@mrwilliamsprek Food is a human right, not a luxury #feedthehungry #snap #family #teachersoftiktok ♬ original sound – Mr Williams
My father left us shortly after I turned three years old. My sister was five. My mom was 26. He never paid child support or provided for us in any way. It was 1973.
Mom held several odd jobs, including babysitting, while she searched for work to support us. On January 1, 1976, she started work as a Therapy Aide at the Middletown Psychiatric Center. It provided medical benefits and it was a secure job.
One day, I hopped into the car, which wasn’t Mom’s car. It was her boyfriend’s car. Jim moved in with us so we could all afford the rent, food, and other basic things to live. He worked at the Psych Center, too. I saw the familiar box in the middle of the back seat. I didn’t know it, but this was probably my first job, at age six or seven. Mom had taken that job, done in her spare time, to bring in a little extra cash.
Inside the box were long sheets of “plastic sticks” attached to more plastic. They were cocktail stirrers. Mom and I would break them off the sheets and then bag them up. I had to know how to count to 12 if I wanted to help bag them. It was something fun for little me to do and I was helping Mom. I hadn’t yet realized we were poor and she was trying to hustle for a little bit extra money. At the time, she worked 3:30 p.m., to Midnight, so finding extra work with two little girls wasn’t the easiest thing to do, especially when your youngest goes to afternoon kindergarten. I went to afternoon kindergarten because I could walk home with my aunt, who is only six years older than me, and my sister.
Before I reached double digits in age, Mom and Jim began junk picking. Our town had two times a year where you could toss whatever crap you had out with the garbage and they would take it away. Around 1 a.m., we’d climb into the rusty Dodge van and drive around town. We picked up broken Big Wheels and cobbled them together to make one that worked and we could sell. The same thing happened with Sit n Spins, televisions, vacuums, etc.
Many other items were broken, but there was valuable copper inside we could sell. At eight years old, I was trusted to use an X-acto knife to strip the copper inside the plastic casing. I was really good at it. It also calmed the inner turmoil no one else knew about. I felt useful to my family, one of the few times I have ever felt this way.
We had old aluminum chairs, standard and long, we’d pick up and strip of its netting and take to the recycling plant. We took people’s newspapers and recycled those as well. When New York State passed recycling laws, all but the aluminum cans were cut off for us as a way to make money. A 5-cent refund was add to cans. Mom picked them up until around 1998. She made $2,000-3,000 a year.
Until the late 1990s, she also picked up whatever she found on the side of the road – towel, shirt, jacket, tools. It could all be cleaned and reused. It was extremely embarrassing. Only the rich assholes and bullies made fun of me when they saw me. They never missed an opportunity, K-12, to make fun of me in school for it.
By the time I was 10, Mom had taken to using her crocheting skills for cash. She crocheted Smurfs and forced me to sell them door-to-door, all over town. I learned as an adult it was often grocery money. I still hate how I was forced to do it, but, adult me understands.
Mom was masterful at couponing. I don’t think she ever paid full price for anything. Even as an adult, she would call me and ask, “Guess how much I paid for groceries today?” Sometimes, with the coupons, she got money back. Yeah, imagine that. Most of the time, she paid less than $25 for hundreds of dollars in groceries.
She “refunded” with a group from around the country. Coupons used to last several months to a year. She’d clip them from the Sunday paper and mail them to whoever on her list needed them. They did the same.
We weren’t smokers, but we got some nice things from Marlboro when you could send in “miles” and get cool shit. It’s been decades, but I still have all of it. The red wool blanket is still in my trunk as my emergency blanket. Paul has a tan one in his car.
Mom volunteered 20 hours a week for a bag of groceries. You didn’t get to pick what was in the bag as it varied each week – except for those motherfucking cabbages. Every damn week, there’s a head of cabbage. For years, cabbage every fucking week.
Then, there’s Bisquick. She made dumplings, which were boiled. I get it. You can stretch your budget quite well. As a kid, it fucking sucks.
We qualified for free lunch through elementary school. We had little cardboard lunch cards. Blue for free lunch. Yellow for reduced lunch. One year, Mom made $27 too much a year to qualify for free. The school district did something and we had free lunch for another year. From junior high on, it was reduced lunch – 25 cents per day. Sometimes, I didn’t have the money because bullies took it. I went hungry a lot in junior high.
Throughout it all, I was made fun of – too poor to afford food. “Your mom must be lazy,” and “how fucking stupid do you have to be to eat shitty school lunch?” If I said anything, there would be more ridicule. I tried to get to the cafeteria quickly and inhale my food so they wouldn’t see. In high school, I did the same, but took my food to the band room where I would climb into the drum cabinet where my quads were, close the door, and eat in darkness.
