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refusemyreality-blog · 6 years

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Doin’ Good, Anon

“I cannot even tell my boss I grew up in a mobile home,” she says to me. She’s my sister, not quite three years my junior.

She’s at the top of a large non-profit in DC. She still shops at thrift stores, buys groceries at Aldi, and drives used cars. Her thrift is #TBT. It’s a matter of pride to pare down our closets and pay five bucks for a nice jacket. It’s a gift from our mother who garage saled, goodwilled, resaled us through childhood and adolescence. We grew up “kind of poor,” like one pair of flip flops for warm months, one pair of quality mary janes for church during the school year. When we ruled the trailer parks, rugrats on bikes, we wore twenty-five cent knotty knit jumpers from garage sales or my hand-me-downs. It comforted me to be stacked three girls to a bedroom.

My sister and I had one authentic Cabbage Patch to our names. The third one of us got one my mom made from a kit. Cute as ours but not the brand and it did have that funny nose- two little upraised handlebars instead of a pert little nose. My sister’s had a funny name though. She could have sent in adoption papers to have it changed, but she kept it. At least the sister with the handcrafted patch doll got to name her own.

We each had stuffed animals of our favorite type. She had a mother-child monkey set. The baby sucked its thumb. All other toys were in the shared pool: battered tin kitchen set, Fisher price put-together train, riding horse, mini-tupperware dishes, fake food and grocery cart, plastic record player, Muffin Family Bible storybooks, and a box of cast off dresses for costuming.

Mom cut coupons on Sundays after dad picked out the parts of the paper he read with us on our orange swivel chairs in the living room. We’d help her organize them on those rare occasions she let us. Every morning, mom brushed our long locks into tight ponytails and trimmed the ends in the bathroom of our trailer (Baby curls trimmed by yours truly in great-grandma’s white bathroom while our parents were visiting. My mother discovered it the next morning and never let me forget that the gorgeous sweat curls around my sisters’ faces had be shorn away by me. Like I’d absconded with their beauty and made them plain jane white girls too early.)

I was the oldest of seven kids (eight if we count the one wasn’t born). Most of them came home to the trailer and several came in seventeen months succession. (Them winters was cold?) The big fat break between this sister and me is one of the longest. Almost three years, because mom was sixteen when my dad knocked her up. They married a few weeks after he graduated high school. While she finished up her junior and senior years, my grandmother babysat me. My parents cleaned up before this sister. They quit toking up, smoking, found Jesus and moved into a bigger trailer across the street.

This sister has a MA in Non-Profit Development from a swanky Philadelphia private university. She’s newly minted on the board of an East Coast private college in her denomination. She keeps her hair in a bob that she never has to curl. She barely blows it dry. She wears almost no makeup except black mascara to emphasize her eternally thick long lashes. She looks exceptional in a scoop neck shirt because she has thin broad shoulders that make her clavicles stand out. That’s a white girl beauty standard.

She carries herself like a queen. She’s barely been in debt since high school. She’s a saver, not a spender. A half-glass of wine makes her tipsy so she rarely drinks. She’s never smoked. Her skin has always been flawless except for that one well-placed beauty mark.

People say she and I are alike. We share traits. But not beauty. I’m thicker in the face. I have dad’s nose and everything about his side of the family. Bulbous nose, dangerous incisors (they’ve been ground to look more normal but still stand sentry in front of all my other teeth. We were too poor to get the traditional American braces. This makes me relate more to the Brits. Mind my gap.) I have narrow shoulders, thick bones, mousy brown hair that gets nappy on the underside. And zits, still.

I’m over forty and I still get zits. In high school I slathered them in toothpaste all night (some brute pranked me and said toothpaste would dry those red bumps. They only grew.) During the winter I smeared orange foundation from Big Lots over them. In the summer I baked them in the sun, then slathered more orange foundation on them.

But it’s not the variation in beauty that matters. It’s her comment.

“Why? You raise money for poor mothers and children.” Her organization gets women off the streets, provides medical care, connects mothers and children to basic assistance along with housing and education. I thought our upbringing motivated, at least in part, or that it would give her cred.

Granted our poverty is not like the women of color she raises money to help. We grew in Rust Belt white urban poverty. My mom organized and handled the church food pantry so she could work for the with government cheese and donations like endless pints of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, dented cans of vegetables and freezer burnt gas station sandwiches that we ate once there were six of us. (Gardening to feed six kids? She’d have to crazy on caffeine. She gave up on gardens after two years of building a house while home-schooling the lot of us.)

