I Have Mixed Feelings About Asking People to Pay for My Work

On my ambivalent relationship with money – as a mother, writer, professional, and budding anticapitalist

Photo by mohmadnady from pixabay

I hate asking for money. For years, I made just enough to get by, taking pride in my second hand clothes and the veggie casseroles I made on Sunday to last me the week. I drove a $1,500 Honda Accord that I’d bought with 297,000 miles on it, and I scoffed at my 20-something peers who wanted fancy careers and nice things. 

I knew better. I didn’t need nice things. Nice things don’t make people happy. Besides, I was busy co-founding a nonprofit, trying to make the world a better place. I worked my “day job” without pay for five years, while writing a novel and supporting myself on bartending tips. Some people, like the boyfriend who would become my husband, thought I was nuts. I didn’t mind. I was more enlightened, less attached to material things.  

My parents might have given birth to me at the dawn of the “decade of greed,” but they weren’t ready to give up their hippie ideals just yet. They eschewed the excesses of the 1980s, proudly modeling frugality throughout my childhood – by design and also by necessity. Their elementary school teacher salaries covered the basics and then some, but still, we had to be careful.   

My sister and I shared everything with each other, save our toothbrushes. We shared a room, a bunk bed, a semiweekly bath, and the one basket that held all our toys. We always split dinners on the rare occasions we went out to eat, and we were never allowed to order drinks. We counted out three hundred and fifty pennies from my father's change jar once a month so we could buy a pint of ice cream.

We ate bread heels, scraped the mold off old fruit, and whipped up cream cheese with milk so it would last longer.

"We don't want to be wasteful," my parents said. "Besides, it saves money."

We watched TV just once a week, dragging our boxy television set from the hall closet on a wheeled cart. We muted the commercials. As such, I didn’t know to pine for things. Sure, some of my friends had cooler toys (and more of them), but even at the tender age of eight, I understood that any given toy became infinitely less cool on the rare occasion that it made its way into my possession. 

I’d spent many happy afternoons jumping on my friends’ pogo balls, but when I got one for Christmas, I tired of it within days. In fact, I mostly associated Christmas with a vague sense of dread and impending disappointment. Not because I feared I wouldn’t get what I wanted – I hardly ever asked for much – but because I knew that whatever it was I got would quickly lose its luster. 

That’s all to say, I’ve never placed much stock in material things when it comes to my happiness and well-being. 

As a young adult, I was disinterested in money as long as I had enough to get by, which worked well enough back when I mostly needed to cover rent and groceries. 

A friend once asked if she could borrow $200 at a time when I had a total of $250 in the only bank account to my name. I said, “Sure,” without a second thought. I knew she was good for it. Plus, I had a rice and bean casserole in the fridge that would last me a week, and I knew that after my next bartending shift, I’d still be able to pay rent. 

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It wasn’t until I had children in my early 30s that my attitude toward money began to shift. The prospect of not having enough of it suddenly became downright terrifying. Sure, there was the cost of all the baby gear we were told we couldn’t live without (as a baby, I’d slept for weeks in a drawer), but it wasn’t just that. We needed stability. If some shit really went down, we couldn’t just show up at a friend’s house, baby in tow, and ask to crash on the couch. 

By then, we owned a small condo and I was working a “real job” that came with a steady paycheck. I generally had more than $250 in my bank account at any given time, but if a friend had asked to borrow $200, I’m not sure I would have lent it so freely. There was always one bill or another that demanded my attention. 

There was the credit card bill that kept stubbornly inching up despite our best attempts to pay it down. I’d never wanted a goddamn credit card. I’d only gotten it so I would have credit to help us buy the goddamn condo. 

There was the medical debt that had accrued ever since I’d had the audacity to burden our healthcare system with the birth of a child. The doctors had been so diligent about checking up on me during my pregnancy, but once they ejected me from the hospital, the only further communication I received came in the form of crisp white papers with large capital letters that said, “BALANCE DUE.” Multiple thousands of dollars. No one told me that you could have health insurance and still owe multiple thousands of dollars for giving birth. That was the first item on a long laundry list of things no one told me about having children. 

Then there was my husband’s car loan that we were so close to paying off. We finally did, and a few months later, I fell asleep at the wheel on I-95, nearly killed my 10-month-old daughter, and totaled the car. In an untotaled state, we could have sold the car for at least twice the paltry check we received from our insurance company.

