My grandparents, both sets, raised children during the Great Depression. My mother’s family were New England dairy farmers, and although they too struggled in hard economic times, they were well enough off to leave surplus milk and butter along with vegetables from their large garden on an honesty table by the road. Most of the time, the food disappeared during the night, under cover of dark when their less fortunate neighbours could avoid the shame of being seen taking what they couldn’t afford to pay for, but couldn’t afford not to take when their children were going hungry.
My father’s family wasn’t as lucky. They were what is colloquially known as ‘white trash’ dirt farmers in the deep south. My father dropped out of school at the age of twelve to help on the farm, and left home at sixteen to join the service, the only route out of poverty open for a boy with no education and no skills. By the time I came along in the mid-fifties, the Great Depression had gone, even if the scars hadn’t healed.
My sisters and I grew up poor. Both my parents worked; my mother was a part-time nurse, my father slowly working his way up in the then burgeoning electronics industry, a tough struggle for a man with no high school diploma, never mind a university degree. With four kids to feed, the money didn’t go far. Although we
never went without food, my mum eked out tuna casseroles with more casserole than tuna, and made 'milk' - half non fat, half powdered - go as far as she could get it to for a family of six. I only ever had real milk in grade school, with graham crackers, supplied by the school. We had our sandwiches on the cheapest loaves of bread available, usually with a slice of ‘cheese food’ in between. My dad made coffee that added in leftover grounds, and was still as weak as ant's piss. I worked in the high school cafeteria all through my sophomore and junior year to save my parents the cost of a lunch (which although it sucked for my 'coolness' factor, it more than made up for when it came to the best of the pick kept back for us student volunteers by overworked lunch ladies).
Even though I was the oldest of four girls, I still got hand-me-down clothes off my mum's younger sisters growing up, and by the time it was handed down to the fourth girl, it had a lot of patches and repairs. My mum sewed whatever else we needed, even underwear - I can remember the rare time I got a brand new store bought dress for my first real date with visceral clarity; my grandmother paid for it. If we went to the park for a picnic, us kids were sent out with plastic bags to scour all the rubbish bins for empty cans and bottles for the grocery store rebate – our car stank permanently of old beer and Coke.
My parents, particularly my dad, understood the value of education. I was thirteen when he finally got his high school diploma, working full-time while going to night school, and fifteen when he got his first college degree. I have a wonderful photograph of Dad in his college graduation gown, my baby sister in his arms,
reaching for the tassel on his cap. He helped me out as best he could after I graduated from high school, but in that age of Reagan's paradise of trickle-down economics, tuition for anything more than community college was out of the question. I applied for every scholarship I could, went into deep debt with student loans and worked crappy, crappy jobs to put myself through school. I biked to work because I couldn't
afford a car, collected discarded fruit and vegetables from behind the supermarket to make canned veggies and jars of jam and fruits. I learned how to ‘accidently’ put the cheque for the telephone bill into the envelope for the electric bill, and vice versa, to buy a little more time before very meagre paydays. I paid for what I could with food stamps, knew when the free surplus butter and cheese distribution days were and, when times got very thin, accepted charity food parcels from non-denominational church organizations. I was naturally skinny as a kid, but there were times when I looked like Auschwitz, and sometimes felt like it.
The awful part now is, I'm not technically poor anymore - or skinny. It’s taken me a long time, but I’ve managed to earn what neither of my parents ever did, a master’s degree from a top English university, and am now working on my doctorate. That little girl in my father’s arms is now a university professor herself. I'm living with a fantastic, wonderful man who makes good money at a secure job. I work part-time as a university tutor. We live in a nice house, in a nice city in New Zealand, where I have an office with a view of the ocean. But my partner has watched me sorting through the 'reduced for quick sale' bins at the market, comparing prices on cheap cuts of chicken and sausages, etc., and keeps trying to tell me I don't have to do that anymore. We can have the good meat now. We can have steak if we want it. We can even eat out every week. Ditto buying my clothes at second-hand op shops, and bidding for what we need off TradeMe instead of new. It’s not that he’s profligate, far from it. We are just…comfortably middle class.
But my stomach remembers being hungry, and my head is permanently locked into 'poor' mode – just as my parents were. A few months of prosperity is hardly enough time for me to adjust to being comfortable or middle class now. And I don't trust that there's really any such thing as a 'secure' job - the fear is always there.
Always.
It will never go away. And I know there are a hell of a lot of people just like me, who know what it’s like to be hungry and scared, to struggle, even when they don’t have to anymore. Looking back, the poverty of Reaganomics seems almost benign compared to what far too many Americans are currently having to endure. So while I watch Congress argue about preserving huge tax cuts for the wealthy (many of whom are in government themselves) while not only cutting back on funding for school lunches but castigating parents who are not that far removed from my own – we had our cereal with that horrible milk mix my mother made, and precious few bananas – I suspect that there aren't too many Republicans, or Democrats for that matter, in Congress who have any clue what that fear feels like.
Maybe they should.
