Growing up poor
This is the post I started last Tuesday, and then didn’t have the heart for. Since it was the day that the Census Bureau releases the latest poverty statistics, I’m discussing two books about growing up poor.
First up is The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less, by Terry Ryan. It’s her memoir of how her mother, Evelyn Ryan, kept her family fed and housed by entering dozens of entries in every possible contest, winning everything from televisions and washer dryers to shopping sprees, trips and a new car (which they sold to pay the bills). Mrs. Ryan had a determinedly optimistic outlook, which Terry emulates in this book, so she focuses on her mother’s determination, creativity, and humor, rather than dwelling on her father’s alcoholism and violence, or on the indignities, major and minor, of their persistent poverty. The closest she comes to complaining is when discussing how the nuns who taught at the parochial school she attended registered her for all remedial classes when it was time to enroll in high school, in spite of her excellent grades.
Evelyn Ryan is an amazing character, and her story would have been a terrific magazine article, but the material runs a little thin by the end of the book. The book has a great premise, but no plot or character development. At the beginning, Evelyn Ryan is a plucky heroine who wins contests, and at the end she’s still a plucky heroine who wins contests. There’s a movie of this book coming out at the end of the month; based on the trailer, it looks like they’ve reframed the story as about Evelyn’s defiance of her bullying husband.
The second book is the provocatively titled Welfare Brat: a memoir, by Mary Childers. Childers writes about the endless contradictions of her childhood, of loving her mother and not wanting to be anything like her, of fitting in neither among the kids in the gifted class (where she stuck out for being poor) nor among the kids in her neighborhood (where she stuck out for caring about school), of living in decaying neighborhoods where all the other white families were fleeing, but also of taking advantage of her white privilege to get department store jobs. She writes of hiding the money she had earned so that her mother couldn’t take it, but also of giving up a birthday celebration so that there would be cake for her little sister.
Perhaps the most heartfelt passages in Welfare Brat are where Childers talks about her dreams of going to college, but also of her depths of ignorance about it. Desperate to get away from her mothers’ overcrowded apartment, she’s horrified at the prospect of sharing a dorm room. She doesn’t understand that "full scholarship" still usually means loans, and has no money to pay for the incidentals that colleges assume are too minor to mention. Her family doesn’t understand why she’d want to go to college, and even her friends think she should just get a job. After her guidance counselor pulls strings, she winds up at a "mediocre community college":
"Even in college, most people aren’t excited about ideas. Outside of class I’m teased for obsessing about my difficulties finishing a paper comparing Martin Buber’s notion of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship to Picasso’s representations of how we are three- and four-faced, and thus slated for prismatic complexity interacting with others. Several teachers drop hints that I would have no trouble transfering to a better school. When I explain my scholarship and aversion to debt, they reply that practically everyone borrows to attend college, as if no one should refuse a common fate."
(For maximum effect, these passages should be read alongside this essay about class and college admissions.)
Childers finishes her book with a statement about welfare reform. She writes "It’s clear to me that I could develop from welfare brat to chip-on-the-shoulder chick to contributing dissident citizen because I had the good luck to come of age when many people in the United States approved of a war on poverty rather than what Herbert J. Gans calls ‘the war against the poor.’" This statement may well be true, but it isn’t supported by anything that’s come before in the book. While Childers is sympathetic to her mother’s struggles, she seems to have suceeded in spite of the parenting she received, not because of it.
September 7th, 2005 at 9:21 am
As an ex-policy wonk and current parent myself, I’ve always been an avid reader of your blog. I’m delurking here to tell you that I enjoyed your post. Also, because I’m not sure whether you’ve seen this or not, I thought I’d refer you to a post written by John Scalzi. It was written in response to Katrina but bears some relevance to poverty in America.
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003704.html
September 7th, 2005 at 9:23 am
I had the same feelings about “Prize Winner,” and I’m afraid the movie looks like it’s made for the Lifetime crowd.
http://frymax.typepad.com/longcut/2005/07/rhyme_pays.html
September 7th, 2005 at 3:02 pm
Your description of Childers reminds me of a student I had once. She had been born when her mom was 15 or 16. At some point in the not-too-distant past, the family had been homeless and living in a car for a couple of years. Now, she was a student at one of the country’s top public research universities, commuting *two hours* each way to live at home, where she didn’t have a desk or a room of her own to study. She was taking a full-time class load *and* working 40 hours/week, somehow. She came to me crying because she had gotten a B (maybe it was a B-) on a paper, and we started talking about how she could pull her grades up. But of course my suggestions about taking more time to revise, etc., weren’t practical, as I realized when she started telling me what her life was like. I said to her then that I was amazed, frankly, that she was doing as well as she was, and that she should be really really proud of herself for having gotten a B under those circumstances. I also asked her if there were any way she could move to dorms, or to a shared apartment near campus. She told me no, she couldn’t possibly afford it, that everything she earned went to books and fees as it was (and gas). I asked her if she had appealed her financial aid package and told her that if she wanted to, I would be happy to write letters or make phone calls to recommend they increase it because she was a really promising student working under unacceptably difficult conditions. She said she had appealed, and they’d told her she should take out loans–that the reason she was in the financial situation she was in was because she refused to borrow money for education. Shocked (in my middle-class, student-loan funded way), I asked her why in the world didn’t she take out student loans? Blah blah low interest rates, blah blah deferment, etc.