There were the student loans, which I’d deferred for most of my 20s because I couldn’t possibly pay them on bartending tips. (This was before there was such a thing as income-based repayment.) Mine were onerous enough, but then there were my husband’s, who was a few months from getting his Bachelor’s degree. They loomed on the horizon, casting their long shadows, and I tried my best not to think about them. 

I began to wonder – was “adulting” simply about sinking into pools of debt and trying not to drown in them? 

With all the balances due, and all the paychecks I’d foregone during my 10 weeks of maternity leave, I spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about money. We were bringing in enough to cover the bills, barely, but whenever shit happened, as shit tends to do, we’d find ourselves caught in a downward spiral, only to have to claw our way back up again. This went on for years. 

Against all our better financial instincts, we had another child. This time around, my job offered no short-term disability to partially tide us through my maternity leave. This time around, my health insurance was less comprehensive and the BALANCE DUE from the hospital was even more onerous. This time around, returning to work meant paying a childcare bill that was more than our mortgage.

The demands of juggling full-time work and two small children were exhausting in and of themselves, and underlying them was a constant undercurrent of financial anxiety. It wasn’t until my husband completed his educational journey and we had the benefit of two incomes that I realized just how much space this anxiety had hoarded in my brain. 

I’d always staunchly believed that money couldn’t buy happiness, but it was dawning on me that in the context of a society that offers so little support, a certain amount of money can indeed buy a certain degree of happiness. That is to say, money can offer peace of mind, and while peace of mind isn’t synonymous with happiness, it’s a critical prerequisite. 

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By the time we achieved some semblance of financial stability, I’d spent 20 years pursuing a career in the nonprofit sector, and I was starting to regret it. I felt bitter that I, along with the other women who make up 75% of the nonprofit sector, had accepted lower salaries in the name of “making a difference.” 

Even when it came to making a difference, I was having my doubts. I’d seen how many nonprofits became more concerned with sustaining the organization than with actually getting to the bottom of the social problem they’d set out to solve. And I began to worry whether the whole nonprofit sector was, in the long run, doing us any favors by filling in the gaps we wouldn’t have in the first place if our government offered a social safety net and our economy invested in its workers. Were we just letting greedy men off the hook, cleaning up their messes?  

But it wasn’t just about the lower paying jobs women get shoehorned into; it was also about the “motherhood penalty,” which I’d felt viscerally as an upwardly mobile ambitious youngish professional who had a baby and promptly hit a ceiling. I spent the next decade making so-called “lateral” career moves because our economy tells us that in order to “advance,” we have to prioritize our job above all else, and even though I was putting in more hours at my job than I was in caring for my own babies, it still wasn’t enough.  

So yeah, I was beginning to feel pretty sore. Both that I’d prioritized “making a difference” over building a stronger financial safety net – really, in the grand scheme of things, what difference had I made? – and that my status as a mother seemed to have all but destroyed my earning potential, precisely at a time when I needed those earnings the most. 

Not only that, but I was just starting to come to terms with the disproportionate amount of unpaid labor that I and every other mother I knew were taking on around the house. 

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“Fuck you, pay me,” became my mantra. I took a new job at a marketing agency. Okay, it was a socially conscious, B Corp marketing agency that eventually became a worker-owned cooperative. I still wanted to find meaning in my work, but I was done with nonprofits. I began lobbying for statewide paid leave and universal childcare, and I became more vocal about the gender inequities, particularly when it comes to the division of unpaid domestic labor, that continue to plague so many relationships. 

But even as I committed to writing one weekly story online – a commitment I made to myself 160 stories and 40 months ago – I was adamant that I was doing this for myself. It was my hobby, something that brought me joy, something that helped me make sense of our increasingly senseless world. Sure, I’d take whatever pennies the algorithms wanted to throw my way, but this wasn’t about being paid. It was about finding flow, connecting the dots, and claiming my voice.

And yes, it was also about growing enough of an audience so I wouldn’t be relegated to the bottom of the slush pile if and when I finally got it together to write my first post-child book. 

