines of race or nationality. But in a quiet way, people who marry across class lines are also moving outside their comfort zones, into the uncharted territory of partners with a different level of wealth and education, and often, a different set of assumptions about things like manners, food, child-rearing, gift-giving and how to spend vacations. In cross-class marriages, one partner will usually have more money, more options and, almost inevitably, more power in the relationship.
It is not possible to say how many cross-class marriages there are. But to the extent that education serves as a proxy for class, they seem to be declining. Even as more people marry across racial and religious lines, often to partners who match them closely in other respects, fewer are choosing partners with a different level of education. While most of those marriages used to involve men marrying women with less education, studies have found, lately that pattern has flipped, so that by 2000, the majority involved women, like Ms. Woolner, marrying men with less schooling - the combination most likely to end in divorce.
"It's definitely more complicated, given the cultural scripts we've all grown up with," said Ms. Woolner, who has a master's degree in counseling and radiates a thoughtful sincerity. "We've all been taught it's supposed to be the man who has the money and the status and the power."
When he met Ms. Woolner, Mr. Croteau had recently stopped drinking and was looking to change his life. But when she told him, soon after they began dating, that she had money, it did not land as good news.
"I wished she had waited a little," Mr. Croteau said. "When she told me, my first thought was, uh oh, this is a complication. From that moment I had to begin questioning my motivations. You don't want to feel like a gold digger. You have to tell yourself, here's this person that I love, and here's this quality that comes with the package. Cate's very generous, and she thinks a lot about what's fair and works very hard to level things out, but she also has a lot of baggage around that quality. She has all kinds of choices I don't have. And she does the lion's share of the decision-making."
Before introducing Ms. Woolner to his family, Mr. Croteau warned them about her background. "I said, 'Mom, I want you to know Cate and her family are rich,' " he recalled. "And she said, 'Well, don't hold that against her; she's probably very nice anyway.' I thought that was amazing."
There were biases on the other side too. Just last summer, Mr. Croteau said, when they were at Ms. Woolner's mother's house on Martha's Vineyard, his mother-in-law confessed to him that she had initially been embarrassed that he was a car salesman and worried that her daughter was taking him on as a kind of do-good project.
Still, the relationship moved quickly. Mr. Croteau met Ms. Woolner in the fall of 1998 and moved into her comfortable home in Northfield the next spring, after meeting her condition that he sell his gun.
Even before Mr. Croteau moved in, Ms. Woolner gave him money to buy a new car and pay off some debts. "I wanted to give him the money," she said. "I hadn't sweated it. I told him that this was money that had just come to me for being born into one class, while he was born into another class." And when he lost his job not long after, Ms. Woolner began paying him a monthly stipend - he sometimes refers to it as an allowance - that continued, at a smaller level, until last November, when she quit her longstanding job at a local antipoverty agency. She also agreed to pay for a $10,000 computer course that helped prepare him for his current job as a software analyst at the Cheshire Medical Center in Keene. From the beginning, the balance of power in the relationship was a sufficiently touchy issue that at Ms. Woolner's urging, a few months before their wedding in August 2001, they joined a series of workshops on cross-class relationships.
"I had abject terror at the idea of the group," said Mr. Croteau, who is blunt and intellectually engaging. "It's certainly an upper-class luxury to pay to tell someone your troubles, and with all the problems in the world, it felt a little strange to sit around talking about your relationship. But it was useful. It was a relief to hear people talk about the same kinds of issues we were facing, about who had power in the relationship and how they used it. I think we would have made it anyway, but we would have had a rockier time without the group."
It is still accepted truth within the household that Ms. Woolner's status has given her the upper hand in the marriage. At dinner one night, when her son Isaac said baldly, "I always think of my mom as having the power in the relationship," Mr. Croteau did not flinch. He is fully aware that in this relationship he is the one whose life has been most changed.
The Woolner-Croteau household is just up the hill from the groomed fields of Northfield Mount Hermon prep school - a constant local reminder to Mr. Croteau of just how differently his wife's sons and his daughters have been educated. Jonah is now a senior there. Isaac, who also attended the school, is now back at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon after taking a couple of semesters away to study in India and to attend massage school while working in a deli near home.
