Day 257: Money, Money, Money

I run into him at the top of the stairs as he’s about to go to bed. I wish him good night, ready to head downstairs, when I see the plastic container he’s holding. There’s no mistaking it.

Grandpa, is that pee?

He chuckles softly.

W_hy?_

To hold pee so I can throw it out in the yard in the morning.

Why don’t you use the toilet?

This saves money.

That’s right. My grandpa pees into a carton because he wants to save the cost of flushing the toilet.

At this point of my life, I shouldn’t be surprised by my grandpa’s obsession with saving money, but this one left me speechless. I didn’t know what to say or feel. Pity? Sadness? Concern? Awe? He went on to say that a CEO of a large Korean corporation does this as well despite having millions in the bank. As if that somehow made this any more acceptable. A lot of people do it, he said.

Every time I come home, it bums me out to see my childhood home in disrepair. The lights that don’t work. The toilets that don’t flush. The opening in the window screen where mosquitoes swarm in, leading to me retreating for the night to the couch downstairs. The areas stuffed with dusty items that haven’t been used in decades because my grandpa refuses to throw them away. Fixing things up costs money, so it gets worse. Even things that do work, like our house’s air conditioning system, might as well be broken because it goes untouched to save money.

Money, money, money, money, money, money. The part that’s most bothersome about all this is that I know my grandpa is financially comfortable. He’s just fanatic about cutting out costs as much as possible. It’s been the source of many conflicts in our house: Him demanding rent from my parents, his disgust with my parents for daring to go out and buy coffee at Starbucks, his anger at discovering a faucet that’s been left on that escalated to him threatening to report my dad to the police and have him deported. It hurts him and the people around him, and it’s sad to see.

Having been raised by my grandpa, I know that his attitude has had a significant influence in my relationship with money as well. I’m thankfully not as extreme as him, but I know that I can be frugal to a fault as well. Most of the time, the frugality comes at only my personal expense or comfort, but there have been times when it’s strained or harmed my relationships as well.

And when I ask myself why, there’s a clear answer: fear. Having grown up in an environment where I had to always think about money, there’s a deep-seated fear of not having enough. It’s funny — I want to have enough money so that I don’t have to be obsessed with it like my grandpa, but approaching this from an attitude of fear pushes me more towards frugality and behaving more like my grandpa.

Being at home with my parents and my grandpa has shined a light on the conditioning from my upbringing that still has an unhelpful impact on the way that I relate to myself, others, and the world. I aspire to develop a loving relationship with my dad, but there’s a part of me that can’t stand him. I aspire to happily support my parents financially, but there’s a part of me that asks “but what if I give too much?” Even for things like hiring people or working with others, there’s a fear of depending on others that I’m sure also has roots from not having reliable parental figures growing up.

Unlearning conditioning, the process of a lifetime.