When I was 17 years old, my family’s car was repossessed. It happened at night, the Dodge sedan my parents had bought used towed away late one evening while we were watching TV.
Cars get repossessed when their owner—who doesn’t really own the car yet, just pays for it—misses enough car payments in a row. For the Dodge, the payments were around $60 a month, an amount my parents often couldn’t afford for the same reason we never bought new clothes and my sisters and me were fed via the federal government’s free school lunch program: for most of my childhood, we lived with an income below the already absurdly low official poverty line. That is, we were poor.
I’ve thought a lot about what to write in this essay, and the more I’ve thought about it the more it seemed to fall apart under my pen. There’s a way of sharing one’s personal life that invites people in, another that almost pushes them away with its need to scream “understand me!” and something in between that falls too much into apology. Lauren Hough has described the former along the lines of, it’s not about telling the story, it’s about figuring out “how to write what it felt like to be you.” I tried to take that advice to heart when writing for Aeon about childhood trauma, but in this case, it feels trickier.
I spent all of my upbringing poor, and struggled financially for many years after that. In more recent years, I was buoyed by a spouse who grew up in Britain equally poor but who had the skills and interest to land in a professional field—cybersecurity and data privacy—that promised a solid income. His constant work travel and resistance to recalibrating parenting and household duties meant that it was his income—which was much higher than mine and, unlike mine, includes health insurance—I ended up relying on for stability. Which has led to me not-so-sarcastically chiding myself many times over the last year with the unkind reminder online pundits give to tradwives: a man is not a plan.
In the year since our divorce was finalized, I’ve spent many sleepless midnights, feeling the tangible reality, often the terror, of financial insecurity. Not because it’s foreign to me, but because it’s far too familiar.
“We had food,” I said to my older sister over the phone, trying to untangle the visceral knot of fear about being able to feed my kids, and my own sense of worry about whether and when I’d eat. I couldn’t figure out exactly where that fear was coming from. Federal food stamps—now known in the U.S. as the SNAP program—didn’t cover enough to feed a family in the 1980s (it covers even less now), but our parents hunted deer and elk, which were our only meat, and our mother gardened, giving me a lifelong loathing of eggplant but at least providing us with vegetables and berries during Montana’s short growing season; and she knew how to can and preserve food, extending the garden’s lifespan into winter.
We had food, my older sister said, but we were generally on our own until dinnertime and the poor quality, carbohydrate heavy food provided in the free school lunch program wasn’t enough to get growing kids through the day, especially after a breakfast that usually involved cereal, powdered milk, and as much sugar as we felt like pouring on because sugar was cheap and we were always on our own in the mornings. She remembers being hungry constantly and dinner was, in our house with its daily violence and often hours of our mother’s screaming, a time of stress, anxiety, and, regularly, tears and loss of appetite.
I knew we were poor and I’m aware of it now. But it wasn’t until we moved to a Montana town (the one I currently live in) with noticeable wealth that I consciously felt the lack that comes from being poor, as if there were something wrong, something lesser, not just with our family income, but with me as a human being.
Until then, everywhere we’d lived it seemed that almost everyone was in the same financial situation my family was in, even if they weren’t moving to a new rental every year and a new school nearly as often.
In this new town where I ended up graduating high school and making lifelong friends, my upbringing of poverty, abuse and neglect was glaringly different, even if I wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time. One of the boys I dated, whose family was comparatively well off, used to make personal comments that I only realized years later were reflective of my socioeconomic status. He didn’t mean to be derogatory, and neither of us would have had the language for it at the time: what my lack of access to dental care meant, or why my $5 thrift store skirts and hand-me-down T-shirts weren’t fashion choices but rather an effort to dress myself with some sense of personality and within the school’s dress code but with little money. He had as many brand-new clothes as he wanted, and his own car, which was never at risk of being repossessed.
He took me out for dinner once to a nice restaurant, and I didn’t realize that it was a joke for him and another friend to go to this place and only order soup. I didn’t only order soup. I was hungry.
It wasn’t until the last few years, through many conversations with the writer Kathleen McLaughlin and reading her extensive work on class and the American precariat, including her incredible book Blood Money, that I had a language for understanding what my own experiences reflected about my family’s life within the broader society.
Since coming to know Kathleen and her work, I’ve thought a lot more about how class issues play out in America, and how easy they are to erase, especially when most people within widely read and widely published media come from wealth or at least the upper middle class. It’s a running joke online how many times we can see a story about a 30- or 20-something-year-old person who paid off their student loans and bought a house “all by herself” except it turns out a parent or grandparent gave them a down payment for the house, or paid off their student loans, or supported them financially so they could take a high-profile but unpaid internship in publishing.
Having a cushion of financial support affects not just a person’s access to health care and education and functional cars and food for their kids and the kinds of jobs and vocations they can pursue, but their lives at all levels of existential crisis.
