"upper-lower class or lower-middle" - can i say i grew up poor?

Mostly I want to use this site to post my poems. Today I just want to share. I probably won't do this often - which most of us will be thankful for. This thing is part memory, part rant, part cliche. I wrote it about a month or so ago.

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I just re-read the letters between Dean and his sister in Without a Net. I remember reading them on the plane back from OB and calling my mom later to talk about growing up poor – how the most she would say was how much (little) she made: around $20,000 a year while raising my sister and me. How she had this intense need to disassociate us from the “really poor” – which I get because we did have some privilege, we are white, we have family to lean on/live with. But how she wanted to rewrite history – how she kept saying, “we always had food to eat.” And how that is true. And…

I wonder about her (our, my) need to erase the ways that what we ate was our pride. The trips to the places her checks had bounced; the way we had to go there and actually apologize to some dumb manager for being poor. How we had to try to buy more time to pay the overdraft fees – the way she had to take us with her – how embarrassing that must have been. To see her crying outside of the grocery store, afraid they would eventually take us from her; moving from apartment to apartment to Granny’s house when she couldn’t keep up with the rent. Wanting an easier life so getting married to LaVaughn and then later to Tim.

What would my mom have been if she weren’t always struggling to get by – always submitting herself to shit jobs and shit treatment so her kids could feel like they were going to win.

I remember going to her boss’s house for some holiday thing. Maybe we were actually at her office. I don’t know. I just remember the old, rich man sitting in a nice leather chair. Was she flirting with him (fucking him?) to keep her job? He took out a 1 dollar bill. Maybe it was a 5. Either way I remember thinking that it was a big deal. Then he’s giving us some dumb pep talk about money, about how we should work hard and then we can make it and then he takes the dollar bill and he rips it in half. He gives half of it to Julie and half of it to me. Fucking paternalistic joker. I was awestruck by this fool.

Here is this thing we’re always, and I mean always, in need of and he’s got the gall to tear it in half and think he’s done us some favor and now isn’t he so cute.

On the ride home I asked my mom if we could still use it – if Julie and I taped our halves back together could it still be spent. I remember wanting to give it to her. Knowing that whatever she was doing with this creep, however many times she had to say yes sir, the money was rightfully hers and it wasn’t mine to keep.

I think the hardest part about remembering money trouble – because that’s how my mom phrased it – we had “trouble with money.” Like it was the rear driver’s side tire that had this tiny nail in it and so every few days we would come out to go somewhere and find it flat. The hardest part was the hiding. The way I tried to space my few outfits apart so that the kids at school wouldn’t notice I was wearing exactly the same 4 or 5 things every goddamn week. The way “vegetables” meant instant mashed potatoes and canned peas. The way we’ve stuffed it all down – made it a ghost past because now we’re outta there. The ways we silence ourselves. The ways we make nice. The way it wasn’t that bad – the way we can’t comfort or talk to each other about it because we can’t really acknowledge that it exists.