Because it's good to remember

[pegkerr]

Read this.

I've had similar experiences, from both sides. I was terribly poor for a period during my twenties. I eked out a living as best I could--I resorted to selling plasma a few times to get money for food. I went to food shelves. I remember someone at my church pressing leftovers from the potluck on me, and I was so grateful, because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to eat that weekend. I remember when someone anonymously left two boxes of groceries on our back stoop, and I was so embarrassed, but god, I needed it.

I remember, years later, when I was a visitor at an adult Sunday School class where someone made a snide comment about people who went to food shelves to get supplies to, I dunno, throw parties.

I was a guest, but dammit, I let her have it with both barrels, and I told her that from my own personal experience I could tell her that she had no idea was she was talking about. I think she was shocked that someone who was so educated and dressed so nicely had actually once been poor enough to need to go to a food shelf.

Once you've been in a position like that, you never forget.

At one point, when someone gave me some crucial help, and I protested, saying I couldn't pay her back, she told me, "Pay it forward someday. I know you will."

I have. And I will continue to do so.

[If you're in this position now, by the way, I recommend the community poor_skills]

Comments

[silme.livejournal.com]

Back around '83, I remember a colleague (a teacher, back in the US) making comments about people on welfare and how they were all lazy, etc. Another teacher, a woman in her fifties with three grown children, approached him and asked if he thought she was a lazy person.

You see, what he didn't know was that she'd become pregnant with her first child when she was in college and she'd dropped out. After the third child, her husband abandoned her. She resorted to welfare, she told him, to feed her children until she could get on her feet again, finish her abandoned degree and find a job that would pay enough to house and feed herself and her kids.

He was quiet after that.

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

Thank you for that community link. I have been very poor, also in my twenties. I have lots of skills for getting by with very little, and I like to share them. And I am always looking for more ideas, because the less I spend, the closer I am to retirement.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I was fairly poor in my college days. I recommend it, as the most painless way to do it, that will still leave you imprinted deeply enough to have some insight into what it's like. I had something of a safety net, but not a huge one - that is, my parents would not have let me go hungry or naked, but they didn't have enough money to bail me out or just easily transfer me if I'd screwed up enough to lose my grants and scholarships and I was acutely aware that the amount they paid toward my college expenses, relatively small though it was ($3K of about $20 - it was a private school but the way the rules went then they'd have paid the same if I went to a state school) made it noticeably more difficult for them to pay bills.

I wasn't poor enough to really hurt, but I was close enough to see how you could be in a position where it did really hurt through no fault of your own. And of course I knew that it was temporary, because I'd probably get a job where I could support myself reasonably well after graduation. It's an experience I think people should have once in their youth, to have at least a little basis for empathy with those for whom it's not a short-term condition, and who don't have that safety net. (Then again, as long as I'm dictating how the world _should_ be, it would be better if no one ever had to be poor for more than a few years without a safety net. But that's harder to arrange.)

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

Once you've been in a position like that, you never forget.

Once you've gone hungry for more than a few days you never forget the experience.

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

I remember scrounging for quarters in the house so that I would have bus money.

I remember living in a one room slum with a shower down the hall that was so nasty it grew fungus on the floor.

I remember cooking dinner and almost crying because it turned out poorly but we had to eat it anyway because that was our dinner for the night.

I can't imagine doing anything similiar with children.

[dreamcoat-mom.livejournal.com]

Once you've been in a position like that, you never forget.

I'm sitting here at work fighting tears and flashbacks. My children were small and I was at home with them when my husband lost his job to a plant closing. Within a year it was all gone. Savings, house, cars - we lived on $800.00 per month and mowed lawn, cleaned houses, washed windows, shoveled snow - a million menial odd jobs while I started college to get us a better life. I was hospitalized for pneumonia because I was afraid of racking up medical bills we couldn't pay. Stupid, I know, but desperation often leads to poor decision-making. Through it all, the kindness and generosity of others was overwhelming - as was the casual cruelty of many more. We are content now, and will probably never be hungry again, but I will never take one shingle on our home for granted. My kids were shocked the first time I shut the television off in a rage over the food fight depicted on a sitcom. After I explained our past, they acknowledged my feelings, but still don't completely understand them. They can't - I hope they never have to. But I know that they also see the value of compassion, and I'm glad that we went through what we did if for no other reason than that.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I suspect that not everyone is affected in the same way by poverty, but it's clear that for a lot of people it changes attitudes permanently. It seems to me that the question now is how do you get that sort of impact on people who haven't gone through the same experience?

I can even see the difference here; I've been through only a marginal approach to poverty and it clearly didn't affect me as much as people here who have had to worry about the next meal. I'm not always as careful with my resources as I ought to be, for instance.

I don't think that the answer would be for everyone to have to try going hungry; if you know you're doing something for the experience it's not the same as doing it for real. But how do you convince people who haven't been there that resources are precious and not to be squandered, that poverty is not necessarily a failure of character, and that privilege carries obligation?

