02 December 2004
I woke up around one o'clock today. One of the luxuries of being unemployed is that one can sleep pretty much whatever hours one wants to sleep or is permitted to sleep by circumstances. So, I slept until one. And then woke up from a bad dream.
The bad dream involved some people who shall not be named, trying to take my child away from me. In the dream, they were waging this campaign against me, talking about how I was a terrible mother, and my house wasn't clean, and I was ugly, and I was a slut, and I didn't have much food. They said I was stupid and that I had no moral values. And that I was crazy. And they said they'd leave me alone if I gave them money. So, I gave them money. I stole money from houses. I went to the thrift store and went through all the purses for spare change. I drained my bank account (which, in my dream, had money in it...). I gave them about a thousand dollars. And then, the people had even more fuel for their fire: now, they said, I was poor, and how the hell was I going to buy food for the baby without any money?
In my dream, some court or another commanded me to turn over my baby. I woke up right before I would have had to turn her over to these people.
...And something smelled. Something smelled fucking HORRIBLE. Apparently, D. had been making something for lunch and had spilled some on the stove. It should be noted that anything we have in the house worth cooking at this point, is not exactly high-quality food. I'm pretty sure that what spilled was either Ramen noodles, or generic Rice-a-Roni. Regardless, it reeked. It took over an hour for the smell to disipate to a tolerable level.
I thought: today is not starting out very well. Maybe it will get better.
I went to the store to buy money orders for the rent.
On the way there, this car was making a right turn at an intersection. And not looking where the fuck he was going. In the process, he almost ran down an old man who was moving sort of creakily. The wife (or whomever) of the old man was creakily trying to catch up with him. The car came to a screeching halt and the driver began slamming his hands against his steering wheel and screaming what I can only imagine were rather harsh words, at the old man and the wife.
It should be noted that the old man had a big blinking WALK-WALK-WALK sign in his favor.
Well, that's just not okay with me. I'm a little bit more in touch with reality than to believe people ought to "all just get along," but it would be nice if drivers didn't act all fucking indignant and pissy because an old man was attempting to exercise his right to cross the freaking road. My gahd, what a shitty world it is when you can get cursed at for WALKING!
In an effort to avenge this injustice, I walked across the street very rapidly and then walked painstakingly slowly in front of the offending car. I didn't glance up to see if I was being cursed at. I'm sure I was. I walked heel-to-toe in front of the car, counting steps. Whatever. You don't fuck with pedestrians. Especially not ones who don't move so fast.
I got to the store and there was a LONG line of people waiting at the money-order counter. To be polite, I turned off my CD player and removed my headphones. I know I have a tendency to play my music pretty loudly. I didn't want to be rude to the people around me who may or may not appreciate my weird music.
I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
The dude in front of me was milling about, while his wife stood in line. He was holding a very small blonde baby, and a little blonde girl of about four or five was racing around, touching everything in the store and screeching "daddy, look at this!" The father wasn't paying the least bit of attention. He was busy poking at things himself. Furthermore, he wasn't paying attention to how he was holding his baby, whose head was drooping as it slept.
When the man's wife reached the counter, the man finally rejoined her. He pushed past me in line, and as he did so, he gave me this look of... what? Something like contempt, only stronger. You'd think that I bore a striking resemblance to somebody who had once shoved a hot poker up his butt.
I ignored him.
Until he began LOUDLY discussing his opinions with the clerk behind the counter -- almost shouting them -- and repeatedly glancing in my direction to see if I could hear what he was talking about...
Oh, I heard what he was talking about, all right.
He was saying that people ought to take a test before they can become parents. And they should be automatically disqualified if they don't have money, or if they don't have a job. People like that? Well, they have abortions for people like that. People like that, who can't even get jobs? How the hell are they going to provide for their children? Besides, it's not like it's that HARD or anything. No way. No way should people like that be allowed to have children. Abortions are legal, and for good reason. To keep people like that from breeding.
I don't think the man actually used the word "breeding." That might be a slight embellishment on my part. The rest of it is nearly verbatim.
Did I mention that, although he was talking to the store clerk, he kept glancing at me with disgust? Like, REALLY obviously? It was the kind of conversation that a high school kid might have about a classmate: that loud, obnoxious, "say, it sure smells like B.O. around here!" spoken loudly in front of a dweeby kid or something. It was pretty damned obvious that the man was talking about me. That he was trying to publically chastise me.
I sized up the man. He was a tiny little dude, maybe about five-foot-five, with a thin frame. He was probably about thirty, give or take. He was wearing khaki pants -- the kind that thirty-ish men wear with nice shirts when they go out clubbing. The kind with the cell phone pocket. I bet you anything he had a cell phone. His wife wore a neat, trendy little leather coat. They dressed like rich people. Like the fraternity boys and "Island Princesses" that Aaron and I used to harass mercilessly at Denny's. They were also fairly unattractive people. The man was a scrawny little squirt with an oddly-shaped face. The woman had apparently been eating all of her husband's meals for several years and all of them had settled squarely on her substantial ass. Her neat little coat didn't quite cover the massive ghetto booty this woman was strutting with.
