Poverty

Nothing in my childhood presaged the fact that I would spend almost ten years in poverty.  I was raised in a middle class home, and both my parents worked.  I attended a private college preparatory high school where my mother was an English teacher. Going to college was never a question.  I graduated with a BA in Early Childhood Education. I was privileged in many ways that I didn’t understand until much later in my life. The details of how I ended up in a family of five living on less than $20,000 a year are complicated and tedious.  Suffice it to say that some things were within my control and some things were out of my control. I was too young when I got married–too stubborn in some ways and too malleable in others.  I knew nothing about my husband’s alcoholism and my inability to control it.  I willingly entered into a difficult situation, and then I got stuck. 

So I found myself at twenty-eight years old, pregnant for the second time, with a three-year-old daughter and nine-year-old step-daughter. My husband had just applied for public assistance, which meant I could not work much.  The income qualifications were outrageous–I could have worked full time at a retail job and earned too much to qualify for assistance and not enough to pay all our bills.  I cared for a friend’s child several days a week for a little cash.  We received $600 a month for rent and bills and around $200 a month in food stamps.  I remember one cold November day, standing in my darkly lit bedroom staring at myself in the blurry mirror on top of my dresser and wondering, “How is this my life?”  

These were some of the darkest years of my life.  We had barely enough to eat, and our diet revolved around what was affordable–foods like pasta, cheap spaghetti sauce, and the milk, cheese, and peanut butter our WIC checks provided for us.  The local food pantry delivered a box of food for Thanksgiving.  And once I went to our local grocery store to ask for a free bag of food.  We were down to ketchup and mustard at home, and our next food stamp allotment was a week away.  I still feel a pain in my chest when I think about standing at the customer service desk waiting for the clerk to bring me my bag–the employees were people I knew well from my years of shopping there.  What did they think of me?  No customers or employees ever commented on my food stamps or WIC checks, but I felt shame using them nonetheless.  “This is not how I was raised,” I thought every time I bought groceries.  

The shame was not limited to my shopping trips.  I also felt ashamed of my house.  We lived in a small cottage next door to my husband’s parents.  I think it was around 800 square feet total.  The kitchen/dining room had a concrete slab floor which was cold in the winter and slippery with condensation in the summer.  When my daughter was born, it was the main room of our house.  She learned to sit up, to crawl, and to walk on the rugs we put over the concrete, but the rugs couldn’t prevent the horrible “thump” that her head made when she tipped over or slipped.  I hesitated to bring my few mommy-friends over because I didn’t want their babies to tip over and thump their heads.  

For many years, there were only three walls in the bedroom my husband and I used. The fourth wall was simply a curtain pulled between the bedroom and the adjoining space– hardly big enough to be called a separate room.  Our bedroom sat over the earthen basement, accessed through a bulkhead outside the house.  The damp, mildewy smell of the basement seeped into all our clothes, our books, our bedding.  The property was surrounded by a state forest, which was lovely and natural, but also dark.  We had snow on our lawn until April, and then black flies so bad that my children refused to play outside.   

I rarely invited people to our home.  I was embarrassed– we had so little space, and the space we had seemed so paltry.  I remember when my son was four or five and he was invited to a friend’s house for a play date.  The friend’s house was a three-story Victorian farmhouse– newly built–with a bonus room over the garage that was dedicated to the kids’ toys.  There were shiny wood floors, beautiful Palladian windows, brand new furniture and appliances.  I left him there to play and then cried the entire drive home.  I would never reciprocate that invitation.    

On top of my shame, I felt a crushing sense of loss.  I could not provide for my children the comforts I had enjoyed myself as a child.  No pool membership, no piano lessons, no vacations to visit the grandparents.  The book Opening Our Hearts; Transforming Our Losses, from the Al-Anon Family Groups, describes the many types of loss associated with alcoholism. One of these losses is the loss of dreams for what your life might have been like.  Loss of dreams for your children. My childhood/childish dreams of raising a family in a big house with a wide lawn had turned into a nightmare of the realities of alcoholism and poverty.  I can never get those years back, to provide my children the life I had wished for them.  They are adults now, and they turned out fine, for the most part!  But I still grieve from time to time for what I didn’t give them.

