I’ve never written about my childhood. In a way, not doing so has colored all of my writing on this blog. And, in a way, with many of my posts, I’ve felt a since of faking it, as one sometimes feels when they’ve managed to move from one social caste to another. When you do that you feel like you’ve tricked everyone. You snuck in behind the curtains, to where the good food is and where everyone is always clean and speaks with the proper words. It’s the nice place you saw on TV, but didn’t get to go home to when you got out of school.
I grew up in situational poverty. That’s different than generational. I think that’s relevant, as it’s a very specific brand of poverty. And, in my mind, generational poverty may have more kinship. We were the black sheep of the family. Always poor, and always poor as a result of the decisions my parents made (mostly my father). We didn’t come from a long line of poor people who could learn from one another. We came from middle class people on my mom’s side (her father was a farmer) and working class on my dad’s (I’m not sure what my dad’s dad did, but I know his mother lived in a nicer apartment than anything we ever lived in). The only extended family we had was my aunt, who didn’t have much do to with us, and there was my grandfather, who is actually my mother’s ex-husband, but, if you ever ask, he’s my grandfather. That’s a long story, and one I’m not going to go into, but, in the strange world I knew, it all made sense…because it was so. You can’t argue with what is.
There were a lot of challenges growing up. One of the biggest was the moving. We never lived anywhere much longer than a year. The places I consider having grown up in we lived in maybe 3 years. Most places we lived for a year or less. There were many years we moved multiple times. Sometimes into places we rented, sometimes into other people’s homes. We lived in Pa’s (my grandfather) house, into my bi-polar half-brother’s house, and my uncle’s house in Las Vegas. At one point I would have been able to get a pretty accurate count of the moves I’d done in my childhood, but at this point, I simply don’t have a number that would be close to accurate. I think dozens would be close. And, for those of you who don’t know, moving is traumatic for kids. You say goodbye to all your friends. To your teachers. Everything you know. And then you start over somewhere new, only to have it happen again months later. And, that’s also not taking the quality of the places we lived into account.
Sometimes we had bedrooms. Sometimes we slept on the couch. Sometimes the floors were level, sometimes they had pieces of plywood covering holes to the ground. Sometimes the water worked, sometimes the septic tanks would overflow and push sewage up the sink or bathtubs when it rained. These were all things that happened, that I worried about from the age of 4-17.
That was a lot of stress. It was a lot of stress that I dealt with by having close relationships with friends. That was a problem I never had. I was always good at making friends wherever we went. I used to feel jealous of people I’d meet as an adult who had more typical parents. Because, even though I was good at making friends, I wasn’t always the best at navigating difficult social situations. I didn’t do well with people who might belittle you to make themselves feel better. And, I used to blame that lack of skill on my parents (and, honestly, I wasn’t wrong). Now a days I don’t focus so much on being angry or regretful, I’m more focused on acknowledging, understanding, and trying to grow into the best person that I can be. It took a long time to get there though. My teens were an angry time. I knew the wrongness of the situations we were in, but I was powerless to change it. My complaints or statements of observations to my parents led to my farther being angry, or my mother being sad. It never resulted in change, and only led to more stress. I spent a lot of my 20s being angry too. At some point that turned into embarrassment, and then maybe denial. Not denial in the sense that I didn’t allow myself to believe it happened, but more in the way that I stopped ever talking about it to anyone, and sort of erased it from my personal story.
I don’t necessarily like making people uncomfortable. I have very little good to say about my home life as a child or about my parents. They simply did the best they could, but, there’s not much else to say. I learned most of what I knew as a child from television and the countless movies we watched (movies were only 49𝇍 back then from the video store). I never knew people talked about their families and childhoods so longingly and fondly until I moved away to college, and met people from different backgrounds than me. And yeah, I have learned that there is no such thing as the perfect TV family. Even my friends with good parents, and childhoods that don’t involve dozens of moves, they have their share of drama. Sometime’s there’s divorce, re-marriages and other forms of trauma. But, I’m here to acknowledge mine, and get it off my chest.
So, yeah. All that happened. There was also a lot of yelling. Parents being stressed that there wasn’t money to pay the bills. Yelling about not being in love anymore. Yelling that Pa was the problem. That I was the problem. Racist explanations of complex problems. There was a lot of fear and worry. As I got older there were car problems. There were girl problems. There was I smell like burnt firewood and our house has no heater problems. And through all of this there was no guide. Nobody to give advice or tell me everything was going to be okay. The feeling that you were navigating this all alone, that was probably one of the hardest parts.