Did you grow up poor? (not trolling for maudlin stories....)

Tony's thread http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=105x2253491 made me think of this.

I grew up on welfare & food stamps.

Anyone else?

Now, thanks to liberal policies that allowed my mom to go back to school, etc., she is working as a financial aid officer at school, I'm in the IT industry, my brother owns his own business, and my sister . . . . well . . . she's my sister :)

also after running away I was homeless for a short while.

poor as dirt

CB

I can remember our family being on the receiving end of those church christmas baskets for the poor.

You can add me to that growing up poor list.

I felt so embarassed I didn't even go out to thank them. I feel bad about that now.

And now that I am on the giving rather than receiving end of that tradition, I understand when many of the children do not come out to see what is being delivered.

But I dropped out of school and left home early and wound up on the poverty cycle. I escaped largely because I took things into my own hands - my welfare worker told me, when I explained that I wanted to go to school and learn a trade or something, that I didn't have to because I could collect welfare until my youngest child was six. Had I been less determined, I would have just let her talk me into staying on welfare rather than trying to become self sufficient.

My mom received food stamps, and was promptly cut off when my sister's job went full time after high school graduation.

middle class when I grew up with my dad. They divorced. My stepdad isn't super rich, but he is pretty well off. He and my mother and us moved into a pretty expensive old house in Annapolis.
Been pretty poor since I went on my own, but I have a good car, and a good apartment, just not a lot of spending $$$

I didn' realize we were poor until I hit 6 or 7, but we only barely made 'lower middle class' by the time high school arrived.

how poor my famiLy was. Looking back, yes we were piss poor, but as a kid i didn't notice.

I mean, we always ate well, and we had enough clothes, the house was clean, etc. . Dad and mom always worked, but they were definitely 'working poor'.

My parental units, such as they were, sucked. They were lazy people who were content to feed off the government tit. :grr:

I never knew we weren't rich, though, because all the kids in the little town where I lived were in the same kinds of families. It was coal-mining country, just as coal production was dying out and miners were being laid off.

Yet, there seemed to be so much. We ate at each other's houses, and we were always dressed well (and warmly) and the mountains were great playgrounds in the summer and the hilly streets were great for sledding in the winter.

My folks just didn't have a lot of money, that's all. We were never poor, though.

My father chose a career in business because he knew he could make more money for his family that way. He grew up fatherless and poor, and he did not want any of us to live that way. So we never did, really.

towards the end of my mothers life, yes we were very poor.

were in the projects. my famiLy, for some reason, was Loathe to accept government heLp... but we did take pLenty of ginormous bLocks of cheese

My grandmother, who was not poor, lived on that stuff. :shrug:

American government cheese is made by several different manufacturers so if you get it often, you are getting a little bit of variety. The USDA is a tough customer though and the manufacturer must meet certain standards. Many of these manufacturers make cheese for delis and use the same formulation in order to meet standards.

my Mom did what hse had to do.

We moved up to middle middle class when she married my stepfather.

I grew up in a blue collar middle class family. My dad was in the union and my mom stayed at home with my brother and me until we were both in school. He worked two jobs for a while - one at the big union company, the other at a small business that he was learning. While we weren't rich, we were able to afford a week or two in Cape Cod each year, and after my mom went back to work and did well for herself, we even went to Disney World a few times.

My wife survived the Cultural Revolution in China, or at least the last 5-6 years of it and all of the economic pains of China over the next 10-12 years.

I didn't really know it though. Just thought it was normal to have hand-me-downs and eat beans and corn bread every day. I guess that was pretty cheap to make for so many people. By my high school years it had all turned around. Just me and one sister so the money went much further.

but my mom raised four kids alone on a teacher's salary after my dad died. I'm not sure how she did it.

I was born right before my Dad started his Undergraduate work at IU and he went to school clear through to his MS. We weren't on Public Assistance as most people define it, but Dad's Tuition was paid by the GI Bill and we got enough money for food and clothing from Relatives. We were living in Gary, Indiana until 1966......

