** Image obtained from Internet images on 6/04/14.

Child of poverty

I didn’t dare

ask for anything

that wasn’t there

in front of me.

Sometime in second grade our family financial situation became worse as I heard the word bankruptcy and felt a heightening sense of anxiety, fear, and even despair in our household.

Only one time do I recall any child my age coming to my home. A next door  neighbor girl ( I think around the same age) , having never visited before, ended up eating lunch at our home on a school day.  I was surprised when I came in the house to find that a sandwich had been neatly cut and laid on a paper towel with a cookie and a glass of milk for me on the table. My neighbor had her lunch in a metal lunch pail.   The cookie came from the girl’s parents, but it was the attention that surprised me the most as I didn’t recall that  any food  had been set out and ready in this nice way before. I did the politically incorrect thing by exclaiming out loud that I had not had this before. After school I was reprimanded.

When I was at school I tried to lose myself in the everyday work. When reading, I still did not see how Dick, Jane, Sally and Spot fit my world, and I did not like reading aloud because of stuttering.  When writing, I found the lines too confining for my thoughts and  my penmanship was average.  Arithmetic was just ok.  I brought my lunch everyday and the school gave me milk.

I didn’t pay too much attention to the social stigma of receiving free milk; I was just glad to have it as I liked it much better than the powdered milk we had for cereal at home. I especially looked forward to every-other day when the cafeteria  served chocolate milk.

The stigma of receiving this government subsidy was brought forth in a dramatic way.  My father had a friend who had a son who was “slow” and in a special class. The first and only time I remember visiting them at their house, their son and I were playing with a rifle. I don’t remember if it was real or not. In any case, the trigger flipped back and just about severed the top of my little finger on my right hand. Since it didn’t heal, I ended up in the doctor’s office where he tied some stitches and placed a Band-Aid on it.

The Band-Aid fell off a few days later and I just went to school without it. My mother didn’t say anything and I didn’t ask for one because I knew we didn’t have another one.  When I walked into the classroom, I don’t remember asking for a Band-Aid, but I might have?  My teacher looked at my finger,  ( it was swollen and perhaps some dried blood on it??) and promptly let me know her feelings. She said that the school already gives me free milk, and that my family should not expect that the school would supply Band-Aids. I was to go home and not come back until I either had a Band-Aid or the stitches were gone.

I did walk home knowing and somewhat afraid that my mother would be angry at the school as well as me for having the stitches in the first place.  I stayed home until the stitches were removed.

What was most compelling about this incident was that it created a situation where  highly competing values “demanded” my internal response. It was as if I was called to come out of my shell and decide “whose side was I to be on?

Forcing a child

to voice

a school’s standards

forces a child

to choose.

My experience of my mother to that point was not all positive. Somehow and somewhere, even though I understood on some deeper level how bad our situation was, I had this thought that perhaps my mother didn’t have all the answers; I heard continually how our situation was the fault of others.   I think it was my first sense of knowing that in addition to being poor, my siblings and I were also “neglected”, although I did not know the word at that time.

My experience of school to that point was also not always positive, although this was the first public display of  institutional disgust and abhorrence.  Even with this display however, I knew that for me; I would need to survive in school because that was my future. Somehow I saw that while this situation was not a good example of kindness or acceptance, schools had standards whether my mother liked them or not, and that I would need to live within them to survive.   School had thus become more than a place to be other than home, it was a place I now had to live in.  Although I didn’t know how I would handle the two worlds, I knew I was in two worlds.

Later in the  year before school was closed for the summer, I remember a flurry of cleaning up the house, including patching holes in walls in the room my siblings and I slept in, carrying seemingly huge bags of old and dirty clothes and garbage out to the front to be picked up; and me wondering if the next family would find what my  siblings placed inside the holes; I think  including stuff from dirty diapers.  I felt badly and wondered if we were found out, would we be beaten.

We drove off to live in my grandparent’s  rock house…. literally in the real desert landscape of the west side of Tucson. My older sister did not go with us, she lived with my grandmother that summer. My parents, I and four younger siblings moved into the rock house and another chapter of our lives were to begin.

 

SaceanCarol