When I was a child, my mother told me a story about a conversation she once had with my Aunt Elaine, before I was born.

Elaine was not really my aunt by blood, but the two of them had grown up through tough times together and thought of each other as sisters. They shared a love for literature, gardens, and inexplicably long telephone conversations.

Elaine was an educated woman with many interests and experiences, and she had an engaging manner in conversation. She had married a man named Rupert—everyone called him Rube. Rube had gone to college and done well in business, at least by the standards of the time. He was a dedicated, determined, and reliable man who believed deeply in the quiet satisfaction of a growing savings account.

My parents lived in a very different world.

Neither of them had gone past the eighth grade. Work was steady but modest, and with seven children in the house my father’s $25 weekly paycheck had to stretch a long way. There was never much money left for anything that could be called luxury.

But my mother had a talent for making something out of almost nothing.

Every summer there would be fun activities, a short vacation, a day trip somewhere—sometimes just a long drive with sandwiches packed in wax paper. Christmas morning always arrived with a stack of presents beneath the tree. Many of those gifts were things she would have had to buy anyway—clothes, socks, school supplies—but mixed among them would be one or two special things, the things she somehow knew we had been hoping for.

Elaine’s household worked by a different philosophy entirely. Rube believed in saving for the future with near-religious devotion. Waste was unacceptable. I once heard that their children had to bring their plastic sandwich bags home from school so they could be reused. They rarely ate in restaurants. Vacations simply did not happen.

Rube was preparing for the proverbial rainy day. Those efforts did accumulate the security savings can provide—but you have to wonder at what price.

One afternoon, as my mother later told it, the two women were sitting together at a kitchen table while my mom was doing the bills. No doubt she was sorting through receipts and her well-scribbled bank book, sipping coffee while the Friday stew simmered on the stove. She was working out how to shift money from one place to another—borrowing from one account to cover another bill—trying to keep a credit card company from canceling the very card she had used to buy Christmas gifts for her children.

Elaine watched her with growing concern.

Finally she said, gently but anxiously, “My God, Marilyn… what would you do if Mario ever lost his job?”

My mother didn’t even pause from her figuring.

“Well, Elaine,” she said, “then I guess I’d have to live like you do.”

It was not said with bitterness or mockery. It was simply my mother’s quiet declaration of priorities. She understood risk. She understood scarcity. But she also believed childhood was happening now, not someday in a more secure future.

When I think about her now, I see a woman balancing impossible numbers while still finding a way to create joy—cheap vacations, surprise presents, memories that would outlast any credit card bill.