I received Federal Tuition assistance for my undergrad work, Reagan hadn't got around to killing those programs before I finished. My folks divorced and I claimed my Mom as my "parent" even though my brothers and I stayed with our Dad. My Mom had a lot of problems and was fairly low income......

Once Dad finished his MS and was comissioned as a US Public Health Service Lieutenant, we were on our way to solid Middle Class America.

We weren't on public assistance until my folks split, but we had a hard time making ends meet. We lived in a working class neighborhood and my dad worked at a paint retailer and my mom worked at Kmart. The marriage was stressed without the added stress of lack of money. When times were tough and they were behind on their bills, my folks would always fight. I don't think money could have saved their marriage, but lack of it certainly made things tougher for us.

After my folks split my mom got custody of me and my sister and we received public assistance for a little while. Then my mom met a man who would become my step-father and things got better for us. He had a good job at a union print shop (they used to print Hustler magazine there). My mom also found a better job a year or so after they married and we moved out to the suburbs where we lived in middle class utopia.

I grew up to be a truck driver. I now live in a working class neighborhood and although I don't have a lot of money, I've pretty much got everything I need through my own means.

Now he's on welfare and so am I.Today I received my Christmas basket and that was a huge relief because the fridge was empty.

:hi: :hug: wish that wasn't all I could give you.

Have you ever been to this site? http://www.modestneeds.org

I know my mom got WIC when my brother was a baby. My parents were very good at being thrifty, so we never needed food stamps. We chopped wood every year for the wood stove (lived in Maine). We bought stuff on sale or stuff from thrift shops, yard sales, and stuff out of the Uncle Henry's (a book full of advertisments for used items). I never thought we were poor growing up, even though I knew of many families who had much more than we did. We never went hungry (ok, I went hungry quite a few times because I was a picky eater). I knew of some kids from larger families that actually had to skip meals because their parents couldn't afford to feed them.

comfortably upper middle class, although I didn't know that at the time.

No indoor plumbing for a number of long years. No running water hot or cold. No electricity and no gas. Very little food or clothing.

Wood stove, often a dry well with hand pump, kerosene lamps (One Coleman white gas lantern). 1942 to 1946. Then things started getting a little bit better-we got ELECTRIC!

Oh sorry, you said no maudlin entries.

180

welfare and food stamps...Good will clothing... We even had to heat the house with wood in the winter because we couldn't afford any other kind of heat. I grew up in Connecticut and it can get down right chilly sometimes. (like today) Ice would form on the inside of the windows, sometimes an inch thick.
I wouldn't change my upbringing though... Yes it was hard, kids at school made fun of me because my mom and I didn't have any money and you could tell... But growing up that way taught me a lot that I find very useful today. My mother is a wonderful, strong woman whom knows how to get by on next to nothing and be happy. I am truly blessed to have her example in my life, I wouldn't change that for all the money in the world.

:)

:)

I'll always be working class....as long as there's republicans controlling things, that is.

not middle, but not dreadfully poor. Money enough for the basics, such as shelter and food, but not for anything else, so we all had to share the bike, or the hockey stick. There was no money for dance classes, etc, so fun or hobbies were up to us and our imagination. Clothes were hand me downs, and it wasn't unusual to have 3 or 4 spots of mending on each sock.

My parents had been very poor during the depression, especially my dad, who lost his own dad when he was 11. There was 7 kids in the house and my grandmother was widowed at 30, and they were dirt poor before his passing. He didn't have life insurance or anything of the sort, and the kids often didn't eat, or only had bread and tea for days, and they had to share shoes.

I learned a lot about thrift and reusing/recycling from them.

They told her it was because she was white! We still laugh about that one. My dad didn't start paying child support until my junior year in high school - my parents divorced when I was not quite two.

I remember going through some tough years when he first got out of the service in the late 70s, but extended family enabled us to forego government assistance. My kids have it much better than I did and that actually worries me. Despite my best efforts they are definitely too complacent about material comfort.

Weird dichotomy though because my parents were very educated (dad's a lawyer, mom's an RN), but my dad always worked in legal areas relating to human services and advocacy in the public sector and my mom stayed home to care for my brother (multiply disabled) for many years, then they were divorced (we even went through a WIC and food stamps period for awhile). I was exposed to a lot of culture and opportunities though, but we never had much ourselves. Once, I got to see the Bolshoi Ballet perform while wearing a Goodwill dress.