My loss was amplified by the fact that we lived in a largely affluent part of the country where the economy is based in tourism.  Of course, poverty is difficult to experience in any location.  In my case, the stark contrast between my family’s isolated poverty in the midst of great affluence revealed to me the veil that I had been living behind, and that the people around me still were.  Growing up in a middle class home, going to a private high school and then on to college– what did I know of poverty other than driving through a neighborhood on my way to somewhere else?  

Poverty ripped through that veil and now, like Hester Prynne seeing the scarlet letter where others could not see it, I began to see the veil in front of everyone’s eyes. 

On the road where we lived in poverty there were only a handful of other homes, and several of them were owned by people who lived elsewhere and came to our area on weekends and vacations.  I would walk with my children in their hand-me-down stroller past beautiful, empty, multi-bedroom homes while my growing family squeezed into 800 square feet.  The wealthy tourists who arrived on weekends to occupy those homes and patronize our town’s stores and restaurants lived behind their own veil.  Learning that my husband was a fiddle player, one older man said “Have you been to Ireland?”  When we answered “No,” he seemed disgusted.  “You HAVE to go to Ireland! I just don’t understand people who don’t like to travel,” as if everyone can afford to travel, but some of us just choose not to.

Making friends was difficult once I saw the veil.  “Are you signing your daughter up for the children’s chorus?” one potential friend asked.  She added “You really should– it’s only $700 a year!” How do I explain that $700 is more than one month’s allotment of public relief?  How do I explain that $700 is not “only” $700 to us?  I didn’t explain.  I just isolated myself. 

Even people who should have known better lived behind the veil.  A social worker I visited through the public health clinic listened to my tales of poverty and shame and said to me “You can live on less.  Maybe you just don’t buy that new winter coat this year.”  Did she really think it was that simple? I had been shopping at thrift stores and hadn’t had a new winter coat in 10 years. I was still wearing the L.L. Bean parka my parents bought for me before I moved east. 

These years in poverty put a rip in my veil that would only widen, and as difficult as this tearing was, it was one of the greatest gifts of my struggles with poverty.  This experience was my awakening to the fact that there are multiple realities around us behind the veil of our own limited perceptions.  I now began to see that the things I had taken for granted, the things that many people take for granted, are not givens in life.  Money provides options.  People without money have fewer options.  It was a vivid example of the danger of making assumptions.  

Years later, when I was a newly certified English teacher, I took a course on African-American history and literature, and I read for the first time The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois.  Just three paragraphs into chapter 1, I was thunderstruck.  

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,– a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.  It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.  One ever feels his two-ness,– an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, to unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn assunder.  

And here was my gift–the realization that others knew of the veil that I had felt tearing apart in my own life.  That others felt gifted (and perhaps cursed) with “second-sight” to see the world from two vantage points.  I cannot compare my eight-year-long experience of living in poverty with a lifetime of living in the United States as a Black man, but I felt a connection to Du Bois, and I realized that this was one of the many realities going on around me.  It was a gift that rewarded me and humbled me simultaneously.  Others understood!  And yet, I had so much to learn.  In my years of poverty, I began unwrapping the gift of seeing beyond the veil. 

Further Reading: 

The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois, has inspired me as a history teacher and as a writer.  Du Bois was a genius, without a doubt.  His writing is incisive, multi-faceted, and eloquent.  

Opening Our Hearts, Transforming Our Losses, Al-Anon Family Groups.  This book helped me to see that loss takes many forms and that alcoholic families experience both subtle and obvious losses.  Seeing my experiences mirrored in this book and reading about the experiences, strength, and hope of others has brought me serenity in many difficult moments.