Levels of Poverty

Hearing my mom talk about the level of poverty she grew up with has been enlightening for me. She grew up on a farm in rural Idaho and is likely the small height she is (the only one in her family) because of the Depression and lack of food she and her mother had. She lived in a two-story house without a toilet and with no heating on the top floor. She tells a story sometimes about getting the measles and being told to stay upstairs until she got better. Her mother brought her occasional food, but she was all alone.

Of all the men she dated, she ended up choosing someone who was clearly the best financial choice. My father was terrible with money and I hated the way he threw it away on people he considered “charity” projects (yes, I know this makes me sound awful, but we didn’t have enough money for food and clothes for ourselves—11 children on a college teacher salary). My father also kept my mother on a strict budget for the household (about $400/month). I hated the way she had to beg him for more than that. I hated the way he made me beg for money, too.

However, it is clear that of her prospects, my mother won the lottery. Compared to her siblings, she was/is wealthy. Her sisters helped make sure she went to college when they could not, and that was how she found my father. She and all of us are better off than any of her siblings or our cousins.

It’s just a useful reminder to me about levels of poverty. We were poor. So poor. But to my parents, that was a curse word and they never allowed us to use it when describing our financial situation. Compared to their childhoods, we were wealthy beyond measure because we had security. My father always ALWAYS had a full-time job. We might not have had anything good to eat in the house and my mother often (yes OFTEN!) served us spoiled food that made us sick. But there was always food of some kind in the house and that was NOT the situation she grew up in. Not even close.

For my children, it is hard for them to remember how poor we were when they were little. Mostly we were students living on a very tight budget, with food supplemented by WIC. We ate a lot of carrots, beans, and cheese from WIC and I appreciated the assistance of that program. We ate iron-fortified corn flakes and oatmeal and free milk. We ate every single calorie that WIC offered us. The kids don’t remember this, but I do. We were never starving but there were plenty of times that some kids went to bed hungry because they didn’t like the food on offer, and that wasn’t something I could change.

When my kids tell me about their plans for parenthood, plans that will not include having children while still students, plans that will not include government assistance for the bare minimum, plans that don’t include wondering about taking the baby to the doctor when I had no medical insurance and the baby had fallen from the top of the bunk bed, I am sometimes hurt by them telling me that what I offered was somehow “not good enough.” I feel like they are saying that I was stupid and overly optimistic. Sometimes my children tell me directly that I had no business having children in the financial situation I was in when I had them. Maybe they are right. I didn’t think it was so bad at the time. I was determined to do better for my kids than my parents had done for me. And I think I achieved that.

But when I frame it like that, I realize that my mother and father also achieved what was probably their goal of doing better for me than their parents had done for them. And one of the costs of this success is that your children will not thank you for it. They will live in a world that doesn’t include the deprivations that you assumed as normal. They will want to do even better for their children than you did for them. And that is as it should be.