When I was 14, I already had two paper routes, delivering about 70 papers a week. All the money I earned was put into my savings account to pay for college. My sister stole that money my freshman year in college and then abandoned my then 16-month old nephew before disappearing just like my father. But I digress.
Mom got hurt at work that year. She took care of elderly intellectually disabled people. You had to be at least 65 years old to be on the ward she worked on. One day, a patient decided they didn’t want their meal and chucked it off their table. Mom just happened to be walking by. She slipped on some macaroni. As she was headed to the floor, she saw her eye was going to hit a sharp edge of a table. She did what she needed to do to move herself away as best as she could. The rest of her life, she often told me, “If I knew what was going to happen, I would have happily lost my eye instead.”
Mom seemed okay, but the next day, she couldn’t get out of bed. For the next three years, everything was a struggle, physically, mentally, financially. She worked for the State, so it was a fight to get compensation. That came the year after I graduated high school. In the mean time, bills needed to be paid and we didn’t want to starve.
Mom refused to go on welfare. We had already endured years of being made fun of for being poor. Mom was blamed for our situation. No one ever blames the father. It’s always the woman’s fault. To be on government assistance meant you would need to endure the humility and embarrassment, the guilt trips and the stigma. She wasn’t a lazy slob. She worked hard. The scars from the surgeries from the result of her physically demanding job were there for all to see.
So, I got more paper routes. I delivered around 175 newspapers per day. It was another 25 or so on Sundays. Christmas Day was the only day the Times Herald-Record didn’t publish. At the time, we thought it would be enough to make ends meet.
About a year and a half later, when we couldn’t hustle anymore and the numbers didn’t add up no matter what we tried to do, Mom went and applied for welfare. For whatever reason, they wouldn’t accept us until they tracked down my father, who had at least a dozen aliases, got paid in cash, and drove truck for some “Italian guys,” hauling “scrap metal” and other things between New York and Florida. Mom begged her doctor to approve her for light duty so she could return to work. Mom didn’t really crawl out of that situation fully until about a decade later.
When she returned to work, she notified the welfare department, and politely said thanks for nothing. They asked if she would like the case to be open in case they ever found my father. She said, “sure and good luck.” They found him when I was in my late 20s. He had a stroke and was in a nursing home. Mom called me to let me know.
“What would you like me to do with your money?” she said.
“It’s not my money.”
“Yes, it is. The courts said he owed $25 a month for your sister and you.”
“And he never paid, Mom. You went without all those years. Do something for yourself with it and use the other half for David.”
We went back and forth a bit like this. She still felt I was entitled to the child support money. I refused to take it. When she passed away, the bank told me I had a joint savings account with her. It had $2,163 in it. She never spent a dime of it.
While I love my mom, I wish she had applied for help when my father left in 1973. She would have qualified for many programs. We wouldn’t have suffered so much.
What she did was so reinforced in my brain that, when I couldn’t afford food in college, I never thought to ask. For three months, I ate tuna on saltine crackers with no mayo and my one free meal at my job at Taco Bell. Going to get food stamps, visiting a food bank, or finding the soup kitchen wasn’t an option. It would be admitting failure. At 20 years old.
Calling Mom for help wasn’t an option. She was working a second job to put me through college and I was working 35 hours a week. She felt obligated to replace the money my sister stole. I wasn’t going to ask her for more.
For much of my life, I’ve needed a hand up, not a hand out. I needed help, not judgment.
I ran across this comment, which stirred up these, and so many more, memories. We should all be like this person’s grandma.
My Italian immigrant grandmother used to tell us how she and my Italian immigrant grandfather owned a 6 tenement house and during the depression she not only didn’t collect rent but also fed their tenants….until they couldn’t pay the mortgage and they lost the house to the bank. She was never bitter or angry about what they went through but rather proud of having done the right thing. Draw your own conclusions.
If so-called christians would read their own “good book,” they are commanded by their god to help instead of judging and tearing others down.
Matthew 25:41-46
“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
James 2:15-16
Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you tells him, “Go in peace; stay warm and well fed,” but does not provide for his physical needs, what good is that?
Luke 3:11
John replied, “Whoever has two tunics should share with him who has none, and whoever has food should do the same.”
No one should go to bed hungry or starve to death. A poor person getting help has never made me feel robbed. We are never giving the wrong people help to purchase food. It’s about providing people basic human dignity during their time of struggle. It’s about not making anyone feel like my mom did. It’s about not making people have to hustle to be able to afford basic human needs.
If we are such a great nation, why are so many people struggling?
Note: In addition to my own life, here are some links, which helped me spur my thoughts to write.
Policy basics about the SNAP program
Let Food Stamp Recipients Eat Whatever The Hell They Want
Restriction vs. incentives: The complex reality of SNAP food policies
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