I grew up poor, but with two competing narratives about poverty filling our ears at home. You see, my mother came from a well-off upper middle class ("prep") family, and my father came from generational poverty in Appalachia ("trailer trash"). They met in D.C. where he was a soldier and she worked at the Treasury.

Due to my mother's urging, he ended up being the first of his family line to graduate from college -- however, he didn't perform well in his profession, became more or less unemployable, and we ended up back in Appalachia. Here Mother refused to work in protest, while Dad bartered, bargain-hunted, salvaged, gardened, and begged to keep us in food and shelter.

His narrative was that poverty isn't so bad, he'd enjoyed a dirt-floor lifestyle as a kid, if you get sick or someone dies it's not worth dwelling on. Keep your chin up, argue with the bank, eat junk food, tell jokes before bed till everyone cries laughing. "What you going to do about it? There's nothing you can do about it." Her narrative was that anyone can be rich with enough effort. One has to work with complete dedication, sleep little, constantly increase one's education, one's social network, personal abilities -- it's an endless fight that should be taken on with zeal. "There's always room at the top."

I've pushed to realize my mother's doctrine, with very mixed success, and I've often been glad to have my dad's absolution to fall back on.