Last year, drowning in constant worry about how to support myself and my kids, I tried anti-depressant medication for the first time.
I’ve always struggled with depression, but during my 26-year marriage I realized that comparative financial security created a buffer for depression and worry that was almost tangible. I used to tell my older sister I could feel it—the soft landing beneath me when I couldn’t cope, or hadn’t had a freelance editing job for a while. Every time our kids needed new shoes and I could just buy them new shoes, I felt the gratitude of that, what a fortunate thing it was to be able to get them shoes and clothes when they needed them—even ski lessons and Legos. And when I was depressed, I could take a few days to walk and spend time in nature and go to the gym and garden, all the activities that have been shown to help with depression and anxiety but that a person needs time and access to even try.
Those extra privileges—ski lessons, Legos, time off—took some juggling, but they were possible and, I constantly thought, how incredible is that?
Since getting divorced and walking knowingly into a drastically different financial situation, my considerations around economic security have become the same: drastically different. The fear brought by financial precarity is constant, and I can feel the way it feeds, and feeds off of, depression that I can’t always alleviate. (The medication trial only lasted four months; I turn out to be one of those people who has bad side effects with pretty much every mental health medication available).
There is research to back up lived experiences of the relationship between mental health and worries about money. One of my favorite Universal Basic Income trials to cite is Stockton, California’s. Objections to UBI often point to trials in countries like Finland and Canada, saying it could never work in the U.S. because the cultures of those countries is fundamentally different (the word “culture” is carrying a lot of water here, and the history of Scandinavian countries’ turn to robust social welfare programs, which Garrett Bucks has written about, shows that culture can be changed). Stockton is located in a huge agricultural region of California whose median income is far below the more well-known and wealthier coastal parts of the state. Its UBI experiment showed that an extra $500 a month in a low-income household not only provided more food and housing stability, but decreased diagnoses of depression and anxiety among those who received it.
When your skin crawls with anxiety over how to feed your kids because you’ve run out of money for the month, or you had to delay a needed doctor visit because you couldn’t afford the medical bills, or you don’t know if you’ll be able to make rent next month, and if you can’t, don’t know where you’ll go; when the fear turns to depression and you move between not being able to sleep and not wanting to do anything but sleep, you know better than any economic analyst or highly paid political commentator what it feels like to never have enough.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it was like for my parents raising three girls and constantly moving either for work or housing. Over the last year, maintaining a foundation of safety and care for my kids has been my top priority. The financial support from their dad isn’t even close to enough to cover rent and groceries and accumulating bills, and the worry feels corrosive. For my parents, it must have been far worse. Yet for all the other problems my family had, for all the abuse and violence and belittling far into the night, my memory is that they did the best they could to provide a basic physical structure that gave us a roof to sleep under and something to fill our bellies, even if a lot of it was sugar.
Trying to maintain stability—both physical and psychological—for my own kids while moving from one home to another, and then doing it again in less than a year, has brought up memories of childhood I thought were buried, or at least dissipated. But the financial reality of life on my own versus with my ex-husband has forced me to see what’s behind the very real but also overwhelming fears: The apartment we lived in where I slept on the floor next to the kitchen and my younger sister on the floor of the one bedroom, all of my possessions (which mainly consisted of some plastic bracelets and a set of Patricia C. Wrede’s Lyra novels) in one small box; the exhaustion of once again packing up our family’s boxes to move to another rental; my younger sister’s description of the expression on the school receptionist’s face when my sister turned in her free school lunch application form and the receptionist read our family income.
The car getting repossessed, a landlord’s anger when we didn’t leave a place clean enough or quickly enough, the depression I sank into when, in college, I had to refuse an offer for an unpaid editorial internship at a literary magazine because my waitressing job took too much time and I needed the money. The time my father was arrested for not having paid a traffic fine.
My finances now aren’t quite as dire as my brain wants me to believe—our amicable mediated divorce and my ex’s willingness to continue sharing the garden and to co-sign so I could qualify for a housing loan makes me feel, again, fortunate—but the familiar fear turns out to have been dormant rather than dead.
The town I live in is known throughout Montana as one with incredible wealth. The influx of extreme money is relatively recent, but even when my family moved here in 1992, when I was 16, it was known as a place with more money on average than the rest of the state. The desire now of literal billionaires and multi-millionaire vacation homeowners to buy land and buildings here has had very real consequences for housing affordability and the health of the community, even though there are a few notable people putting effort and money into mitigating those consequences.
As attached as I am to this place and my community, I’ve eyed the year my youngest kid will finally graduate from high school and considered whether I’ll need to move simply due to the cost of living.
The undeniable wealth where I live also brings on derision from outside the town, but my experiences living and raising my kids here include the many, many hours I’ve spent volunteering in the schools and knowing intimately how many kids go home with bags of what’s known as Friday food—food to get kids on the free lunch program through the weekend. The program in my town alone is enormous and might shock anyone who looks at this community and sees only wealth.
