Socioeconomic Status #3

While growing up, my family never had a lot of money. However, I would not consider us poor because there was never a time when we had to worry about not having food on the table every day; we never had to worry about power or anything like that being turned off. My mom ensured that my siblings and I were taken care of. Until I was 12 years old, I lived in the very small town of Big River, Saskatchewan. The population of this town was approximately 700 people. There was one elementary school, one high school, one grocery store and two gas stations. With that being said, the houses in this town that were considered higher class would be considered the middle class in a larger city like Regina. I had this best friend in elementary school, who I basically grew up with because our moms were so close. Her mom owned one of the only gas stations in town, so her family had significantly more money than mine did. There was a school trip somewhere, and it cost quite a bit as we would be going to a pool and eating out. I could not afford to go, so my mom tried to pick up more shifts at her job, and it still was out of her budget range. However, my best friends mom helped us pay for it. That is the point in my life where I realized that if I can barely pay for a school trip, I wondered what social class I actually belonged in. After this, we started learning about social classes in school, and that is when my mom and I started talking about it because I started to really question it. She explained that she didn’t have enough money because she was not working as much as she normally does. She explained that we are middle class; we just hit a little rough patch. I never questioned what class I was in until that school trip, and we started learning about it.