I learned life is about more things than money, yet people with money never intimidated me, nor did I ever see anyone as inferior or superior based on that factor. It's just a "thing" or a "tool", not something defining more important things.

Another "yes" here. I agree with another poster that I didn't realize we were poor till I went off to school.

I was born to married teenagers who divorced before I went to kindergarten. To make things worse, they weren't used to living on their own or living poor so we ran out of money. On separate occaisions, my parents ran out of gas in line to cash their checks at the drive thru at the bank. In early elementary school, my sister and I had to "charge" our lunches at the end of the week since my mother had literally run out of money until payday. My mother did insist on buying us new clothing because we were from a good family who didn't shop at Goodwill, but we wore everything until we were too big for them, when they were quite worn out. My parents got better jobs and my mother married an upper middle class guy.
I moved with my father in high school shortly after he had lost a good job and was stuck with a low wage job. They were better at living poor. As a result though, I had to give up the luxeries of eating brand name food. My step mother also had this notion that I should get by on eating a normal amount of food when I was a high school athlete. I usually felt hungry and weighed 110 lb at 5'5''.

Lived in a trailer - a single wide at that! I always thought the people that lived in double-wides were rich. We eventually upgraded to a single-wide with a tip-out. My parents divorced when I was a year old and my mom raised me and my sister on her own in the 70s. My dad never paid any child support but every so many years I'd get to go visit him in his big house. He had Pong when it first came out. That was cool.

My mom used to make my clothes. I didn't think much of it but I realized many years later that one of the playground supervisors used to make fun of me. She was always asking me where I got my pants and if my mom could make some for her. Believe me when I tell you they were some damn ugly pants.

Before they thought up the name (50's & 60's).

the very bottom rung...but we were happy.

Dad was laid off the pharma company he worked for (Sidney Ross, currently GlaxoSmithKline) four or so years before the minimum contribution time for Brazil's version of Social Security to kick in. But he had savings, so for those remaining years we lived off them while paying SS. When the contribution time was reached we started living off Dad's retirement. Very frugal lifestyle all along.

But somehow they made it look like non-poverty. I wondered why I never got the REALLY cool toys (but I got fairly good ones nonetheless), and sometimes lunch was rice with tomato sauce and that was it (and I found everything perfectly normal).

Now I have the answer: insane money discipline and a fair bit of luck -- if our income-less window was two years longer, we'd be fucked with extreme prejudice.

But my mom was a single mom and I did get free lunch from the school free lunch program. I never thought that meant I was "poor" although I did wonder once why other kids didn't get it.

I lived like a prince... until my father took off when i was 4. He left my mother (a housewife) penniless. He had a good lawyer, so he paid little in child support. However, he always had a new Mercedes Benz every year.

:eyes:

Both parents worked, saved, and invested.
We went without the gadgets that other
families had, but we were comfortable.

I lived in Morris Township, NJ - an upper-class bedroom community about 40 miles west of Manhattan. Many of my schoolmates were the children of doctors, lawyers, and business executives with two working parents, while my father was a maintenance mechanic at RCA and my mother stayed at home until I was in high school. It didn't matter to my closest friends, but some kids had that "better-than-you" attitude that many spoiled brats develop.

That being said, we always had a roof over our heads and food on the table - though there was a lot of mac & cheese and tuna casseroles.

but really, mill workers made as muchor more money. My dad worked for the state in a county highway construction office. I did not think much about our relative status until I was in my teens and realized that money was the only distinction required for respect. Things were a little different then, and eve though status objects, like clothes, cars andcolleges were much the same, it was nowhere near as bad as it is now. Brand awareness is iron law now among many young people, and it is plain to see many kids are hurt badly by the stigma of being poor or just less well off than others. pretentiousness is encouraged now in everything from food to the supposed signifiers of rebellion (tattoos, piercings, and other expensive hobby rebellion doodads), and if you don't buy some of it, you get ostracized. The (phony) connoiseur is offered up as the only smart choice as a role to play.