On the one hand, I feel very strongly that artists should be able to make a living off their work. Our economy has always undervalued the creative endeavors that bring us joy, expand our perspectives, and speak our truths. Maybe “undervalued” is the wrong way to put it. Our economy has professionalized creativity, enabling a handful of elite artists to make quite a lot of money and enjoy an outsized impact and leaving the rest of us to pursue creative endeavors as cute side hobbies – that is, if we have any energy left after our “real jobs.” 

On the other hand, I don’t know how caught up I want to get in the so-called “economic value” of the arts. Shouldn’t art be by and for everyone? My father, a recently retired music teacher of over 40 years, made it his life’s work to awaken the inner musician in all of us. Music, he believed, shouldn’t be relegated to recording studios and concert halls, but played, sung, and enjoyed freely in the streets, at family gatherings, and around campfires. There's a secret song inside all of us, he says, just waiting to be released. (For more, see this incredibly inspiring documentary about my father, “The Secret Song,” currently streaming on PBS!)

The so-called “market value” of labor for any endeavor – whether it’s care work, software development, or creative writing – is far more reflective of our underlying white patriarchal values than it is of any objective monetary value. (As a case in point, according to the market, software developers are over four times more “valuable” than childcare providers.) 

Among the Internet’s many unfulfilled promises was the democratization of creativity, a space where we can all enjoy and nurture one another’s talents. But the algorithms have simply replaced the gatekeepers; the Internet has instead become a frenzied and desperate competition for ears and eyeballs. Because we live in a capitalist country in which profit trumps all, we’ve commoditized and commercialized creativity online far more than we’ve democratized it.

Even on Substack, a relatively noncommercial and creatively rigorous corner of the Internet, there are the hours we spend writing our stories and then the hours we spend trying to lure people to actually read them. 

Ultimately, when it comes to asking people to pay for my work, I’ll have to hold space for multiple tensions and truths. For instance:

1. Yes, I’m writing for myself.

2. Yes, I’m writing for you. 

Also:

1. It’s important to recognize, and advocate, for the value of artistic and creative endeavors, which includes platforms like Substack that help artists hone, promote, and make a living off their craft. 

2. In a society in which “value” is tied up in profit potential, it’s also possible to get too laser focused on the “market value” of art and lose sight of its intrinsic social value – or even compromise its social value by prioritizing specialization and commercialization. 

And lastly:

1. In the context of an economy that has exploited both my labor and time while failing to offer basic social supports like paid leave, education, and childcare – and particularly as a mother whose earnings have been compromised by the disproportionate amount of unpaid labor I’ve taken on in the home – it’s important to me to maintain financial stability and be compensated fairly for my labor.

2. I don’t like to think about my time and labor in purely monetary terms. Pay becomes less important the more social support we have. If we all enjoyed a baseline of financial stability, we could focus more of our energy on creating simply for the sake of creation, or offering our services simply to be of service. 

This post began as a short announcement to let folks know that I’m going to try putting every other story (roughly two a month) behind a paywall so I can offer more value to my paid subscribers. Considering that this “short announcement” evolved into a 11-minute read, I clearly have some mixed feelings about this. But two free stories and two paid stories a month strikes me as a reasonable compromise between “Show me the money!” and “Down with capitalism!” 

If you’re already a paid subscriber – thank you! Your early show of support has been meaningful in ways that extend far beyond the dollars. If you haven’t yet made the leap to becoming a paid subscriber but truly look forward to seeing my weekly stories in your inbox, now would be a great time to upgrade your subscription.

If a story every other week is plenty and you have other expenses competing for your wallet, I totally get it. It means a lot that of all the things out there competing for your attention, you’ve chosen to engage with this newsletter. 

There. I’m done. Next week I’ll resume my regularly scheduled programming with a story for all my subscribers – “Where Feminists and Tradwives Can Agree.” Stay tuned!

What I’m reading this week:

Sometimes I’m hungry for stories that challenge me and expand my perspective. Sometimes I need a story that helps me feel seen. She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts by

Emily F. Popek

is just what I needed yesterday. It’s about mothering a 12-year-old girl who has, somewhere along the way, evolved into her own human being.

Neither Emily nor I are sure that we’d be friends with our daughters if we were classmates with them. If I were a fellow sixth grader, I know I’d be totally intimidated by my daughter. Hell, I’m her mother and I still feel intimidated by her sometimes! You don’t have to be the mother of a 12-year-old girl to enjoy this story, but you’ll enjoy it on a whole different level if you are.