You Mean This Isn’t Normal?
Came across this article “15 People Who Grew Up Poor Share the Things That They Always Thought Were Normal”
Wow, did it hit home. I could have written this article. It even included a couple of things I hadn’t thought about but “Yep ….. that, too” struck me as I read it.
Take a moment and read the original article before going further.........
If you read this and found it an horrific way to grow up, then I am sincerely glad for you because it means you didn’t have to survive (you read that right …. “survive”) in an environment like this. I also want to state that I wouldn’t change anything about how I grew up. It made me into the person I am, with the drive and motivation needed to achieve what I have achieved in life. Anything I have had to deal with in my life has never been as bad as what I already survived.
I’m going to take them one at a time…..
Second Hand Clothes
Most kids looked forward to buying
new school clothes. And, yes, we did get
a few new things in August before school started. I remember being excited
because we got a couple of packages of new
underwear, containing 4 (5?) pairs of underpants, to be shared among us three
girls ….. for the whole school year. 8-10
underpants for 3 girls for the year.
But the bulk of our clothes came from relatives, friends and passing our own clothes from oldest to youngest. Don’t misunderstand ….. there is nothing wrong with that. For the most part, they were perfectly good. But for this reason, I never learned about changing into “play” clothes when getting home from school. Only rich kids had school clothes and play clothes. If we couldn’t wear it to school, then it wasn’t purchased for us.
My friends always told me their play clothes came from “…..my school clothes that were kinda worn out.” Interesting. Because MY school clothes that were “kinda” worn out became my little sister’s school clothes.
Groceries Are Exciting
Being Hungry
We were always told not to ask for
something to eat when we visited relatives.
If they offered, that was ok. And that’s normal. It was considered poite behavior. But there was a certain way they had to
offer. “Here, have a cookie” was ok to
accept, but “Do you want a cookie?” required a “no” response.
I remember being at my Uncle Kenny’s house when he asked us if we had eaten dinner yet (we always had to say “no”. We were not allowed to tell people we had no food at home). When I started to turn my head, he stopped me and said, “Don’t look at your mother…… you know if you’ve eaten yet or not. So just tell me.” Even while I was shaking my head “no”, I was scared of getting in trouble for “admitting” we had not eaten that day.
Along with that was Only Eating At School. How often have I told the story about “We had perfect attendance at school because that’s where the food was.” This was also LONG before schools started offering breakfast (something that didn’t come along until after I had graduated). We could never assume there would be supper every night, because many times, there wasn’t.
A Staycation
To this day, I have trouble grasping
the concept of “everybody” going on a spring break vacation or even a big
summer vacation. Some of the “big”
vacations we had included driving to the nearest big city airport to watch the
planes take off. A few times we drove to
Dayton OH (about a 45 minute drive) to the free air force museum. That was
considered a big time vacation!!! Mostly, we found access to a river and packed
a picnic and swam in the river. I don’t feel that I was deprived of
anything. We enjoyed those events and
had lots of family fun. As the headline
says, we thought it was normal. Only
rich people actually “went” on a vacation.
Always Alone
For reasons that differ from
those in the article, our mother’s way
of escaping the “poor-dom” was to leave.
Leave her kids at home alone while she (and dad) went to visit relatives. I was ten years old and in charge of 4
siblings, which included sisters ages 9, 8, 6, a barely toddling 2-yr baby brother and
eventually a baby (infant) sister added to the mix. They would be gone for hours and would leave
nothing for us to have for lunch, along with strict orders to “stay out of the
bread! (and) be sure to feed the baby.”
There was one day I vividly remember we thought we could sneak some slices of bread for five kids and our parents wouldn’t notice. No butter, no peanut butter, just plain slices of bread. That was our food for the day while our parents were gone for hours. Yes, I said hours. When they came home, our mother started yelling “Well, they’ve been in the bread so we have nothing for supper!” We were in trouble for eating. Sneaking food was normal.
I was surprised to learn my friends needed sitters when they were my age. I thought parents leaving all day long and leaving the oldest kid to watch all the other kids was normal.
No Heat in the Winter
Another given. Six kids in a bed to stay warm. A 2-story house shut down to 2 rooms with
blankets hung at the doorways to keep the heat (from the open oven) in the
kitchen and the connecting room where the one bed was. Frozen water pipes were always going to
happen because of no heat in the house.
(You mean everyone didn’t have to deal with frozen water pipes? Every winter? Really?). If we ran out of
heating oil, there was always a week or more waiting time to get more, until
the next payday, and that was only if the light bill or rent wasn’t due.
But even that wasn’t a given. No heat,
frozen pipes and the electricity being turned off. That was our normal winter. Normal.
