My father was born with a real silver spoon in his mouth, not gold not platinum but a nice solid silver. Not by any fault of his own but rather by his family having practiced good business and money-wise decisions. I still have his monogrammed solid silver christening cup.

I was born with a silver plated spoon in my mouth. My very young years saw a good steady growing up and if there was a want in my life I did not know it existed. One thing I didn’t realize was that my wonderful silver-plated spoon was less than palatable for my mother.

Something else I learned is spoons can morph.

My mother and father divorced – my mother’s fault in her need to find sanity. After the divorce my spoon changed to a sometimes decent and sometimes not so decent thick paper spoon. My mother struggled to feed and clothe four young girls while keeping a roof over our heads. No easy feat while my father whittled away his days doing what he loved to do – fighting my mother in court so he had to pay little or no child support. He could have given us enough so our wooden spoons could at least have stayed wooden or tinned-up but no.

There were times when all she could afford was a fifty pound bag of pinto beans and little more to last the month. Those were hard times but being young and inexperienced of how life was, I didn’t realized that more was missing from my life. Children are so malleable. By the time I left the house the spoon had again changed and was now a thin tin. I had experienced times of little food and time of plenty by then, so tin was not the worst option.

In the last almost forty years, I and my own children have seen our spoons change. Sometimes solid brass sometimes reasonably acceptable wooden but I never lost my spoon. Came close once. I would have claimed it a thin-paper spoon during those darker days, weeks, alright a few months and that is as close as I ever planned to be a smidgeon above having no spoon.

Spoons and having one, in my opinion, makes me a ‘have’, rather than a ‘have-not’. Listening to people claim they are a ‘have-not’, while having food to eat, a roof over their head and often much more, makes me wonder. Perhaps it is because they don’t have what they think they want and believe they need to be truly happy. Perhaps because society tells us we must have lots of money and things and things and things. That if we don’t, we are ‘have-nots’.

I am a ‘have’ because I have never lost my spoon and I would say I have a nice clean stainless steel spoon now. It is a solid spoon – a roof, food, a job to pay the bills and buy needed things (and sometimes not so needed but just wanted things). Not rich, in fact we fall into the low income earnings level but that is a monetary rating and money truly is not the-everything it is made out to be.

Wooden spoon, tin spoon, stainless-steel, brass or silver spoon. I ‘have’ a spoon and therefore I am a ‘have’.