Being Poor

And now a little bit of non-fiction for your reading pleasure. :-)

Being Poor

It’s funny how long it takes you to realize that things about your childhood were not normal. Or, really, just how abnormal they were.

I’m thirty years old and volunteering at a camp for Deaf kids in my home state. It’s my thirteenth year at this particular camp and I’m really here, at this point, just for the kids. Here to pray for them, to love on them, to hopefully show them a little glimpse of what a life built around God’s love can be like. It’s late, and I’m talking with one of the girls about her family. She’s an only child, product of a teen pregnancy that turned out well, and I ask her whether her parents have thought about having any more kids.

“I don’t know,” she says, shrugging through her signs, her purple sleeping bag lying wrinkled around her. “I keep telling them I want a brother or sister, and they say they’re thinking about it. But I want one NOW!”

The emphatic nature of her signs pulls her up off the bed, until she’s almost sitting. I nod my understanding. I remember being eleven, and desperate to have a baby around. I remember my parents being so broke that they couldn’t afford a pregnancy test. A friend picked one up from the Crisis Pregnancy Center (never mind that my mom had three kids already, and this wouldn’t be a crisis even if it WAS a pregnancy), brought it to us in a brown paper bag. My mom couldn’t wait until we got home to find out, and wanted me to be the first to know, so when we stopped at the library (where the kids could entertain themselves in the children’s section for a few minutes), she called me with her to the bathroom. We walked down the long, dark hall, past the oil painting of ocean waves that shimmered as if the sun was lodged right in the midst of the ocean, past the book-repairing section, where abused books went to be given a second chance, and through the heavy metal door that housed the one-room bathroom. Toilet on the right, sink on the left. Big, clunky radiator to my back.

Perhaps it’s telling that I didn’t really find it odd that mom wanted me to go into the bathroom with her, but I think I suspected what the bag might contain. I was a pretty smart kid, all things considered. Mom ripped open the bag, and there it was. A pregnancy test. And then I was sure.

I turned my back while mom peed on the stick and then leaned over her shoulder as she washed her hands, watching the odd white cylinder resting on brown paper towels on the back of the toilet, bouncing in anticipation of what color it would turn.

A pink cross! We’re having a BABY!! And we leapt into each other’s arms, jumping up and down and hugging there, in that tiny bathroom, celebrating the new life that was coming.

I think a big part of the reason I never got pregnant, as a teen, was that my mom kept having babies, giving me an outlet for all those overwhelming teen mothering needs. I think about this, as I listen to this girl, who only yesterday told me she really wants to get pregnant, even though she knows she’s too young.

“The problem is,” she goes on with another shrug, “that if we have another baby, we have to move.”

My face must be showing my confusion, because she goes on quickly.

“Well, our house is small; we only have two bedrooms, one for me and one for my parents. So there’s nowhere to put a brother or sister.”

“Really? “ I ask without thinking. “I never thought of that…I mean, babies are small, and you’ll be graduated by the time it’s two…I mean…kids can sleep anywhere…”

I’m half way through telling her where I spent my childhood sleeping before the shock on her face registers, and I realize that here’s another thing about my childhood that is distinctly not normal. I’m almost embarrassed, telling her my story, about how poor it makes my family sound. I want to stop and say “No, it wasn’t like that...” but then I realize that it was like that.

I shared a bed with my parents until I was almost five. They had a twin bed wedged between their bed and the wall, where I would fall asleep at night with my mom curled around me, her cheek pressed against mine (“Cheek to cheek, mommy!” I would beg. “Cheek to cheek!”), or her hand in mine. Some time after I went to sleep, she must have rolled away, because I always woke up by myself in the bed, but my parents were never more than the length of my arm away. As an adult, now, I wonder how they ever managed to make my siblings and I have this wisp of paranoia, if I think too long about it, that I might have been sleeping soundly while, two feet away, my parents were having sex. I suspect this is not the case, because I distinctly remember being put in a high chair in the living room with a tray full of carob chips and being told to sit there while mom and dad had “grown up time”, but I’ve never had the courage to ask either of my parents. I think I’m afraid of what I’ll find out.

