On Food Stamps and Disability Benefits

[SheilaT]

68. Back in the early 60's, before food stamps,

and I was just a kid, we were very poor. My mother packed up us five kids and left our alcoholic, abusive father and moved 2,000 miles (from upstate NY to AZ) to give us a better life. Even at the time I knew she was doing the best possible thing for us, and years later when I was married and with two small children I REALLY understood how hard it must have been.

We went hungry a lot. A year or so later, when I was a sophomore in high school, there was an announcement over the PA about signing up for a baby-sitting job. I went to the office to sign up, but there were at least five or six others ahead of me on the list. Later on that day, much to my surprise, I was told I had the job. Years later I realized that it wasn't because the other kids were turned down, but because the school understood that my family needed the money. They'd already scholarshipped us kids for our textbooks (don't know what it's like now, but back then you had to buy your schoolbooks in AZ) without our asking, because they'd somehow figured out that my mother could not buy our books. Anyway, it was a Saturday babysitting for two little girls and paid the munificent sum of three dollars for the day. Three dollars! Most Saturdays when the mom was driving me home, I asked her to please stop at the grocery store so I could use the money to buy food. She was clearly astonished, could not understand why I wasn't keeping the money for myself. It never occurred to me to do anything else. Otherwise we'd have gone hungry.

Even though at various times since then I've been relatively poor, and I have less now than I did a few years ago, I am not in absolute terms poor. I do need to watch my money. I rarely buy books anymore, but go to the library. However, I'm in little danger of being homeless. I try to eat frugally, but I'm not going to do without.

If you have never been really close to the edge, you have no idea. And even in my poorest days, I was never THAT close to the edge. My mother was a nurse, and so she could always find work. She often pulled a double shift, and there was a period of time when I saw her maybe once every other week. It would be too easy to hold this up as an example of (white privilege) how she worked hard and we persevered, but the truth is times were hard. We absolutely did have white privilege that we didn't fully understand, but I will NEVER invoke that as to why someone else, whose skin might be darker, ought to wind up as successful as I have.

Being truly poor is terrible in ways that those who've never been poor cannot understand. At least twenty years ago one of the NPR shows (I think it was Morning Edition) did a series following a person who weas poor and struggling. I have never forgotten that the reporter said, in a summation of the report, that the woman's problem was simply that she did not have enough money. When her car broke down she didn't have the money to fix it, was the part I remember best.

Having reliable transportation is far more important than the privileged understand. A reliable car, or access to good public transportation -- it doesn't matter which -- but it's the reliability that matters.

These days I live more frugally than I wish I had to, but in the end I have it a lot better than most people. I just wish everyone could understand how fragile financial security can be.