What Is Poor?

My parents never told us we were poor. They told us that we were lucky, middle-class, and had everything we needed. Note: we did not have everything we needed.

My parents grew up during the Depression. My mother lived on a farm in southern Idaho and she told me once that when the war came, she was delighted with what she could get with war coupons, food like jello, and instant pudding packets, which she’d never had before. Her idea of “healthy” food was not your standard. For dinner, we’d sometimes have creamed corn with hot dogs cut up in it. She refused to buy sugared cold cereal, but would let us put as much sugar on as we wanted separately—one of my brothers used to pile his entire bowl with sugar and milk on top. She didn’t object.

The result of her attempt to penny-pinch on food for a family of thirteen was us eating a lot of expired food, a lot of stale leftovers, a good amount of spoiled food that made us all sick (we’re probably lucky no one died of food poisoning, though one of my siblings simply stopped eating anything served at home after several bad bouts). My mother didn’t even shop at thrift stores because they were too expensive. We relied mostly on garbage bags full of hand-me-downs from neighbors (including used underwear) until we were old enough to get jobs and buy our own clothes.

Every generation redefines what “poor” means, I think. When my kids were little, we were on WIC and it was a huge portion of our monthly food budget. I only had about $100 cash to spend on food, but our WIC vouchers were worth $250, and they paid for the most expensive things: milk, cold cereal, cheese (also for cheaper things like carrots and dried beans). We ate boxed mac n cheese most lunches and had oatmeal for breakfast a lot of days. Sometimes when I could find off-brand corn flakes, they were almost as cheap, so I got those. I nickle-and-dimed every meal, and I sewed a lot of clothing for my kids—until they went to school and I discovered they were being bullied about their “weird” clothing.

I also had no money for health insurance, and didn’t qualify for Medicaid, so I delivered most of my children at home with a lay midwife (this is legal in Utah, though it isn’t in many states). I took our children to the county health clinic for checkups and for vaccinations, but we had to pay out of pocket for anything else (like when our fourth child ended up with RSV and was hospitalized overnight, something that took us two years to pay off).

I used cloth diapers with pins and plastic pants on top. They were very, very cheap, even if you take into account the cost of soap and washing. Breastfeeding is also cheap (though not free, since it means I had to eat more). I remember when I started using paper diapers and Ziploc bags. Those were, for me, the real signal that I wasn’t poor anymore. Maybe not rich, but not dirt poor. It was a good feeling. It felt safe, like I didn’t have to expect starvation next week if I didn’t watch the bank account carefully.

Sometimes when I hear people these days say that it’s cheaper to eat out than to go to the grocery store, I think—not if you just eat bad, cheap food. Sure, it might be a smaller difference than it was when I was raising kids. But boxed mac n cheese is still cheaper per calorie than McDonald’s and cloth diapers passed on from child to child are still a lot cheaper than paper diapers. I don’t wish on anyone the kind of poverty that I had to manage. It’s just a different thing entirely. I see the cost of homes going up to a level that I don’t know if my children will ever be able to afford one, though I owned a home in the midst of my poverty. But that also doesn’t mean that I wasn’t poor. I was. But poor means different things in different frameworks. What was poor for  you?