We were never homeless. We had a safety net. My grandfather owned the trailer court. He gave my parents “free” rental space in exchange for tapping my dad for snow plowing, road work and cement laying on my grandfather’s schedule, of course. (Um, yeah, I’m gonna need all day Saturday to help me lay cement for.... Sigh. My father just wanted a day off. Maybe that’s why he volunteered to lead worship, Saturday night church school, the youth group and a crap ton of outings for our church.)

When dad got itchy to get out of the trailer life-- Quote: “I don’t want boys coming to pick my daughters up for dates in a mobile home park.” -- grandpa gave my mother her inheritance of five acres of land and we moved into a camper for nine months so my parents could build the house. Not have the house built. No. They built it. The aunts and uncles and grandparents and church folk kicked in so we could have a real house.

So we grew up thrifty, boot-strappy, bleeding heart volunteering-types. Most of my siblings work with at-risk populations. Two work with addicts who have mental illnesses. My dead sister worked with high school girls in lock-up till she had kids and couldn’t afford daycare. Her husband works with teens on disability. One sibling is a nurse. Another sibling a programmer who adopted two kids with physical disabilities from the Philippines.

I teach at risk high schoolers. Most of my students have failed so many classes or grades they are just waiting on eighteen and the right to drop out. The ones who stay have babies, parents who are dependents, crippling anxiety and depression or other mental illness, full time jobs, a history of missing thirty or more days of school most years, or physical illnesses or disabilities. Almost all of them grew up in need. When my assistant principal pitched the program, she recruited me because we both grew up white poor. I didn’t want to say yes. Teaching general education high schoolers is daily triage. And, I would be aiming right for the hardest luck cases.

My other grade level teachers begged me not to go to the program. I tried some hang-ringing and soul searching and self-cajoling because this group of kids takes all my energy, but I couldn’t say no. I grew up around these kids, with single moms who have bad chunky highlights and don’t use the helping verbs before participles because they speak Hoosier. I might have been one, but I had what many of them don’t- a lot of breaks: my parents stayed together, my mom and dad kicked the TV out of the house and made music, talk radio and books our entertainment, then mom home-schooled us (with a rigor that surpasses most elite private schools, like “You will read the ENTIRE history textbook, answer all the questions and ace those tests. I don’t care how boring it is. Oh, and yes you will do thirty algebra-trig-geometry problems a day. I know you are cheating on the evens because the answers are in the back of the book and you didn’t show your work. Do you think I’m stupid?”).

We had a healthy diet, mostly. My mom and dad gardened a big ass garden and my mother canned most of our vegetables for years. She sweated with the pressure cooker and the bulging veins of a constantly pregnant woman while shooing us outside to either A) shuck the corn so she could freeze cobs, B) ride your bikes and stop letting all the cold air out. Do you think we are air conditioning the neighborhood?, or C) swing on the swings, go the park or just disappear peacefully for a while because I’m canning while a baby is attached to my boob.

Just after three pm, my father arrived from the warehouse. We’d spy his orange VW Rabbit coming down the road and run into the house slamming the aluminum screen door several times in succession and scream as we ran down the hall to “hide” so we could jump him as soon as he entered the house. Dad’s return highlighted our day. He’d shrugged us off after a lot of giggling and my mother chewing us out for waking whichever baby was sleeping. Saturday nights, after church, when we had popcorn and ice cream were the sanctioned “attack dad” nights. We throttled him with our pillows while he tried to tickle us. He laid on the ground while we beat him and he crawled at us threatening to tickle more than achieving it. Just the threat of his tickle made our sides hurt from laughing. Then he’d lay there, tossing us up and over his head in a twist, time after time until the butter brickle ice cream high, from servings the size of a tub of margarine, wore off.

The next morning, he made us pancakes and fake maple syrup and took us to church where we slept off our sugar haze during a two or three hour song and sermon service. In the middle, we saw some Pentecostal action- flags waved, people dancing in the spirit, blowing a shofar (an animal horn), and getting anointed then “slain in the spirit.” In other words, we had extraordinary loving parents with a great work ethic and a network of friends who spoke ancient tales and metaphors to embed in us all the advantages that working poverty can offer. Most of my students lack those safety nets.Our poor life wasn’t perfect but it was good. I keep thinking it was a life worth living and one worth telling.

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