By contrast, Mr. Croteau's adult daughters - who have never lived with the couple - made their way through the Keene public schools.
"I sometimes think Jonah and Isaac need a dose of reality, that a couple years in public school would have shown them something different," Mr. Croteau said. "On the other hand I sometimes wish I'd been able to give Maggie and Lael what they had. My kids didn't have the same kind of privilege and the same kind of schools. They didn't have teachers concerned about their tender growing egos. It was catch-as-catch-can for them, and that still shows in their personalities."
Mr. Croteau had another experience of Northfield Mount Hermon as well. He briefly had a job as its communications manager, but could not adjust to its culture.
"There were all these Ivy Leaguers," he said. "I didn't understand their nuances, and I didn't make a single friend there. In working-class life, people tell you things directly, they're not subtle. At N.M.H., I didn't get how they did things. When a vendor didn't meet the deadline, I called and said, 'Where's the job?' When he said, 'We bumped you, we'll have it next week,' I said, 'What do you mean, next week? We have a deadline, you can't do business like that.' It got back to my supervisor, who came and said, 'We don't yell at vendors.' The idea seemed to be that there weren't deadlines in that world, just guidelines."
Mr. Croteau says he is far more comfortable at the hospital. "I deal mostly with nurses and other computer nerds and they come from the same kind of world I do, so we know how to talk to each other," he said.
But in dealing with Ms. Woolner's family, especially during the annual visits to Martha's Vineyard, Mr. Croteau said, he sometimes finds himself back in class bewilderment, feeling again that he does not get the nuances. "They're incredibly gracious to me, very well bred and very nice," he said, "so much so that it's hard to tell whether it's sincere, whether they really like you."
Mr. Croteau still seems impressed by his wife's family, and their being among "the ones with their names on the buildings." It is he who shows a visitor the framed print of the old Woolner Distillery in Peoria, Ill., and, describing the pictures on the wall, mentions that this in-law went to Yale, and that one knew Gerald Ford.
Mr. Croteau and Ms Woolner are not the only ones aware of the class divide within the family; so are the two sets of children.
Money is continually tight for Lael Croteau, 27, who is in graduate school in educational administration at the University of Vermont, and Maggie, 25, who is working three jobs while in her second year of law school at American University. At restaurants, they ask to have the leftovers wrapped to take home.
Neither could imagine taking a semester off to try out massage school, as Isaac did. They are careful about their manners, their plans, their clothes.
"Who's got money, who doesn't, it's always going on in my head," Maggie said. "So I put on the armor. I have the bag. I have the shirt. I know people can't tell my background by looking."
The Croteau daughters are the only ones among 12 first cousins who made it to college. Most of the others married and had babies right after high school.
"They see us as different, and sometimes that can hurt," Maggie said.
The daughters walk a fine line. They are deeply attached to their mother, who did most of their rearing, but they are also attracted to the Woolner world and its possibilities. Through holidays and Vineyard vacations, they have come to feel close not only to their stepbrothers, but also to Ms. Woolner's sisters' children, whose pictures are on display in Lael's house in Vermont. And they see, up close, just how different their upbringing was.
"Jonah and Isaac don't have to worry about how they dress, or whether they'll have the money to finish college, or anything," Lael said. "That's a real luxury. And when one of the little kids asks, 'Why do people sneeze?' their mom will say, 'I don't know; that's a great question. Let's go to the museum, and check it out.' My mom is very smart and certainly engages us on many levels, but when we asked a difficult question, she'd say, 'Because I said so.' "
The daughters' lives have been changed not only by Ms. Woolner's warm, stable presence, but also by her gifts of money for snow tires or books, the family vacations she pays for and her connections. One of Ms. Woolner's cousins, a Washington lawyer, employs Maggie both at her office and as a housesitter.