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

I will never forget how easily I ended up sobbing in Castle Meadow, Norwich, one morning at 7am, because I'd had to leave the place where I'd been staying and I had nowhere to go, no one to turn to and no money. Middle-class student, all right: but parents who weren't on the 'phone, unsympathetic bank manager, long summer break at university and no idea what I was going to do or where I was going to sleep, or wash, or what I was going to eat, or anything.

Luckily I ran into an acquaintance a few hours later, and he let me have his spare room until I was sorted. But it's terrifyingly easy to fall without benefit of safety net, and nearly impossible to drag yourself back up if you don't have people to help you.

[phoenixw.livejournal.com]

Really good links and story, lady. Thanks for sharing.

[aeditimi.livejournal.com]

My family has been on both ends, too--my family of origin (who won't let my new nuclear family reach the level of need we were at as kids).

My sister and I had attended summer day camp, which was essentially a day care, for a couple of years. It was a run-down little place that a lot of kids from 'broken homes' and foster homes went to because our parents couldn't afford the nicer camps. Shortly after my parents divorced, my mom, now on one salary for the first time in her life, could no longer afford the camp at all, and was in a bind because she needed to work during the day but couldn't afford the daycare for us so that she could go to work. She went to the day camp director and told her that she was withdrawing us and, when prompted, told her why. The director waived the cost, and my sister and I attended the camp for free that summer. When my mom tried to thank her, the woman told her a story about someone helping her family out in a time of need after her son sustained a brain injury. "Don't ever pay me back," she said, "Just pass the kindness to someone else."

Years later, my sister and I were in dance lessons, and there was one girl in my class who was an exceptional ballerina. Only she couldn't buy the costumes that we needed for the show, because her parents didn't have the money, and the cash that she herself made went to help put food on the table. But my mom found out. That young dancer had costumes that year, and she never knew who bought them.

I always wonder at the first person, because everyone seems to say 'pay it forward' because someone else graced them with something huge and asked no payment in return. But who was that first person in the chain--and I'm sure there were many--who are those first people who refuse repayment not because they're paying forward a kindness, but because they're just the kind of people to do so? I'd like to meet each and every one of them!

[sheryll.livejournal.com]

I've been on both ends of this one, too.

I was a single parent on social assistance when Nyssa was small. I remember going the grocery store and counting change. To this day, I can't stop at the store for one item. I always have to buy more. It's like I somehow think that, despite a plentiful pantry, there just isn't going to be enough food. It's the one thing I haven't gotten over.

I've added someone else's small items to mine at the grocery checkout. I've given my last $5 US to someone who can't afford to eat at a rest stop on a bus trip (I always travel with food). You never know when something small will make a big difference, but I know how often it made a difference when I was on the receiving end.

[kijjohnson.livejournal.com]

Many years ago, my ex and I moved from NYC to Portland OR. Two incomes to one, about 40% of what we had been making in NYC. We totalled the car about three months after we moved, and we needed that car for me to get to my job. Both our families were broke and a long way away.

Someone -- not a relative, not even a close friend -- gave us a car.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Now that's an interesting thought. I will be selling a running vehicle soon - a ten-year-old compact pickup, but it's in decent shape apart from age - not perfect but decent. It's paid off. I *could* actually give it away instead of selling it; the extra money would be nice to have but not necessary. But I don't know anyone who really needs a car just now, or at least if I do I don't know that I know them, if you follow me. I live in a large city, so there are certainly going to be people around who do. But how to find one? I don't think I trust the stories on Craigslist.

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

Wow! Thanks for linking to this. (I also replied to the original writer.)

I can relate some to this, what with being on SSDI and all. But I've also been in worse situations (like last fall...).

I'll check out the "poor skills" site.

[avengangle.livejournal.com]

I had a semester of being poor. Not that poor, because I had enough money to pay my rent and my car loan, and I worked fast food so I could usually eat, but there was no money for anything else, including the prescription anti-anxiety drugs (Zoloft; $85/mo) that were what was keeping me in school. (It was a bad semester for about a hundred different reasons.)

Working full time for two weeks and bringing home just over $300 (I needed about $550 a month for rent, phone, and car, not counting gas or insurance) is incredibly disheartening.

Then I moved back home because it was just a better idea. A lot of people don't have that option. My parents are financially solvent (but nothing more) and endlessly supportive. (So I couldn't ask them for money, but I could move back home, because that was much cheaper.)

On another note, currently (while living with my parents) I work for Child Support. I hear people say things like, "oh, well, she just had another kid so she could get more money from the government." First, the government doesn't give that much money. Second, women don't do that. They have babies for a slew of other reasons but 'to get money out of the government' (as if it were enough to live on!) isn't usually very high on the list.

Also, child support is a lot better now, but it still isn't perfect. Deadbeat dads abound. (And deadbeat moms, but the percentages are so much higher for dads than moms that I'm willing to generalize.)

But seriously. Because, you know, being poor is a CHOICE . . . *rolls eyes*

[mayakda.livejournal.com]

Tears rolling down my face reading saoba's post.

Grew up poor. Youngest of 4, mom a widow.

I love that old woman in her post.