I thought all of this in the space of about four seconds. And then I started to cry.
Not to the point where anybody noticed, really. The clerk looked at me a little bit funny because my voice was breaking up. There's an advantage to wearing microscope lenses for glasses; other people don't see the tears right away.
I felt so fucking stupid.
As if I'm not neurotic enough about being a decent mother.
As if I don't sit around wondering if I'm getting enough nutrition to supply my baby with a good set of muscles and bones and brains. As if I don't worry about whether or not I should be playing Beethoven CDs at my belly instead of the stupid oldies' station. As if I don't freak out about every doctor's test.
I spend a good portion of my life wondering how I'm going to know when she's ready for solid foods. Should I have her get the MMR shot, even though it's been linked to pervasive developmental disorders? What am I supposed to do if I see her running with scissors? How much fluoride IS good for kids? Am I really prepared to home-school her, considering it took me ten minutes to understand that 9.8 m/sec IS a constant rate of acceleration, not just a velocity? What if she doesn't like how I dress her? What if she doesn't like the food I know how to cook? What if I got really, really angry and spanked her for doing something that was really only mildly irritating?
What if Freud was right? What if I potty-train her the wrong way, and she spends a miserable adolescence cutting her wrists and injecting heroin before shooting herself at the age of fifteen? Or what if I don't breast-feed her correctly, and she ends up worshipping Eminem and joining the Marines in order to go kill some of them sand-niggers?
My gahd, I'm TERRIFIED. Of all of it. The whole damned thing.
Here's this little tiny life -- this itty-bitty, delicate thing -- that I'm supposed to be taking care of. And she trusts me completely. She trusts me with her LIFE, for crying out loud. There's some who would tell you that I'm a murderer because my first baby died before she was born. There's some part of me that believes that. There's a part of me that's fairly sure I'm completely inadequate for any of this, even the easy parts. Right now IS the easy part, I think, because I still haven't had to learn to fasten a diaper correctly, and the crying and fussing haven't begun yet. Right now, all I have to deal with is trying to maintain my own body's health. I couldn't do that before. My baby died and I almost died, and this time around, part of me is completely astounded that I haven't killed one or both of us yet.
...And yet, she trusts me enough to have picked me for her mother.
I don't think it's ever occurred to her that I might fuck this up.
But it occurs to me. ALL the time. All I can do is try my best. And hope to gahd it's enough.
As if it's not enough to wonder all of this, ALL the time, now this guy's got a judgment to make about how I ought to have had an abortion because I'm poor?
A guy who lives near me -- this weird drunk dude who is lacking in a number of the social graces -- has a Christmas tree in his apartment. He also has lights around his windows and decked out all over his computer desk. His little boy (who is, admittedly, a pest) is delighted. Tonight, the kid was helping his daddy put up a wreath.
I can't afford a tree for Christmas. And I surely can't afford lights. The best I can hope for is that I'll find a pine-like shrub someplace that I can cut branches off of. This being Western Washington -- the Evergreen state -- I don't suppose that finding such a thing will be a difficult task. And I can buy some little Russian candies and string them up with paper clips, and call them ornaments. That's festive, right? And maybe I can find a church nearby that has a midnight mass with a nice choir...
But I wonder if those things are enough? What if I'm still dead broke five or six years from now, and my daughter is sorely disappointed because she doesn't get to help decorate like the other kids? What if she's sad because I can't afford to buy her everything she wants, like other kids' parents can? What if she feels like she's missing out?
When I was a kid in elementary school, the other kids always called me a "Philly." A "Philly" was a poor person, especially of the trashy variety. A "Philly" was somebody whose mother shopped at Philadelphia Sales, a local store that was... well, pretty trashy. It always smelled like really bad popcorn, and the stairs were so old that they kind of tilted and should have been condemned. But you couldn't hold onto the railings because they were sticky. Like, REALLY sticky. It was a nasty store. It has since been torn to the ground, after at least eighty of a hundred years of serving poor people in need of school clothes for their children.
My mom shopped at Philadephia Sales. She also shopped at a discount children's clothing store. And sometimes garage sales. My first mall-bought outfit was in middle school. And everybody made fun of that because I wore it every single day.
In high school, the kids on the bus called us the "Land O'Lakes family," because our house had this huge, weird puddle in the front yard, and we didn't have the money or the know-how to fill it in with dirt. Still, our clothes were ridiculed, our house was ridiculed... We were ostracized for not having various toys that other kids had. We were tormented especially for collecting bottles and cans for redemption, and then carrying them (on foot, since I couldn't afford a car) to the grocery store for five or ten bucks.