And she said, “I’ve been homeless and lived in a car. And I’ve sworn never, ever, to borrow money because I’ve seen how borrowing can destroy your life.”
It was a real eye-opener for me.
September 7th, 2005 at 3:13 pm
There was an article in the new york times magazine a while ago that seems relevant to being poor, and how it changes your world view. The author (can’t remember who) described her family life; they didn’t have much money, and her mom cut coupons and trimmed and snipped until they were able to almost live a middle class life. She then describes going shopping with a poor mother, as an adult, who does none of the scrimping her mother did.
And, she realizes, that the difference is lack of hope. Her mother thought that she would, through her coupons and scrimping, raise her family out of poverty, and if not her own family, her children’s. The other mother was hopeless about the future, and didn’t see how buying the cheaper brand of paper towel was going to change her life.
I was a student loan student, too, and I didn’t think twice about taking on the loans. But, that’s ’cause I was counting on a future. I don’t know what we do with students who feel their future is precarious. And living your life without counting on a better future means that you make choices now that will make that better future harder. But, those of us who are fortunate can take risks, because we have a safety net. Can you take a student loan if you have no net? Probably not.
bj
September 7th, 2005 at 5:33 pm
Thanks for the comments.
MetroDad, I had seen that blog link, and think it’s great.
bj, I did see that article — it’s by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of *Random Family.* I actually wrote about it a bit when I did my month on the Thrifty Food Plan — http://www.halfchangedworld.com/2005/01/thrifty_food_pl.html
September 7th, 2005 at 10:01 pm
My parents, in their lifetimes, moved from poverty into the middle class. I was there for part of the ride, the transition from working class to middle class. It’s clear to me now, as an adult, what an amazing feat that was for them, and that it could only happen because of personal qualities that they possessed, incredible good luck (for example perfect health and no accidents or disasters), and government programs like GI Bill, VA mortgages, and low-tuition public universities.
Conservatives make it sound easier than it really is to make that transition. And many people refuse to recognize the help their own families received along the way. People love to say that their family pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, but if you question them closely, you’ll find out there’s always more to the story. Nobody can make it out of poverty without some kind of hand up. That’s why all of us who made it out should continue to support the programs that helped our own families.
September 8th, 2005 at 1:00 pm
This quote could be repeated almost exactly verbatim about my first couple of years in college: “Childers talks about her dreams of going to college, but also of her depths of ignorance about it. Desperate to get away from her mothers’ overcrowded apartment, she’s horrified at the prospect of sharing a dorm room. She doesn’t understand that ‘full scholarship’ still usually means loans, and has no money to pay for the incidentals that colleges assume are too minor to mention.”
I haven’t commented too often on them in the past, but I really enjoy these posts on books about poverty. So often, I read your words about the books and the quotes and they are just absolutely familiar to me from my life and I think how much I’d like to read the books. But honestly, I don’t know if I could–not sure I could think all that closely in a sustained way about that period of my life, to be honest.
September 10th, 2005 at 11:36 am
I read and enjoyed “Prize Winner.” One thing that book brought home to me was how no-fault divorce is basically a good thing. While frivolous divorce is a bad thing, no-fault divorce has liberated many women and children from awful marriages. While reading Prize Winner, I thought how much better off Evelyn and her children would have been without useless sack-of-excrement Leo Ryan. I suspect that there were many “intact, two-parent families” like this back in “the good old days.”
September 11th, 2005 at 1:59 pm
Funny that, I just read “Prize Winner” last week. Like other commenters, I was disappointed by the lack of character development or evolution. I was also struck by how thoroughly Evelyn Ryan (and other women like her) was failed by the Catholic Church of the 1950s and 60s:
1. Stand by your man, even if he’s a “useless sack-of-excrement”.
2. No birth control, no matter what.
Fewer children wouldn’t have changed the fact that Leo Ryan was an abusive alcoholic, but it certainly would have strained the families resources less. I suppose the author is reluctant say much about that, since she was the 6th(?) child; access to birth control probably would have reduced the size of the family by at least half.
October 26th, 2006 at 6:33 am
Poverty week
I was going to do a post for Anti Poverty week, but of course at the Cast Iron Balcony we hardly ever blog anything in a timely manner. Anyway, has poverty gone away since Poverty week? NO! OK then.
I meant to link to this famous blog post by John Sc…