Blue Collar Life
I always describe myself as growing up blue collar, lest anyone think I got to my current well-educated, reasonably comfortable living status with everything being handed to me. I am oddly and fiercely proud of having worked for everything I now have in my life. My parents always stressed the importance of education, both high school graduates themselves, and encouraged my siblings and me to seek higher education. All four of us have attended at least some college: two associates degrees, three undergraduate programs, and two master’s degrees. Not too shabby for the children of a homemaker turned bookkeeper and a factory worker turned maintenance supervisor. The blue collar catch to our college journeys? All of us utilized grants, scholarships, and student loans. And we lived at home while we obtained our education or, in the case of my sister and I getting our master’s degrees, we were married with children and mortgages while working towards our goals.
Budget Stretching
Thinking back on my childhood, I feel like my parents managed our household income fairly well, but when there are six people and one modest salary, the money can only be stretched so thin before a hole appears in the dough. We lived in a small, brick house, eternally under construction from one project or another. In my naive eyes, my father could build or repair anything; while possessing a talent which saved us a lot of money over the years, my dad wasn’t quite infallible. A brilliant man, despite struggling with undiagnosed learning issues his whole life, Daddy could read up on a topic and foray the freshly gained knowledge into an interesting project. He designed and built a platform playhouse, a set of solar panels which powered our water heater, and conceptualized and layed a beautiful tile floor in our kitchen with terra cotta colored grout. Daddy seemed to perpetually repair his old, baby blue, dented Chevy truck and whichever beater car my mom used to haul the kids around until eventually even my father’s wizardry couldn’t bring it back to life. And, if he couldn’t figure out some aspect of a project, he was smart enough to find someone in our small town who could.
Every fall Mama would go and get a part-time job in the evenings, trading off parenting duty with my dad when he arrived home from work. Dressed in neatly pressed dress pants and one of her three rayon blouses, she would kiss my grungy, tired father on her way out the door, taking care to avoid the creosote and motor oil dotting his clothing. One year she worked at a now defunct shoe store chain in the mall; our dad would take us by there sometimes to say “hi,” even though it meant chasing my toddler sister among the racks. The next fall she worked in a gift shop with shelves of expensive, beautiful, and fragile items, the kinds of treasures our household would never have on display. Daddy didn’t take his three tomboy daughters by to greet our mother (my brother hadn’t been invented yet), wisely knowing we would break something. Our favorite yearly part-time job of Mama’s was the candy kiosk, also at the mall. A couple nights a week she would bring home a crisp, white paper bag filled with caramel corn, huge colorful suckers, or Jelly Bellies, which would cause a knock-down-drag-out fight over who got what flavors.
I was a teenager before I tuned into the timing of my mama only working a part-time job each year from October through December. Her motivation for going to a menial, less-than-rewarding job in the evenings after taking care of children all day was to provide us with a great Christmas. As a therapist, I recognize now our wonderful Christmases represented her attempts to heal from her own past and ensure none of us experienced the heartache she steeled herself against on a daily basis. Her childhood difficulties included lack of stability - living with her grandparents for years only to be uprooted to live with her mother and stepfather, experiences of abuse, and exposure to alcoholism. Although our six-person family struggled to have extras after the bills were paid, my mama’s family struggled to pay the bills. Did we want the Barbie Dream House? Bicycles? Stacks of brand new books? Art supplies? Easy Bake Oven? Done, done, and done. Cue Christmas lights, silver tinsel, and packets of hot chocolate with home-made cookies. My siblings and I didn’t have an idyllic life, but my mom tried to give us an idyllic Christmas.
Food Insecurity
One aspect of our financial struggles centered around nearly running out of groceries before the next pay period. We never went hungry, but the meals the last few days leading up to the Friday payday often left a lot to be desired. If we clamored for a snack, our mama instructed us to make ourselves some toast with jam or bread and butter, having run out of fruit, peanut butter, and anything resembling a snack earlier in the week. Our family used food stamps for several months when my father lost his job. A difficult time for him, his pride dented like the canned goods we purchased from the clearance section at the supermarket, he sank into a depression. Mama worked several odd jobs while he fought on a daily basis to get out of bed and search for a job. In order to stretch our food stamps to feed six people, my parents purchased economy bags of rice, cornmeal, and dried beans. To this day, I can barely eat rice or choke down a pinto bean; black-eyed peas and I are still on good terms, though.
Several years ago, when observing my sister’s well-stocked pantry, I remarked on my own pantry and deep freezer staying packed full at all times and I experienced anxiety when we ran out of items. She expressed feeling the same stress around any reduction in her pantry stores. After polling our siblings, we learned all of us spent more money on groceries than any other single living expense to maintain a certain level of available food items. I thought this was interesting, but didn’t quite know what to make of it until I stumbled across the phrase: food insecurity. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines as “a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.”
Simple Pleasures
A few years ago my father expressed regret about not being able to do more for us when we were growing up. He felt shame around not being able to afford family vacations. While it is true our family struggled to make ends meet at times, overall we all describe our childhood experiences as happy. We went camping and hiking in the mountains where we lived, we rode our bikes until sundown every day, we enjoyed competing to win board games, and my siblings and I used our imaginations to play any number of pretend scenarios - house, school, spies, or superheroes. A lot of what I remember enjoying as a child cost our family nothing: catching fireflies, riding along on a trip to the hardware store, or perusing our local library for something new to read. I may not be able to eat pinto beans, but I still enjoy all of these simple pleasures from growing up. I’d love to hear about all y’all’s favorite childhood memories.