These are interesting times we are living in. I think a lot about the state of our country and what it may look like in five years, or hell, next month. I've talked a lot about my upbringing on my social media to raise awareness to people who may not have any idea at all what it was like to be raised in the projects by a single mom. When I talk with people about that my favorite phrase they say is , “Well, your mom was the kind of person those programs exist for.” If you say this to people, I want you to please do me a favor and stop. It's insulting.It insinuates that my mom was some how more valuable than everyone else in the neighborhood. My mom did however have more support from her parents and she was white, two things that made a big difference in the outcome of our story. I guess I'm glad I had the right kind of mom. I guess people would be totally okay letting me starve if my mom was a so called welfare queen. I hate to burst your bubble, but there were no welfare queens where I came from. It was just life in the Serengeti, all of us trying to survive. Even utilizing all of the loopholes in the system mothers were forced to make very difficult choices everyday. The neighborhood was full of latchkey kids running amuck. Gangs created jobs for the unemployable, either due to age, record or infirmity. It was just a melting pot of people tossed together by unforeseen and unplanned circumstances thanking their lucky stars everyday that they had a roof over their heads and food in their bellies, even if it came from the food pantry down the street or the boxes of dry goods dispersed at the WIC office twice a month.
There was a large part of our time on Dooley Drive that we didn’t have a car. My mom walked a few miles to the nearest bus stop to go to college. Luckily her professor learned she was doing this and started giving her a ride. When she needed to take night classes to finish her degree her classmate stayed with me in our concrete walled apartment on the edge of the projects. We would often walk a mile to the nearest grocery store so that we could get a cab ride home with our packages. We could only afford a one way trip most of the time. While going to school full time my mom would have to go to the welfare office to turn in pages of job contacts so that she could continue to receive benefits. She had been a stay at home mom prior to the divorce without a lot of significant work history. I vowed to myself that if I accomplished nothing else in my life, I would find a way to be independent of the confines of marriage. I would marry, but I would retain the ability to walk away if shit got real. No one would own me. When I got older my love for poetry led me to the poem Invictus by William Earnest Henry. To this day when things get hard I say these lines to myself:
Out of the night that covers me
Black as a pit from pole to pole
I thank whatever gods my be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the Fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced or cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
looms but the horror of the shade
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how straight the gate
How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.
I wear these words like a cloak woven around my spirit, protecting me from the warfare of the world. They lie in concert with my Maya Angelou anthologies, providing me an atlas of the landscape. They are my quintessential words to live by.
I was thrown into a whole different culture than I knew living in suburbia. Where I went to live after my parents split there where few dads. The men we did see where an oddity and I admit I was often wary of them. To me they represented the constant threat of violence. I feel so blessed to have found a partner in life who helps me navigate this trauma without making me feel like a failure. I often feel unlovable and the wall that surrounds the soft spots is thick with the thorns sown in my youth. He is the only man with whom I can enjoy a safety and softness that I never knew existed inside the male species.
Day in and day out what I did see all around me in the throws of poverty where strong and determined women. Women working construction jobs like my friends Nadia’s mother, Women doing hair in their living rooms while tending their children, grandmothers selling pickles and potted meat out their back doors. Women were being bosses and figuring out the next level of survival. There was little luxury. However when luxury was achieved by someone we celebrated it. It was only a feat we understood and we knew that everyone on the outside of Dooley drive would complain that the welfare queens were taking tax dollars again to fund elaborate lifestyles on their dime. I guffaw loudly at the assumption that an occasional Nintendo game placed me in the lap of luxury.
