As I pulled into a local Head Start parking lot, I saw a mom and her young son walking towards the front door. As I joined them, I heard her say, “Dog is in your pocket. He’ll be with you today. And here is your blanket,” as she wrapped a worn quilt around his narrow shoulders. I looked and saw a well-worn stuffed animal in his coat pocket.
The child barely noticed her words he was so intent on the directions his teacher was giving him. “Rub your hands like this,” she said as she showed him how to clean his hands before entering the building.
The mom turned away and went back to her car, and the little boy walked into the building. I watched as she got into an old mini-van and drove away. I wondered where she was going. Home or to work? I remembered when Covid first hit being told by a school social worker that she was going to visit a family where the mom had to work two shifts at a local store stocking shelves in order to make ends meet. That meant she had to leave her fourth-grade daughter at home to take care of her five-year old sister all day during the summer. The grandmother who usually cared for them was unable to come in anymore.
As I sat in the parking lot, seeing other parents drop off their four and five-year olds, I thought back to when we had moved here to rural Maine four years ago. We had come from good, steady jobs, a nice house, plenty of income to do what we felt we needed to do. Then came unemployment (our own choosing) and having to figure out how to pay the bills. Not since our early years as a young married couple had I needed to think so much about paying basic bills. How much would the heating oil cost? When was the property tax due and did we have enough to pay it? As we took low paying jobs at local schools, we began to see what many people have always known in both rural and urban America: Fixing a flat tire or buying a new one (forget all four) was no small thing. When you are bringing home 1,400.00 a month the little, unavoidable expenses suddenly become big.
We had bought a house that needed all the proceeds from selling our last house just to bring it up to code and be livable. We had to live on our monthly income. At the school where I ended up as a fulltime aide (they make about $11,000 a year since they are only paid during the school year) a new friend suggested I read an article by a woman named Dr. Donna Beegle. I had never heard of her, but I bought her book, and found that I knew NOTHING about poverty as it is experienced by those in it. I discovered that what I felt was poverty in my experience was simply a blip on the screen of my life. That it was “situational poverty” not generational. Basically, I knew I wouldn’t be in it for very long.
I also realized that having to make choices about which family members we could afford to visit, or what groceries I would buy at the store based on what I had left in my checking account was a good thing. I had to exercise some restraint, be more creative and less self- indulgent, and it forced me to feel what that feels like rather than think of it on a wholly intellectual, slightly superior level.
Working on a daily basis with kids from generational poverty also helped open my eyes. I told a little girl I was working with that I would bring her a copy of a book she loved, a copy she could keep. She looked at me with something close to sadness and said, ”Thank you, but my mom would be mad. We move so much I can’t have any books. My mom says they’re hard to move.” I had never in my life considered that aspect of having books in the home. I brought her the book anyway telling her she could bring it back to class and give it to someone else if they had to move again.
Most of us are completely ignorant about what it is like to grow up in a home like that. Both the good and the bad parts. Because there are good parts! The entitlement we bemoan with this current generation is almost completely absent in kids who live in poverty. They are grateful and thrilled about the smallest things – a new pair of cheap boots from Walmart, or sneakers that were on clearance and don’t have a lid on the box. They will hug you hard if you bring in a new pencil with an eraser (one pencil, mind you). And there is a genuine empathy for others that I have seen time and time again in kids who have almost nothing. They don’t judge their peers (or adults) on what kind of clothes they wear, or where they went on vacation, or what car their parents drive. They may not even have a car or have ever gone on vacation. In fact, having very little seems to make them more aware and appreciative of what they do have. They are fiercely loyal to their families, grateful for having a cake at their birthday even though they didn’t get any presents and thrilled beyond speech at being allowed to pick out a book (one!) at the school book fair. I can’t help but think back to our own boys and how many books they were allowed to choose at the book fairs, or how dissatisfied I would be as a teenager after a shopping trip with my mom even though she bought me everything I wanted.
All this is to say that I have come to no conclusions about poverty, only more questions.
As I pulled out of that Head Start parking lot where I had dropped off a box of new books for their Early Head Start program, I was grateful I had felt just a little bit what it was like to be rejected for a car loan because we didn’t have a steady income, to have to choose between going to see my father-in-law and buying heating oil, to drive by the fancy Italian restaurant and do the math on what a dinner for two would cost and what I made in a week of fulltime teaching. (The dinner would have added up to a day and a half of teaching.)
I’ve stopped teaching fulltime in the public schools as an aide, but I will never forget the lessons I learned. The kids I now work with are a bit more removed, but no less worthy of my attention. And I can still see them as they walk into their schools, or run in our Run Clubs, or hear about how much they love their new books. And feel rich.
If you want to learn more, check out Donna Beegle’s website below. You can also order her book and read deeply about her research. The book is titled: “See Poverty . . . Be The Difference!
https://www.combarriers.com/articles
