Even after I swore I wouldn’t ask him for money again, my dad kept bringing it up.

I meant it, too. Not in a dramatic, wounded-daughter way. More in the tone you use with a skittish animal. Easy. Relax. I’m not coming any closer. But the stories kept coming.

Money’s tight, he’d say. He couldn’t do this, couldn’t do that, couldn’t be expected to pull cash from thin air. The warning would arrive before the request, which was impressive, considering there usually wasn’t one.

That’s the part I can’t stop poking with a big stick. Not the scarcity itself, real or performed, but his need to keep narrating it after the supposed threat had passed.

He always talked like our family was one payment away from ruining him. Come to find out, he was sending money to other women all the while. Gifts, trips, direct transfers, gestures of generosity large enough to become, eventually, his biggest expense.

So the script wasn’t exactly, I have nothing. It was more like, I have nothing for this. That distinction matters.

He once said that we treated Papa like a bank, which would be funny if it weren’t so crooked. Papa helped when things were bad, or when Dad had flaked, or when life cornered us in some way. Mostly with loans. The occasional outright rescue. Help without theater. Help without lecture. But somehow Papa was the one reduced to a transaction, while my dad got to cast himself as the weary provider even while giving his money away elsewhere.

So I grew up with this warped little equation: family as debt, outsiders as investment.

I think what made it so confusing was that he didn’t only tell the story to us. He told it to himself. That’s what it feels like now, reading the old messages. Less like disclosure than rehearsal. A man stepping back onto the same stage, reciting the same ole lines, long after the audience has left the theater.

I don’t think money was ever just money to him. It was cover. An alibi. Stage dressing.

If he declared himself broke first, then everything after that could be framed as sacrifice. If he gave to someone else, that was generosity under strain. If he withheld from us, that was necessity. The story did all the heavy lifting. He just had to keep repeating it.

Maybe that’s why it still Bothers me with a capital B. Being told, over and over, that your existence is costly does something to the body. It makes your stance defensive before you’ve even done anything wrong. It teaches you to apologize for taking up space, to feel ashamed of need, even in its absence.

It leaves you with a strange afterimage once you realize the story you were given was never the whole truth.

I don’t enjoy auditing the dead like some bitter accountant, but the numbers confirmed something I had a hard time trusting while it was happening. I kept the messages because they showed me I hadn’t imagined it. Even if money was tight sometimes, Dad kept framing it in a way that made family sound like the reason. That was the pattern: the warning was always repeated, and the burden was always us.

Maybe the scarcity was real, at least sometimes. But so was his performance around it.

After my dad died, I started doing a different kind of math. (I did much more than just map his bank statements.) I worked the kind of formulas that run on a thousand different parings of what-ifs.

That was the question I kept returning to at the start—what should I have done differently?

But the more time I’ve spent inside this story, the less useful that question is. It assumes there was a version of me, back then, who understood what was happening well enough to act differently. And there really wasn’t. I wasn’t choosing inaction. I was operating inside the only logic I had.

So no, I don’t think I would go back and fix it. I think I’d stop asking the question that assumes it was mine to answer.

Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to this. Money in families is almost never just about money. It’s about power, innocence, self-mythology, who gets to be needy and who gets accused of need, who gets to spend freely and who has to feel expensive for years afterward. It’s about the stories people tell before anyone can question the math.

My dad liked to act as if he were one bad month away from ruin when it came to us. With other women, he could be open-handed, romantic, magnanimous. I don’t think that contradiction cancels out the pain he may have felt around money. If anything, it makes it clearer.

Scarcity wasn’t just a financial condition for him. It was an identity. A role. Maybe even a way to stay innocent while making choices that hurt people.

There’s a special kind of loneliness in realizing someone wanted credit for caring more than they wanted the intimacy that care requires. Intimacy keeps receipts of a different sort. It remembers who showed up, who vanished, who kept insisting on hardship after the asking had stopped.

That may be the part I’m still writing toward. Not whether he had the money. Why he needed me to believe he didn’t.

Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently?

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inspo: outsiders as investments, family as debt // money-talk as performance, not reality // Dad’s offhand comment about Papa one ordinary October day // addicted to being wanted and admired // giving where there are fewer expectations of return, where generosity can’t be checked against the past // a displaced confession, possibly? // guilt avoidance & narrative control // lying as habit, not strategy // mostly, reading through all Dad’s many texts about money while writing this memoir

Kinsey Keys

aspiring memoirist rummaging through my noggin, stubbornly clutching the past to my chest like it’s a newborn babe starved for mother's milk.

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