No matter your station, no one believes that poor people have a right to own nice things, or eat high quality foods. Flip on the news and there is a constant barrage of misinformation surrounding what happens in lower class neighborhoods. Did you know that the average yearly contribution per tax payer that funds welfare programs is 42 dollars a year? You can google it.. go ahead. Ill wait. To pretend that poor people are a drain on the average taxpayer is a fallacy that I will preach about with all of my heart to combat. It remains an uphill battle. Classism and racism seem to go hand in hand on the American landscape. People will look the other way completely as the government steals from the American people left and right to uphold the military defense budget which as of this latest audit is some 63% unaccounted for give or take, and blame every mother seeking a meal for her kids for the poor economic status of the country. I also think it is very telling that people will say, well they wont work, without taking the time to understand the complex issues surrounding what kind of job you need to have so that you can afford things like insurance. If you take a job making 10 dollars an hour that’s not enough to pay your bills but it is enough that you will lose your SNAP benefits and Medicaid. It isn’t as simple as finding any job and I so wish that people understood the complex issues that people receiving benefits face. Having pride in the face of the American public for taking any kind of job unfortunately doesn’t meet the needs. We put so little value on good parenting so that people can save face in the eyes of the taxpayer and ignore that when a single mom is working two full time jobs the children are left unattended. I spent a whole lot of time alone from the age of 7 because my mom was trying to go to school and work at an on campus job. My mom also had to take out predatory student loans to pay for her education which left her in debt almost until the time of her death. Having borrowed 13 thousand dollars, she was only able to start making payments several years after she completed her education. While she was able to defer her loan payments she didn’t take into account the interest and by the time she finally made the last payment she had paid nearly 60 thousand dollars back. Being poor costs you in every way imaginable.
I remember my mom shopping the sale bins at the fabric stores looking for fabric she could use to make some of my clothing. We drank powdered milk and went without medical care. I remember taking a gross garlic smelling concoction one time that a very robust woman named Roberta whipped up in her kitchen when I had a tooth ache because dentistry was a luxury unavailable to us at the time. I remember getting a terrible haircut from a sweet woman who apologized profusely at my too short bangs because she had never cut a white girls hair before. My mom bought a pair of hair shears and took to the task herself from then on. My mom never went to a hairdresser. Even when those welfare years were well behind us. For many years after that my mom suffered from a scarcity mindset. She over spent consistently on food because she was always afraid we would go hungry. She hoarded every scrap of material and art supplies she came into contact with because she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to afford it. There where multiple traumas that came from her marriage and carried over into the rest of her life. For this she would face a life time of judgement and I would spend the first half of my life combatting the parts of that trauma mindset passed on to me. I often wonder if my suffering was less important than the 42 dollars a year it cost per person to keep food in the mouths of children. I remind people as often as I can that without welfare, my life would be much different , if it even existed at all. I think about this a lot as Chad and I make sacrifices to see that our children are well cared for emotionally and physically. It was always important to me that they be raised by us and not a system. It is a privilege that we get to do so.
It wasnt all doom and gloom though. There was a ton of mischievous fun. There where dance parties in the quad when someone got a new appliance delivered. Immediately the radios would come out and folks would duck tape the box into a dance floor. In the 80’s there was break dancing and thriller jackets paired with parachute pants. Music and dance brought a oneness to the landscape. On the Fourth of July there would be firework wars that could get scary. One time we were in the kitchen when a kid from the neighborhood came by and threw a handful of black cats inside the screen door. The racket left our ears ringing and my mother trembling. There where hot summer days eating popsicles on our porch swing with my friends Nadia and Elisa. We were just doing regular kid stuff which was a welcome distraction from the situations that led me to the projects to begin with.
What’s odd is that I get a lot of praise for “ getting out” and doing better. The truth is though that I suffer more from what happened to me prior to my time on Dooley Drive than I did from being pushed head first into the urban jungle. In the jungle I learned to survive. Im proud of it. Im proud of having the opportunity to learn that love is the same in all colors and all walks of life. This is I feel the foundation on which the great empathy I have for people is built. . I learned that the world isn’t sending you a savior but you can find support among the masses, and you can find the grit inside your self if you can find a crumb of bravery to lead you to healing.
