My friend Aneil Gokhale, Director of Philanthropy at the Toronto Foundation, has a talent for facilitating discussions about money.  What messages do we inherit and how do they inform our inclination for, and approach to, giving?  These messages are the software that influence future behaviour, including openness to giving to charity, during life and at death.

Ingrained messages

In every session that Aneil leads, he coaxes out deeply ingrained messages that reflect the hard-earned experience of participants.  Messages of scarcity, loss, frugality.  There is never enough money.  It’s skittish stuff, prone to evaporate in crises – like migration, family strife, job and business loss, or bankruptcy.  Money generates so many feelings of insecurity.  It shapes and warps us, even when prosperity arrives.  Its absence creates cravings and fantasies.  Money.  Fickle friend.  Can there ever be enough?

In the act of giving, money takes on moral weight, an instrument of judgement.  Dividing the deserving and undeserving.

Personal epiphany

Inspired by one of Aneil’s sessions, I had a personal epiphany that prompted me to have a talk with my 90-year-old parents.

My childhood memories of money were defined by thrift.  My family’s frugality manifested itself in ways that embarrassed me in childhood. Little things. The hand-me-down clothes. The used sports equipment. Sandwiches in old plastic bread bags on crumbly, “day-old” bread (always on sale) that had to be unpacked in a lunchroom full of judgemental kids armed with fresh zip-lock baggies and crisp paper lunch bags. The indignity.  The constant scrimping by my parents was clearly designed to humiliate me.

These were my initial, self-indulgent memories.  And then I remembered something that shaped me far, far more.  The message “we have enough, share” popped into my head.  This is my long-term, substantive money message.

Parent check

When I sat down with my parents this summer, I raised the topic of money messages.  They had a different perspective.

My mother shared how they were shaped by Depression and wartime childhoods.  Of rationing and uncertainty, which in her case included regular bombing raids.  She also reminded me that my paternal grandfather died of leukemia when my father was 17 – leaving the family in debt.  My paternal grandmother, who had struggled with her mental health, ended up in the provincial asylum.  My father and his sister were temporarily adopted by their church congregation.  One anonymous member paid for my father to go to the University of Toronto to study physics.

Frugality with purpose

My mother cheerfully acknowledged that they were frugal when my siblings and I were young, but it was economizing to ensure there was enough for things that matters.  She reminded me of a story when she was taught geriatrics at Algonquin College and one of her students was from China.

It was 1989.  The crackdown in Tiananmen Square had just happened and the student, Mi Ding, reached out to my mother.  She said her husband, Ping, was in the Square and she had no way of reaching him.  She had no one to speak to, no one to trust.  Mi Ding wished to stay in Canada, and my mother offered to sponsor her and hopefully Ping too.  This required a security bond of $10,000 – an enormous sum to my mother.  She described how nervous she was asking my father for the money.  But he didn’t hesitate to write the cheque.  Ding and Ping never touched the funds.

We have enough, share

Money is – both in its presence and absence – emotionally complex stuff.  It has taken me a while to understand that the thrift of my childhood was the result of my parent’s childhoods.  Moreover, they lived by an everyday ethos of frugality so they would have enough for their family, their community, and random strangers in need.  I’m not as good at the everyday frugality part, but the sharing part stuck with me, both professionally and personally.