Whenever I mentioned any of this to my parents or other adult authority figures, they'd tell me my classmates were jealous of what I had. They'd say that if some kid made fun of my Philly's boots, it was because he secretly wanted them. Only, the thing was, I knew better. I wasn't that dumb of a kid. Sometimes, I heard: "God doesn't make trash." But I wasn't THAT dumb, either. God DID make trash. Or maybe God didn't make trash, but there were sure as hell enough trashy people around me to know that somehow, they came into existence.
In my high school years, the majority of my friends were poor. Mostly because they didn't give a shit how I dressed or whether I could afford new CDs every week.
After I graduated, my friend was Aaron, and the two of us desperately tried -- maybe without even realizing it -- to live up to the stupid standards of our stupid high school. Aaron bought the nicest preppy-looking clothes for himself. I bought clothes and CDs. And when we found ourselves dead broke, we went through dumpsters for cans to redeem. Once, we made twenty-five dollars selling dumpster finds in a garage sale. Our secret -- the one we alone shared -- was that we were still broke. That we were still the same trashy kids who got tormented in school. That underneath the new outfits, the stereo equipment, the leather jacket, the cell phone -- underneath, we were still poor white trash who went through dumpsters for gas money and coffee money. I think, though, that everybody knew it. It's just that, most times, once you're out of high school, people are slightly more respectful than to say it to your face.
And was I happy?
Yes.
No.
A little of both.
It wasn't, all in all, a bad life then. I had a library card. And a couple of decent friends whom I loved dearly. I slept in a relatively comfortable bed for a lot of years. I always had at least two meals a day, even if a good majority of them were somewhat crappy.
But it was so lonely... It was so, so lonely... I didn't have much of a family at home for a few years. Without a pretty solid family to tell you otherwise, it hurts like a bitch to be told, day in and day out, that there's something wrong with you, that you're poor, that you're dirty trash. Being an untouchable isn't so bad, really. It's not a bad life, really. It just gets desperately lonely.
I don't want that for my kid.
I never gave a shit, personally speaking, about what I had or didn't have. There were a few things I would have liked that I didn't have, but I did okay without. And I never gave a shit what my friends had or didn't have. The Java Kids especially always seemed to be kind of broke, but none of us gave a shit one way or the other. Somebody always came up with money for coffee, cigarettes, and a pesto sandwich, and that was all we needed.
I know damn well that money doesn't make the person.
The people I have loved most in the world have, for the most part, been less than rich. I know that money isn't nearly as valuable as people suppose.
But I just don't want my daughter to be subjected to assholes like the guy in the store today... People who think poor people shouldn't have compulsory abortions. I don't want her to be subjected to this world's awful assumption that all poor people are lazy, worthless, and undeserving of respect. Seems like poor people are treated as inhuman.
The weird thing is, most of the poor people I know are intelligent, hard-working, extraordinary people. Oh, a few of them really are lazy fucks, but for the most part, there's something preventing them from getting a decent job: a shitty economy, an inadequate resume, a disability... or the fact that it's hard as hell to get a job when you have no money. In order to get a job, one requires a resume, and to have a resume, one requires a printer. Or money for printing out resumes at copy stores. It takes decent clothing and bus fare. And guess what? Even if I had the money for bus fare, and even if I had some decent clothing, I don't have money to do my damned laundry, so my decent clothing isn't actually CLEAN... Plus, to get a job, you've got to have a phone, preferably an internet connection, and an address. Sure, I'm smart, and I've got a Bachelor's degree, and I've got a somewhat decent work history; but from the end of May all the way up to August, I had no phone and no address. Not to mention that I had almost NO clothing, and my bus fare was iffy at best.
And my daughter's going to come into a world where people honestly think it's your own fault if you're not fucking rich enough to do laundry more than once a month.
You know, I actually have a friend who believes that capitalism, as a system, is perfectly fine, and that there are PLENTY of opportunities for anybody who wants to make money. She wrote that she knows there are plenty of poor people, but, you know, this is America, land of the free, and it's easy enough to make your own way if you work hard enough... I really do like this girl, but sometimes things like this seem so naive to me. That mentality INFURIATES me. It only ends up contributing to this widespread belief that poor people are deficient. Perhaps even deficient to the point where they should be given compulsory abortions?
How can I explain?
How can I make this entire world see that my life has GREAT worth, even if none of that worth is monetary?
How can I make sure that my daughter grows up knowing that the worth of her life has nothing to do with money? How can I make sure nobody's ever this cruel to her?
Sometimes I despise things about this world. I truly hate how most people think about each other, and treat each other.
Maybe somehow, today will get better...
~Helena*