For Ms. Woolner's sons, Mr. Croteau's arrival did not make nearly as much difference. They are mostly oblivious of the extended Croteau family, and have barely met the Croteau cousins, who are close to their age and live nearby but lead quite different lives. Indeed, in early February, while Ms. Woolner's Isaac was re-adjusting to college life, Mr. Croteau's nephew, another 20-year-old Isaac who had enlisted in the Marines right after high school, was shot in the face in Falluja, Iraq, and shipped to Bethesda Medical Center in Maryland. Isaac and Jonah are easygoing young men, neither of whom has any clear idea what he wants to do in life. "For a while I've been trying to find my passion," Jonah said. "But I haven't been passionately trying to find my passion."
Isaac fantasizes about opening a brewery-cum-performance-space, traveling through South America or operating a sunset massage cruise in the Caribbean. He knows he is on such solid ground that he can afford fantasy.
"I have the most amazing safety net a person could have," he said, "incredible, loving, involved and wealthy parents."
On the rare occasions when they are all together, the daughters get on easily with the sons, though there are occasional tensions. Maggie would love to have a summer internship with a human rights group, but she needs paid work and when she graduates, with more than $100,000 of debt, she will need a law firm job, not one with a nonprofit. So when Isaac one day teased her as being a sellout, she reminded him that it was a lot easier to live your ideals when you did not need to make money to pay for them.
And there are moments when the inequalities within the family are painfully obvious.
"I do feel the awkwardness of helping Isaac buy a car, when I'm not helping them buy a car," Ms. Woolner said of the daughters. "We've talked about that. But I also have to be aware of overstepping. Their mother's house burned down, which was awful for them and for her and I really wanted to help. I took out my checkbook and I didn't know what was appropriate. In the end I wrote a $1,500 check. Emily Post doesn't deal with these situations."
She and Mr. Croteau remain conscious of the class differences between them, and the ways in which their lives have been shaped by different experiences.
On one visit to New York City, where Ms. Woolner's mother lives in the winter, Ms. Woolner lost her debit card and felt anxious about being disconnected, even briefly, from her money.
For Mr. Croteau, it was a strange moment. "She had real discomfort, even though we were around the corner from her mother, and she had enough money to do anything we were likely to do, assuming she wasn't planning to buy a car or a diamond all of a sudden," he said. "So I didn't understand the problem. I know how to walk around without a safety net. I've done it all my life."
Both he and his wife express pride that their marriage has withstood its particular problems and stresses.
"I think we're always both amazed that we're working it out," Ms. Woolner said.
But almost from the beginning they agreed on an approach to their relationship, a motto now engraved inside their wedding rings: "Press on regardless."
And on growing up in two worlds.
Up From the Holler: Living in Two Worlds, at Home in Neither
By TAMAR LEWIN
PIKEVILLE, Ky. - Della Mae Justice stands before the jury in the Pike County Courthouse, arguing that her client's land in Greasy Creek Hollow was illegally grabbed when the neighbors expanded their cemetery behind her home.
With her soft Appalachian accent, Ms. Justice leaves no doubt that she is a local girl, steeped in the culture of the old family cemeteries that dot the mountains here in East Kentucky. "I grew up in a holler, I surely did," she tells jurors as she lays out the boundary conflict.
Ms. Justice is, indeed, a product of the Appalachian coal-mining country where lush mountains flank rust-colored creeks, the hollows rising so steeply that there is barely room for a house on either side of the creeks. Her family was poor, living for several years in a house without indoor plumbing. Her father was absent; her older half-brother sometimes had to hunt squirrels for the family to eat. Her mother married again when Della was 9. But the stepfather, a truck driver, was frequently on the road, and her mother, who was mentally ill, often needed the young Della to care for her.
Ms. Justice was always hungry for a taste of the world beyond the mountains. Right after high school, she left Pike County, making her way through college and law school, spending time in France, Scotland and Ireland, and beginning a high-powered legal career. In just a few years she moved up the ladder from rural poverty to the high-achieving circles of the middle class.