Even when the Friday food bags aren’t visible, I see those kids partly because I see myself in them. The faded winter coat from the thrift store that’s a little too short in the arms but needs to last another season, the broken-soled shoes, the mornings before school spent alone with a television or video games for company and some form of sugar for food, the lack of participation in programs like team sports or theater because you’re a bus kid and have no way to get home if you stay longer after school. My high school love for debate was fostered partly because the very kind debate and speech coaches lived near me and often gave me rides. It might even be partly why I was so drawn to writing about walking—I knew too well that car dependence is expensive and restricting.
The fear of not having enough money to live on sinks into the marrow. I’ve wondered recently if I never truly felt financial stability while married, if I was simply waiting for the other shoe to drop even when we’d finally reached a point where I could stop juggling credit card balance transfers. And when the shoe did drop, some subconscious part of me said, “Here, you see? This is where you’re meant to live.”
Class issues come with shame as well as fears about survival. When my ex-husband’s new girlfriend, who comes from a much higher socioeconomic class, came to visit and meet the kids a couple months ago, I gave myself an evening to indulge in my feelings about it. I cried all night, texting with a close friend, and the next day I realized the grief was only in part about mourning our relationship. The rest of it was feeling once again, as I had with my boyfriend in high school and on many other occasions, the invisibility and shame that comes from being, or at least having grown up, poor.
I read Betty Smith’s classic novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn so many decades ago that I barely remember the plot. But the passage where Francie’s teacher is giving Francie feedback on her stories without knowing they depict her family’s poverty, has always stuck with me:
“Now that we’ve talked things out, I’m sure you’ll stop writing these sordid little stories.”
Sordid. Francie turned the word over. It was not in her vocabulary. “What does that mean—sordid?”
“What-did-I-tell-you-when-you-don’t-know-a-word,” sing-songed Miss Garnder drolly.
“Oh! I forgot.” Francie went to the big dictionary and looked up the word. Sordid: Filthy. Filthy? She thought of her father wearing a fresh dicky and collar every day of his life and shining his worn shoes as often as twice a day. Dirty. . . . Gross . . . Also mean and low. . . .
Her face got hot. She couldn’t see the next words because the page turned red under her eyes. She turned on Miss Garnder, her face twisted with fury.
“Don’t you ever dare use that word about us!”
“Us?” asked Miss Garnder blankly. “We were talking about your composition.” . . .
Walking home from school, Francie began to understand that her life might seem revolting to some educated people. She wondered, when she got educated, whether she’d be ashamed of her background.
It’s easy to tell someone there’s nothing to be ashamed of, that there’s no reason to feel shame, but every single societal structure in the dominant culture for the past several thousand years has said otherwise. It’s only in times of rebellion, like the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and centuries of mass resistance against enclosures of the commons, and violent revolutions like the Russian Revolution of 1917, which eventually resulted in the death by starvation of millions, that lip service is paid to the damage done by class-based systems. That being poor is not a personal failing.
But the aftermath of those revolts has shown that it’s still just that: lip service. King Richard II made his and his class’s sentiments clear to the rebelling peasants in 1381 when he said:
“You wretches detestable on land and sea: you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues: rustics you were and rustics you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we shall strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity. However, we will spare your lives if you remain faithful and loyal. Choose now which course you want to follow.”
Richard did not, in fact, spare their lives no matter what loyalty they expressed. He had every rebel, known or suspected, murdered.
Even the U.S.’s New Deal programs that reformed wealth inequality and boosted working class solidarity in the 1930s only lasted a few decades. A few changes in tax policy and we’re right back to a version of the Gilded Age that preceded the Great Depression, along with the idea that being poor is purely the result of personal choices.
The class structures rebuild themselves and the shame along with them. I don’t think that’s a reality that’s easily shaken off. I’ve written before about the echoes in rhetoric between how people view homelessness now and how the condition of being a legal vagabond was described in 15th-century England—a condition that was most often caused by theft of one’s home through enclosures of the commons, and that at times and by royal decree resulted in enslavement.
No matter how progressive any of us think we are, there remains a lurking belief that someone can avoid poverty by working harder, eating better, not having sex, marrying more intelligently, or simply by being someone other than who we are.
The power of wealth and class has to be reformed at a tax and compensation level, but also at the level of society’s values—even the subconscious ones.
I have a car now that is unlikely to ever be repossessed, mostly because it’s 16 years old, is paid off, and has over 213,000 miles on it. I’m hoping to keep it going to 300,000 because it’s hard to envision a future where I can afford a new one. Given the realities of America’s economy—and many other countries’ economies—outside what large media outlets report of a booming stock market that benefits only a small percentage of people, I know I’m far from alone.
Even if I’m better off now than my family was while I was growing up, that identity is still there, waiting for me to accept it back.