As I write this, I have concern that my readers don’t really understand
how I’m using the word “normal”. It’s normal for my reader to come home to a
warm house with dinner on the table and a dad complaining about too many lights
on in the house. It was normal for us to
come home to a cold, dark house, hoping the lunch we had at school would last us until lunch at school tomorrow.
Normal.
Only One Pair of Shoes
Until I saw this in the article, I never thought about it much. More than one pair of shoes? Seriously? We had “school shoes” in the winter and cheap tennis shoes in the summer, which were usually the gym shoes we brought home at the end of the school year. Like our clothes, shoes were passed down to the next kid until they were worn out and trashed.
Knowing About the Bills
I can tell you the amount of rent
we paid at every house we lived in starting when I was in second grade. I knew when they were being sued for
non-payment of a hospital bill or other bill.
I knew my dad’s paycheck had garnishments on it “with others waiting in
line” for their turn.
I had a 4th grade concert where we were asked to wear navy blue shirts for girls and navy pants for boys with a white shirt so we’d look “uniform”. I never even told my parents about it because (1) I didn’t own either of those things and (2) I knew we didn’t have the money to go buy one. When another mother blew the whistle about the uniform request, I lied to my mom about how I “just forgot” because I didn’t want to embarrass her in front of another mom by saying “Because I knew we didn’t have the money to buy one.” As a 4th grader, I knew we never had money before payday so to ask for a special outfit to wear to a concert was just not going to happen. It had become so normal that I didn't even feel bad about looking different from my classmates.
(I was also VERY surprised at how most of my classmates owned a blue skirt and white blouse.)
We knew running water meant the electric pump in the well would be running which ran up the electric bill. So baths were just once a week with two kids at a time in the tub. When they were done, the next two got in. Same water. Because running two tubs of water was expensive.
We didn’t dare create extra laundry (another reason we didn’t change clothes when coming home from school) so we better not get so dirty we had to change clothes during the day. We lived in the country and played outside so our clothes DID get dirty. But we just wore them. All day. And on the weekend, we wore them the next day, too. Didn’t everybody?
I remember being shocked while at a family friend’s house and the mom told her son to change clothes because the shirt was dirty. On the way home, our mom was making fun of the woman for being “uppity” about “a little dirt on his shirt!” and going on about “it must be nice to be able to afford to do extra laundry!”
As we girls grew into teens, we were reprimanded (well, that’s a nice word for it) if we washed our hair too often. It ran up the electric bill. Shampoo was expensive so we used liquid dish soap to wash our hair. (Didn’t everybody?)
All of this because I knew, as a kid, about our bills and what could and couldn't be paid.
Breaking Open the Piggy Bank
But then my sister and I quickly saw that loaning them a dollar this week meant we got two dollars next payday, giving us a dollar to spend and a dollar to hold back to loan them when they needed it. When. Not “if”. When. The entrepreneur spirit hit us early when we saved our two dollars to be turned into three (payback the two, plus our one dollar allowance), and so forth. We got to be pretty good at parlaying our one dollar allowance into quite an income. Because it was “normal” for our parents to come to us to borrow money for food and gas money.
And we didn’t do it so we’d have a lot of money in our piggy bank. We did it to assure our dad could get to work (because even as kids, we knew if he missed one day’s work, we wouldn’t eat that week), and so we could have food the day before payday.
For those youngsters out there reading this, one dollar went quite a ways back in the 1960s. Gas was under 20 cents a gallon, so a dollar’s worth of gas could get you four or five gallons or more, which could be at least a quarter of a tank, which would get dad to work for at least a couple of days. Bread was ten for a dollar, which is why we had lots of gravy bread dinners (something I refuse to eat to this day) or had toast with eggs from our gramma’s chicken coop (which is probably why I am not a fan of breakfast food because I equate it with “poor people food”).
It's interesting ... when I went searching online for a photo of "gravy bread", there was nothing there. This photo is the closest thing and it looks WAY more appetizing that what we had. A slice of bread on a plate, covered in water-gravy (that means it was made with flour and water because we couldn't afford milk). Dinner became a soggy piece of bread covered with this gravy-like mixture. So evidently this is such "poor people food" that there are no photos of it online anywhere, with the bragging caption of "Look what we had for dinner tonight!".
When we started babysitting and
got our first jobs (my first paycheck-job was at 14 years old), we started
buying things for supper …. soup, bread-and-bologna, bags of potatoes ….. out
of our paycheck. It was never said but
just understood if we had a job, then we chipped in for groceries. This differed from the borrowing of a dollar
for gas. This was never paid back.
It was expected. It was
normal. More than that, it became
survival.
I learned lots of things I did growing up wasn’t considered normal. But we thought it was.
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