Reframing a Scarcity Mindset
And how I'm unlearning A LOT of crap.
It all starts with a metaphor. When I was ten, my mother remarried my now-stepfather on a day in June when the gray clouds dumped pondfuls of water on us. It rained so much that my black Mary Janes flooded and I made inelegant squishing sounds as I walked down the aisle in my bridesmaid gown. But before all that, it was just me and my grandmother sitting in the lanai of our home—the one I was about to move out of—making adjustments to my hair before we headed to the church.
After one last puff of Aqua Net, she leaned over and placed both hands on my knees. “I need to tell you something. Your mother is about to get married, which means that from this day forward, you will only have half the love you have always enjoyed.”
I gave her a skeptical look. Though my mother could be difficult, she was never stingy with her love. We shared a room, a closet, snacks hidden under her bed—the very air we breathed—and it felt unbelievable that this would all change after a few words in front of some slack-jawed minister.
My grandma went on, “Think of your mother’s heart like a cookie. Up until now, you got the whole cookie, right? But now that she’ll have a new husband, that cookie gets split in half. So that’s your portion. Half the love, forever and ever. I just wanted you to know that.” Then we packed up our stuff and drove to the church.
I’m going to pause here and say that in retrospect, I know how deeply problematic this was. I can also understand it, somewhat. My grandmother, an only child like me, received her own stepfather at a tender age, and felt whiplashed by the loss of her mother, who’d been her sole companion all her life. She was lonely and unhappy for much of her childhood. My mother and I were about to move out of her home, after a decade of living (rent-free and completely supported) with my grandparents. Her words came from trauma, fear, sorrow, and also a misguided sense of protection, thinking she could save me by lowering my expectations. She was offering a steaming pile of tough love.
But woo-boy. If I thought the adjustments to my new family life would be difficult, this certainly did not help.
Why am I sharing the metaphor of the cookie? Because this sort of cookie math has defined my relationship with the world for nearly all my life. It represents my reckoning with the finite supply of things I hold dear: love, friendship, creative opportunities, time. To understand beautiful things in terms of a disintegrating cookie, parceled without logic and at great personal cost, is to see the world in the shadow of scarcity. It is a mindset so many of us hold, and yet, in the way that the rich keep getting richer, a steadfast conviction of dearth seems to only beget more of the same.