My brothers, my sister, and I grew up dirt poor. Five of us slept in a bed on a drafty floor in a one-hundred-year-old farmhouse, head to toe, like all the grown-ups in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We ate macaroni and cheese and hot dogs almost constantly because, I think, the dinner total for five children (the two other children were adults at this point and lived with their spouses) was monumentally low when you only ate government cheese and mixed animal parts.
My mother worked, and my father looked for jobs. I remember him working a few times while growing up, but I always remember him looking for jobs. He would also drink coffee, stare at the wall, and tell us he was looking for a “management” position. There is something about military service that messes you up, I’m sure.
My siblings and I spent many days finding things to do around the house that didn’t cost money. Of course, we would always ask my parents for a few bucks to go pick up a Wiffle ball and a Wiffle bat (cheap plastic simulacrums of real baseball gear meant for pickleball, I guess), but the answer was typically “No” unless it was a holiday or my dad was working.
We made it a joke that my mother would say, “I’ll blah-blah-blah you” when you asked her for something. For instance, “Mom, can we buy a Wiffle ball and a Wiffle bat?” And she would reply: “I’ll Wiffle ball you!” In hindsight, her response was one of those shields you put up to protect yourself from trauma. An automatic response means you don’t have to think about the desperation of your life.
Furthermore, I can vividly recall, for whatever reason, that my siblings and I loved playing a game called “poor kids,” in which my oldest brother and sister would pretend to be parents, and my two brothers (one older and one younger) and myself would pretend to be the kids. To play “poor kids,” you just had to pretend to be a poor family that was struggling financially. Except, if you were actually poor, then the game loses meaning, but luckily, we were not self-aware of our predicament, so the game would often go off without a hitch.
The icing on the cake was that I can remember us trying to find “ratty” blankets to use while we pretended to be homeless, but the only blankets we had were our actual “ratty” blankets on our bed.
Poor kids was us, and we were poor kids.
It’s interesting, when you are a kid and you are poor, you have no conception of just how poor you actually are in real life. You have an image that being “poor” looks so much worse because you still have something to hold on to, like a home or a bed that you share with your siblings. In hindsight, we were fortunate for what we had, but boy did we spend a long time struggling.