Now, at 34, she is back home. But her journey has transformed her so thoroughly that she no longer fits in easily. Her change in status has left Ms. Justice a little off balance, seeing the world from two vantage points at the same time: the one she grew up in and the one she occupies now.
Far more than people who remain in the social class they are born to, surrounded by others of the same background, Ms. Justice is sensitive to the cultural significance of the cars people drive, the food they serve at parties, where they go on vacation - all the little clues that indicate social status. By every conventional measure, Ms. Justice is now solidly middle class, but she is still trying to learn how to feel middle class. Almost every time she expresses an idea, or explains herself, she checks whether she is being understood, asking, "Does that make sense?"
"I think class is everything, I really do," she said recently. "When you're poor and from a low socioeconomic group, you don't have a lot of choices in life. To me, being from an upper class is all about confidence. It's knowing you have choices, knowing you set the standards, knowing you have connections."
In Pikeville, the site of the Hatfield-McCoy feud (Ms. Justice is a Hatfield), memories are long and family roots mean a lot. Despite her success, Ms. Justice worries about what people might remember about her, especially about the time when she was 15 and her life with her mother and stepfather imploded in violence, sending her into foster care for a wretched nine months.
"I was always in the lowest socioeconomic group," she said, "but foster care ratcheted it down another notch. I hate that period of my life, when for nine months I was a child with no family."
While she was in foster care, Ms. Justice lived in one end of a double-wide trailer, with the foster family on the other end. She slept alongside another foster child, who wet the bed, and every morning she chose her clothes from a box of hand-me-downs. She was finally rescued when her father heard about her situation and called his nephew, Joe Justice.
Joe Justice was 35 years older than Della, a successful lawyer who lived in the other Pikeville, one of the well-to-do neighborhoods on the mountain ridges. He and his wife, Virginia, had just built a four-bedroom contemporary home, complete with a swimming pool, on Cedar Gap Ridge.
Joe Justice had never even met his cousin until he saw her in the trailer, but afterward he told his wife that it was "abhorrent" for a close relative to be in foster care. While poverty is common around Pikeville, foster care is something much worse: a sundering of the family ties that count for so much. So Joe and Virginia Justice took Della Mae in. She changed schools, changed address - changed worlds, in effect - and moved into an octagonal bedroom downstairs from the Justices' 2 year-old son.
"The shock of going to live in wealth, with Joe and Virginia, it was like Little Orphan Annie going to live with the Rockefellers," Ms. Justice said. "It was not easy. I was shy and socially inept. For the first time, I could have had the right clothes, but I didn't have any idea what the right clothes were. I didn't know much about the world, and I was always afraid of making a wrong move. When we had a school trip for chorus, we went to a restaurant. I ordered a club sandwich, but when it came with those toothpicks on either end, I didn't know how to eat it, so I just sat there, staring at it and starving, and said I didn't feel well."
Joe and Virginia Justice worried about Della Mae's social unease and her failure to mingle with other young people in their church. But they quickly sensed her intelligence and encouraged her to attend Berea College, a small liberal arts institution in Kentucky that accepts students only from low-income families. Tuition is free and everybody works. For Ms. Justice, as for many other Berea students, the experience of being one among many poor people, all academically capable and encouraged to pursue big dreams, was life-altering.
It was at Berea that Ms. Justice met the man who became her husband, Troy Price, the son of a tobacco farmer with a sixth-grade education. They married after graduation, and when Ms. Justice won a fellowship, the couple went to Europe for a year of independent travel and study. When Ms. Justice won a scholarship to the University of Kentucky law school in Lexington, Mr. Price went with her, to graduate school in family studies.
After graduating fifth in her law school class, Ms. Justice clerked for a federal judge, then joined Lexington's largest law firm, where she put in long hours in hopes of making partner. She and her husband bought a townhouse, took trips, ate in restaurants almost every night and spent many Sunday afternoons at real estate open houses in Lexington's elegant older neighborhoods. By all appearances, they were on the fast track.
