Over the summer, I was miss moneybags, because I worked a minimum of five days a week. Now, my parents insist that I don't work during the school year because they don't want my grades to suffer as a result. What they don't understand is that I hate being the person that has to mooch off of everyone else. God forbid that I ask one of them to give me twenty dollars to go out. Lunch money alone is frustrating to ask for. I hate it. My mother tried to convince me to do chores for money and she'd give me an allowance. I completely refuse. Because what will happen is, I'll do everything she asks and stand on my head, and then when I ask for money to go out, there's one more thing I have to do. Then on top of that another little thing later. And if my grades start to fall I can forget about getting money at all for the work I'm doing. And it ends up a bigger headache than it's worth.
I had a friend complain because her mom gave her 250 dollars for school clothes. I was dumbfounded. This year, my mom gave me less than half that, and it was like God's gift to the world. I don't just get handed money for no reason. The rest of the money I spent on school clothes was earned when I spent my summer slaving away at a retirement home, washing dishes or serving food earning eight dollars an hour.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I have a horrible life and my parents don't care about me. Obviously they do. I'm just frustrated because I've been completely broke for a month and I hate mooching off people so much. I miss having my own money that my parents couldn't watch to see what or where I was spending it. I miss being able to go out somewhere and spend money without having to explain what it was for, and not having to give back the change when I came home.
You know what I really couldn't stand in the summer, was when my friends complained about how often they worked. I worked so often, my place of employment actually got in trouble for child labor laws one day because I'd worked twelve hours in that day. My vacation was the highlight of my summer because I had a whole week off. If I had two days off in a row, I was excited.
From June eighth to August twenty eighth I earned over two thousand dollars. That might not be a lot in comparison to the average educated adult, but for a sixteen year-old girl, that's a lot of money. Now I have a balance of like five dollars in my checking and something around 700 in my savings.
I hate it. I can't stand when people yell at me for mooching off of them, though. It's like, okay well I understand your frustration, but this summer whenever I spent however much money on you, because you didn't know how to manage your own money even though you had a job, and you're going to complain about how I legitimately don't have any source of money at all anymore?
On a lighter note, I convinced my mom to let me get a job when I told her how much the new shoes I wanted cost. I have a job interview tomorrow at 3:00. So hopefully this won't be a problem for much longer.