I really don’t remember where I slept after Tiffany was born, until I was seven, but I know that when my second sister came along, Tiffany and I got booted to the living room.

Someone had given my family a really nice couch, with a hide-a-bed that I remember as being wonderfully comfortable, which we made out every night and slept on, giggling and whispering stories to each other, or playing the silent game if I was too tired and ready to go to sleep, waking in the morning all tangled in the sheets and happy. Eventually Julianna came along, the fourth girl, and Hannah was moved to our bed.

The three of us shared the hide-a-bed for a while, but I was getting big enough to be uncomfortable and crowded, so I would take the couch cushions into the trailer and sleep on them, or the one-person futon my dad found somewhere. For a while I had an army cot, but it was uncomfortable and too much work to set up every night, so that didn’t last long. I had a light-weight aluminum camping cot that I really liked, but it wasn’t meant to be used every day, and it didn’t last as long as I would have liked it to.

I was thirteen before I got my own bed. It was a roll-away, but we made room for it in the back of the trailer and set it up permanently, allowing me to finally have my own space—a couple of milk-crate and wood bookshelves, and a school desk, back by my bed. My clothes were still in a dresser in my parents’ room, though I had closet space near my bed.

When my brother (the last) was born, Julianna was still nursing. Mom would bring her, at night, into my bed where she would nurse her to sleep while I held my brother, then she’d take him to her room, nurse him to sleep and then roll over to my dad if she wasn’t so tired she fell asleep beside my brother.

I loved sleeping with Julianna—we shared a bed until she was seven and I was twenty. At that time, we moved into a three bedroom trailer, and I had my own room for the first time in my life. It was nice, having my own space, but I always missed being curled up with my sister. I missed the late-night conversations, the giggling, the child-like questions about God, life, the devil and love. For years, even after I moved out, we shared a bed when I visited, or she came up to see me. Being together, so close for so many years, created a bond in us that I wouldn’t trade for anything.

It’s funny, how whatever you experience as a child becomes your normal, and you don’t realize, until you’re thirty and telling a sixteen year old about how you made out a hide-a-bed every night before you could sleep, and didn’t get your own bed until you were thirteen, how truly abnormal that is. How getting rid of your couch so you can put bunk beds in your living room is not the average person’s solution to crowding. How spending your entire life with rough-wood shelves in the kitchen, plastic on the walls, unfinished sheet-rock in the bedrooms and floors made of varnished plywood would make your average social worker shudder and start making notes.

And it makes me understand, just a little, why people were confused about where to sit, when they came to visit. How the gift of an “extra” air conditioner when the summer heat was really too much for my nine-month pregnant mother would be an act of Christian charity, or why some people just didn’t come back to visit.

But it also makes me realize just how committed my parents were, to their beliefs. To the things they chose to build their lives upon.

My parents didn’t want to owe anyone anything. They built their house as they could afford to (the room-addition which would have doubled the size of the house was nearing finished, when the house burned just before my fifteenth birthday), gardened to keep us in good food, heated with wood because it saved money and was better for the world, and put their children before absolutely everything else in their lives. Whether we had enough space for another person was never a deciding factor in adding to the size of our family. Having enough money to support a child wasn’t argued about, or discussed. Children were a blessing, our family was the most important thing in life, and each of us felt like we were the reason our parents were together; loving and teaching and raising us was the reason they existed. It was what God had given them to do. And if a new baby meant even less meat in our diet, or fewer treats, well, I don’t think any of us would have traded. The richness of life and love that each of my siblings brought made the crowding easy, the laughter of the youngest was easily worth the loss of a frozen yogurt on a trip to town.

We never felt poor. I remember Hannah, once when she was very small, saying she felt sorry for some friends of ours, because they were so poor. Confused (they made considerably more money than my dad did), we asked her why she thought that.

“Because they can’t afford to paint their house!” she said, as if the answer was obvious. And that was what she saw, feeling sympathy for them, though they had a bed for each of their children, and a finished house, with raw wood siding. Poor or rich, to us, was never about where we lived, what we ate, or how new our clothes were. It was about love, about family, about people. I hope that I carry that attitude into my adult life. I know I mean to.

Copyright 2010 --Tesi, The Barefoot Author