But Ms. Justice still felt like an outsider. Her co-editors on the law review, her fellow clerks at the court and her colleagues at the law firm all seemed to have a universe of information that had passed her by. She saw it in matters big and small - the casual references, to Che Guevara or Mount Vesuvius, that meant nothing to her; the food at dinner parties that she would not eat because it looked raw in the middle.
"I couldn't play Trivial Pursuit, because I had no general knowledge of the world," she said. "And while I knew East Kentucky, they all knew a whole lot about Massachusetts and the Northeast. They all knew who was important, whose father was a federal judge. They never doubted that they had the right thing to say. They never worried about anything."
Most of all, they all had connections that fed into a huge web of people with power. "Somehow, they all just knew each other," she said.
Ms. Justice's life took an abrupt turn in 1999, when her half-brother, back in Pike County, called out of the blue to say that his children, Will and Anna Ratliff, who had been living with their mother, were in foster care. Ms. Justice and her brother had not been close, and she had met the children only once or twice, but the call was impossible to ignore. As her cousin Joe had years earlier, she found it intolerable to think of her flesh and blood in foster care.
So over the next year, Della Mae Justice and her husband got custody of both children and went back to Pikeville, only 150 miles away but far removed from their life in Lexington. The move made all kinds of sense. Will and Anna, now 13 and 12, could stay in touch with their mother and father. Mr. Price got a better job, as executive director of Pikeville's new support center for abused children. Ms. Justice went to work for her cousin at his law firm, where a flexible schedule allowed her to look after the two children.
And yet for Ms. Justice the return to Pikeville has been almost as dislocating as moving out of foster care and into that octagonal bedroom all those years ago. On a rare visit recently to the hollows where she used to live, she was moved to tears when a neighbor came out, hugged her and told her how he used to pray and worry for her and how happy he was that she had done so well. But mostly, she winces when reminded of her past.
"Last week, I picked up the phone in my office," she recalled, "and the woman said who she was, and then said, 'You don't remember me, do you?' And I said, 'Were you in foster care with me?' That was crazy. Why would I do that? It's not something I advertise, that I was in care."
While most of her workweek is devoted to commercial law, Ms. Justice spends Mondays in family court, representing families with the kind of problems hers had. She bristles whenever she runs into any hint of class bias, or the presumption that poor people in homes heated by kerosene or without enough bedrooms cannot be good parents.
"The norm is, people that are born with money have money, and people who weren't don't," she said recently. "I know that. I know that just to climb the three inches I have, which I've not gone very far, took all of my effort. I have worked hard since I was a kid and I've done nothing but work to try and pull myself out."
The class a person is born into, she said, is the starting point on the continuum. "If your goal is to become, on a national scale, a very important person, you can't start way back on the continuum, because you have too much to make up in one lifetime. You have to make up the distance you can in your lifetime so that your kids can then make up the distance in their lifetime."
Ms. Justice is still not fully at ease in the other, well-to-do Pikeville, and in many ways she and her husband had to start from scratch in finding a niche there. Church is where most people in town find friends and build their social life. But Ms. Justice and Mr. Price had trouble finding a church that was a comfortable fit; they went through five congregations, starting at the Baptist church she had attended as a child and ending up at the Disciples of Christ, an inclusive liberal church with many affluent members. The pastor and his wife, transplants to Kentucky, have become their closest friends. Others have come more slowly.
"Partly the problem is that we're young, for middle-class people, to have kids as old as Will and Anna," Ms. Justice said. "And the fact that we're raising a niece and nephew, that's kind of a flag that we weren't always middle class, just like saying you went to Berea College tells everyone you were poor."
And though in terms of her work Ms. Justice is now one of Pikeville's leading citizens, she is still troubled by the old doubts and insecurities. "My stomach's always in knots getting ready to go to a party, wondering if I'm wearing the right thing, if I'll know what to do," she said. "I'm always thinking: How does everybody else know that? How do they know how to act? Why do they all seem so at ease?"
A lot of her energy now goes into Will and Anna. She wants to bring them up to have the middle-class ease that still eludes her. "Will and Anna know what it's like to be poor, and now we want them to be able to be just regular kids," she said. "When I was young, I always knew who were the kids at school with the involved parents that brought in the cookies, and those were the kids who got chosen for every special thing, not ones like me, who got free lunch and had to borrow clothes from their aunt if there was a chorus performance."
