Although I have retired since joining this group...

[davidthegnome]

57. Thank you for sharing your story.

I have been working poor for all of my adult life... though I'm unemployed now without benefits (or health insurance) I do have a family that lets me live with them and helps me out with what expenses I have. I wish I had learned to do more practical things as you did, I can always start learning, I can probably do some of those things if someone teaches me how.

I grew up spending most of my time on the internet, it was where I met my girlfriend. I was sixteen and she was twenty three when we started living together. She came to Maine from South Dakota, with her five year old daughter so we could try to make a go of it. I had been... up to that point, more spoiled and more sheltered than I ever knew. I picked up a job at a call center making something like 7.50 an hour, which, at the time, was considered good pay up here. She had a job as a dietary aid (and later a medical in medical transcription) at a hospital.

I was struggling with overwhelming depression and severe panic disorder at the time. I ended up losing my job and instead stayed home with my girlfriend's daughter. Suddenly my life became one of constant work, doing laundry, dishes, cleaning, cooking - and taking care of a young girl who had severe behavioral issues. She could be violent, even at five she was taking swings at adults, throwing and breaking things, using vulgar language and insults. As hard as it was to deal with, I loved that girl, and took care of her as best as I could - it was the hardest thing I have ever done.

A year later, without the situation having changed much, my girlfriend told me she was pregnant. I was seventeen, about eight months away from my eighteenth birthday. I was... scared shitless, but oddly happy at the same time. It occurred to me that I was going to have a child, that nothing else I ever did would be more important, more significant. It became my reason to keep going, despite my struggles with depression and panic attacks and poverty (if not for my family's help, we never would have survived at all).

I proposed marriage, almost immediately - and when my son was born, I had never (and have never) had a happier, more magical day in my life. I managed to go back to work, washing dishes for restaurants, picking up odd jobs here and there, working at a call center again. I spent a lot of time "in between jobs" too, when I would be home with the children, learning how to juggle bottles, pacifiers, school lunches and supplies and everything else. Too much to describe it all without writing a hundred pages.

The ongoing march though, of poverty, of mental illness, of so many issues rolled into one eventually took it's toll on me. I ended up in a psych ward after a suicide attempt. No, I don't know what I was thinking, just that I was miserable and saw no way out, that not even the kids, who had been my life, could keep me from overwhelming self hatred and misery. Everything that was wrong with my family, with our lack of money, opportunity and so on... I blamed myself. I felt like a failure as a man, as a father, as a provider.

My fiance and I split up, for various reasons - and she took the kids and moved back home to South Dakota, with her parents. I moved back in with my own. It took years for me to get myself at all together, for me to make a headway against my mental illness... but eventually I did, through medication and therapy, through the love and support of my family, I managed to go back to work and keep working. I have been a jack of many trades, but a master of none. I've had jobs and done things that most normal people would consider absolutely ridiculous - like shoveling horse manure for five bucks an hour.

One of the brightest spots in my life was the year I managed to get enrolled in a university - the educational experience was great... until the student loan money ran out and I couldn't find work. Then it was back to the drawing board again, back home, deeper in debt (both educational and medical), living with mom and dad. I've worked in retail and hospitality, and had a brief job as a bartender. This last summer I did something to my back and now I struggle just to get out of bed in the morning, it is a constant pain, to add to many other constant pains, the worst part of it being that I have no health insurance - no available care to me that could perhaps make it better.

Still... the battle goes on. I have not seen my son or the little girl I helped to raise for several years. A lot of that is financial as it costs a lot to go from Maine to South Dakota. The other part... is a deep, overwhelming shame. I was not... am not, a very good Father, in that I failed to provide for my family, in that I could not even manage to keep it together. My parents did it, their parents did it, but I could not.

It sucks. I can't say that enough. It sucks. I love my family, living with them is good - and I am deeply grateful that they will have me, but as a man, as a worker, as a... whatever the hell I am, I feel like I have failed at pretty much all of the important things.

So much of it is rooted in financial inequality, in deep poverty - and in mental illness, which is related (which is worse and which makes which one worse? I don't know... chicken or egg question, I think).

Somehow... despite all of this though, I am inspired, enthusiastic, and passionate about this political revolution that is going on today. It just seems to me, that my life could have been a lot better... could be a lot better now, if, collectively, the working poor got together and demanded something better. I think we are just beginning to stand and fight.

I struggle (hard) every day to stay positive, to keep moving forward, to try to find things to keep me busy even though I can't move around like I used to, some days my back hurts enough that I just want to lay in bed and cry. I am thirty one years old, but some times I feel so much older.


So I can relate to your story in several ways and I absolutely understand how hard it is to be a stay at home parent. I absolutely understand how hard it is to be poor, or broke, to learn how to survive without. Once a member of the working poor - you are always one of us, it is a story no one forgets, an experience one can never deny. It is filled with grief and pain, with triumph and joy, with such a mixture of all the crazy things that make us human. It is the experience of being a working class hero, being taken for granted and used as a statistic or scapegoat by pundits and politicians. Of being looked down upon by people who "got theirs", because, you know, if we're working poor, it must be that we don't work hard enough.

K & R for solidarity. I admire you and applaud your courage and strength. With you in spirit, all the way.