Watching my mom work tirelessly to seek out opportunities to do better taught me to do the same. I learned the value of discomfort and finding support and happiness even in circumstances that bring you pity from everyone else. I learned that we indeed live in a shallow culture that measures you by the number of designer outfits you have instead of the balance in your soul. That’s a lesson I wish everyone had the opportunity to learn. We judge each other so harshly based on so many trivial things. The image of wholeness becomes more important than actually having it. Allowing people to live a real life that makes them happy versus having a life that is pleasing to others is something i think we all struggle with collectively. Undoing this unhealthy conditioning is I suppose some of the hardest parts of this deconstruction/ reconstruction journey that I find myself on these days. Some could say its a midlife crisis. I can understand why people call it a crisis. When you finally get to the point of having choices, you start to really evaluate who you are and whether or not the choices that have been thrust upon you really suit who you are at your core. Are you really this person that has been built from hard earned strength? Do you have the ability to peel back the layers of your existence and allow yourself to flourish from a point of safety and softness. There is a line from Dr strange “ who are you in this vast universe.” I want people to understand that getting to this point is a huge privilege, one that many many people I grew up with will never have the opportunity to do.
My mother and I’s relationship was very difficult. I have touched on this a great deal before. I know that for the most part this was circumstantial. I became a product of my experiences and trauma and she did too. Looking back now I see the diagnoses of pathological demand avoidance forming. After all that I had suffered I was never going to be told what to do, especially by a man, ever. To this day I bristle at authoritative control. Over the years thru patience, love and cleverness, Chad has worn the wall of this pathology thinner, but I still struggle which in many ways has limited my and our potential. I feel that thru the pandemic and the stress of that season I have backslid in progress with this and it is a situation that is difficult to explain to people. Thanks to Tik Tok and internet therapy I have been able to adequately define it. All around me in my early life I saw the fragmentation of trust that women had placed in men who then left them destitute and disappointed. I saw women burdened alone with the task of caring for children who now due to circumstances beyond their control where cast into this liminal space where everything you are told about who you are is negative. It’s interesting now on the other side of this experience to listen to how people view poor people as lazy and worthless and I can tell you from my own observations and experiences that this is certainly not the case.
I found myself prior to my move to Texas at a point in my life where I finally had some real choices and options. I was also 40 years old.. so I want you to think about how long it took me, to get to a point in my life where making a big move for my family was a possibility . It took me forty years of digging myself out of the shadow of poverty. Even then it still meant that I would need to liquidate my entire life savings to even have an opportunity to make this change. I do it willingly to give my children and grandchildren a better start. It is astonishing to me how horribly mean spirited my fellow Americans can be in their attitude towards those they feel are beneath them. It’s an interesting juxtaposition to hold your self in a place of moral authority over women’s rights while campaigning with the other hand to take support away from the children you desire above all else to see born. Attempts to claim ownership over reproductive choices are wrought with judgement and projection. Resources are dwindling for family planning while men are all over social media complaining about how women just expect too much of them in terms of equal partnerships. It’s incredibly interesting to me that people would see birthing children as a righteous punishment for promiscuity. I’ve often wondered how the child felt being a consequence instead of a sought after blessing.
The other day Chad made me a grilled cheese sandwich made from the knock off Velveeta brand gooey cheese concoction. It tasted just like the government cheese that came in our food boxes. As the cheese melted in my mouth I was transported back in time to when I learned how to make my own dinner and even cooked apples covered in brown sugar and honey for a make shift dessert. At 8 I was alone after school till well after dinner time. I felt proud that I had mastered use of the stove top even if my mom was disapproving of my new found independence. She was worried I might burn the house down and thus alert the authorities of my situation. Government cheese sustained me thru many lonely nights waiting for my mom to come home. She would fall asleep over her books at the kitchen table and I would tuck myself into bed. Im thankful for that government cheese. I certainly wouldn’t be here without it.
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