Counting Copper Coins – Making Friends with Money

When I see numbers, I think of money and money, and I haven’t always been the best of friends.

We all have an area of our lives that feels the trickiest to navigate and where it’s more challenging to create positive change, and money is mine.

Like many of us, particularly those of immigrant parents, I come from generations of women who had very little power and influence when it came to money. They could never take their eye off money because there was always so little of it, so money was very much a focal point in their lives.

As these women were not the ones to earn it, money and how to get it, was a little mystical. In my family, the generations of women I observed all knew how to be highly creative with money – how to make it stretch and morph and keep it moving from one place to another.

I see the magic now of what they were able to do – keeping everyone afloat and comforted and households managed – while rarely revealing how they did it. The only giveaway, a kind of brittle determination that showed through their otherwise buoyant humour.

These women held the threads of very meagre purse strings. For them, success was measured in copper change; their triumphs, the wellbeing of others.

Whether they deserved more for themselves was not something to contemplate. They had an important job to do and they dedicated their lives to it.

Where I stand now, on the shoulders of these women, reflecting on my own relationship with money, I give enormous thanks to all of them for their teaching. I learned caution and patience, resilience and creativity. I learned how to be strategic and generous, and how to persist even when resources were scarce.

Now I see it as my job to create a broader foundation. To teach myself and others to have greater ease around money – to develop an expectation of receiving money that more closely matches our efforts and contributions.

I also share this with you who may have a similar history and now choose to venture beyond those generational limitations. May we do our best to pave the way for those who will stand on our shoulders, able to count more than a few copper coins.