It's All About the Money Honey
Story and Art by Thuy Ngo

I can agree that money can not buy me the more important things in life such as a baby's smile or my first moments in love, but it's one of the only things in life that will definitely be here in the end. Someone has to pay for the hospitals and funerals.

For me, money means survival, livelihood. It means your parents' blessing and respect. It means having food on the table and a place to sleep at night. Money means having the bare essentials of being able to provide for one's self in today's modern world. So why is money considered the root of all evil? Why is it wrong to want to be a high achiever? Why is it wrong to choose money when it comes down to narrowing down priorities? And as the old saying goes -- “no money no honeys.” So you can see it has an effect on people's social lives, too.

The importance of money does not necessarily have to do with the paper itself. There's deeper meaning to people's insufficiencies and worldly needs. My point being, those insufficiencies and needs are legitimate. These are needs and wants that make up the basics of what people are about, meaning the dreams that they dream.

I grew up learning the value of money from my mom. My parents have been divorced since I was two. Money issues meant living with my mom working two jobs, my chronic gambling step-dad, and having to depend on my dad's alimony to keep things running right. We could not rely on the monetary means of my stepfather because he was always gambling away his paycheck. Things were hard because we lived pay check by pay check. My mom would average three hours of sleep a night. I would wake up in the middle of the night with my mom and step dad arguing about money. Things were tough, and even love did not keep things true a lot of the time. At least I had my younger brother and sister to look to for comfort. We grew up learning that we shouldn't want what we can't have because that means making mom mad. We grew up well aware of our money problems and would play pretend at being rich and famous.

Don't get me wrong. We were fed and had clothes on our backs. My mom made sure of that, even though she was away working all the time on the assembly lines. We would get hand me downs from relatives and food my mom cooked during the day and left at home for us to eat at night. We got by on a lot of faith that someday when we grew up things were going to change. Things were going to be better someday where we could support ourselves and get away from all this chaos.

We cannot have what we don't got. As my mom would say, “We must accept what we do have and live in the present reality.” In the long run people would say it's not money that matters, it's the person that counts. That much I can agree on with my mom.

Now that I am a little older, my take on money is that I live with what I have and can earn. I am not going to be yearning for what I can't get, but the more I get, the better.   It's not greed. It's security. A person needs money these days to cover their ends. However, if I can, I want to make sure that money does not get in the way of what happens with my family and friends.

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