Because Ms. Justice is self-conscious about her teeth - "the East Kentucky overbite," she says ruefully - she made sure early on that Anna got braces. She worries about the children's clothes as much as her own. "Everyone else seems to know when the khaki pants the boys need are on sale at J. C. Penney," she said. "I never know these things."
As a child, Ms. Justice never had the resources for her homework projects. So when Anna was assigned to build a Navajo hogan, they headed to Wal-Mart for supplies.
"We put in extra time, so she would appear like those kids with the involved parents," Ms. Justice said. "I know it's just a hogan, but making a project that looks like the other kids' projects is part of fitting in."
Ms. Justice encouraged Will to join the Boy Scouts, and when he was invited to join his school's Academic Team, which competes in quiz bowls, she insisted that he try it. When he asked her whether he might become a drug addict if he took the medicine prescribed for him, she told him it was an excellent question, and at the doctor's office prompted him to ask the doctor directly. She nudges both children to talk about what happens in school, to recount the plots of the books they read and to discuss current events.
It is this kind of guidance that distinguishes middle-class children from children of working-class and poor families, according to sociologists who have studied how social class affects child-rearing. While working-class parents usually teach their children, early on, to do what they are told without argument and to manage their own free time, middle-class parents tend to play an active role in shaping their children's activities, seeking out extracurricular activities to build their talents, and encouraging them to speak up and even to negotiate with authority figures.
Ms. Justice's efforts are making a difference. Will found that he enjoyed Academic Team. Anna now gets evening phone calls from several friends. Both have begun to have occasional sleepovers. And gradually, Ms. Justice is coming to terms with her own life. On New Year's Eve, after years in a modest rented townhouse, she and her husband moved into a new house that reminds her of the Brady Bunch home. It has four bedrooms and a swimming pool. In a few years, when her older cousin retires, Ms. Justice will most likely take over the practice, a solid prospect, though far less lucrative, and less glamorous, than a partnership at her Lexington law firm.
"I've worked very hard all my life - to have a life that's not so far from where I started out," she said. "It is different, but it's not the magical life I thought I'd get."
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Date: 2005-05-19 01:29 pm (UTC)I have some experience with the class thing.
I grew up lower-middle-class, with a kind of a hippie/bohemian father. I'm also Jewish, so this means I didn't fit anywhere. My mother is from a poor working class background. [Anyone who is poor and Jewish knows what I'm talking about - half of my family converted to Christianity because of the class issue, and my mom married a non-Jew because of it.]
My mother later on assimilated into the upper middle class by means of adopting behaviors, appearance nuances, and social connections. She became a legal secretary and started affiliating with people who were upper middle class. But being only a legal secretary and not a lawyer, she still felt she didn't fit. That didn't keep her from marrying a man who is upper middle class - who has four Master's degrees.
All the same, class differences have affected our family a lot. An example is that I am close with my stepsister (who grew up poor) on my dad's side [the daughter of my dad's wife], but I am not close with my stepsisters (who grew up upper middle class, and very privileged) on my mother's side.
I feel like, if we did not have the same background and same privileges, then we cannot be sisters. They are just two strangers. It just feels wrong to me. I know I am being cruel and rejecting. It's not a matter of jealousy so much as it is a matter of trust. I am still struggling with this. I feel like there are certain things I can never trust my two stepsisters with because there is no way in Hell they would ever understand. There are just too many things they take for granted. It feels dirty and shameful even to talk about this, like I am not supposed to admit that it is a problem. When I talk to them, I can't help but feel ashamed about my own background, and feel bad that my 19 year old stepsister is the one with the power in our associations (I am 31) because she has a car and I don't. She also just takes for granted that she is "one-up". I can't deal with this kind of power differential between myself and a 19 year old. She can suck eggs.
I had more privileges than my poorer stepsister did, and I wonder if she feels the same way about me.