In 2014 I began opening up the reality of my life to a small group of friends. Last year I tried to go further. Each month, I wanted to share with my greater community an insider's look at one of the ways poor people don't have the *choices* taken for granted in our society... not looking for help for my family, but looking to help good people understand how what is simple in solvency becomes layered in complications with poverty.
This second aspect is easily the most important and most complicated of them all, because "life is with people." Really, #1 The Look is only a prequel to #2 Connections, because looks only matter because of their huge impact on how people connect to us.
So trying to write this ate up the whole year, and I'm still frightened of how short it falls of what needs to be conveyed.
I've tried splitting it up, breaking it down, and there really is no way to do that without reducing the reality.
So I am starting it the way we all started, with a very, very young child, laying out his neural map of how human connections work-- the potential and probability of all people, everywhere and forever-- from the people around him right now.
---
"Old people are like dogs... they do anything for attention!"
My child is listening. The man is speaking-- loudly, on and on-- inches away from my two year old's head. We're at the public counter at the Pike Place Market; our hummus and crackers and my child himself are all on the counter in front of the one stool that finally opened up. This man and his friend took the stools beside us, and have spent their lunchtime raining rancor on their old relations, too old, too slow, too much time, too much trouble, why don't they just d--?
All this, at length, straight into my child's ears. I hum and sing and catch my child's eye as I think of all the "old people" who are the center of his happiness. He opens his little mouth wide again. He is so hungry, it was such a long bus trip and walk and then we had to wait so long for a seat. He is finally getting to eat; I can't move us now.
I am not an envious person, but when I look out the window at the people eating at private tables in the restaurant across the alley from us, I am drowning in envy.
"No. No. No." My child is watching as the white men in uniform let the black woman (such a thin tank top for December) talk herself out. They pace her all around our little neighborhood playground and the low income housing behind it. A teenage girl comes out expertly balancing a child a little younger than mine on her hip, coming out to say goodbye while other residents crowd behind the cracked blinds. The police are patient. They wait until the woman has exhausted herself past protest before actually formalizing the arrest and loading her into their car, parked across the street from our twin slides.
My child is listening as my homeless friend describes being cornered and groped in her shelter by one of the regular male residents. We walk her safely past the openly smirking man in question who has been following her through the streets. Several blocks later she hugs me, tells my child to be good, and disappears. We never know when we will see her again.
My child is watching as his father and I snap off the music and fling open the windows, straining to hear whether the shrieking outside is punctuated by the sound of blows again.
My child is in my arms when the intoxicated driver blocking two disabled parking spaces unleashes a stream of filth upon me for daring to ask him to move.
My child is watching over my shoulder, his body rigid against mine, when the man gets out of his truck to come after us.
*Shweeeenk ka-chunk* The gun is unholstered, passed, unloaded, and gone in two seconds. The guest relaxes into a chair; the host disappears briefly into another room and returns empty-handed and my child, a few feet away on the floor, is watching it all.
We do not live on Sesame Street.
My child is two years old at the time of all this. Even by the standards of two year olds he watches and listens and ponders with an intensity so fierce that adults who barely know him stop in their tracks to *watch him thinking.* The main brain work of a two year is the mystery of human connections.
At two years old, intolerance, shame, adult fear, and the possibility of violence are becoming just part of life like the weather we walk through, and he is watching and listening to it all.
Meanwhile every solvent toddler I know lives on a moving, Rated-G island, transported by car from one sanitized, specialized environment to another.
For the most part, connections are the one great wealth of our little family, the one resource we have not lost. We have been blessed with a tiny extended family that does not quit, and friends with unending hope, humor, and insight. For the most, part, too, our kith and kin, my academic peers and mentors, and our congregational community are fairly stable, well-read, and well-off in their daily needs.
To preserve this one wealth, my family watches what we say. We try to keep our balance between cutting people out and telling them more than anyone could handle. We swallow the constant shame and awkwardness of never being able to return a dinner invitation, produce a birthday present, join in a restaurant outing, offer to meet someone for coffee, or even return a casserole dish properly filled and in a timely manner.
These people are our thousand thread-thin links to a less-cramped world: a world in which art matters, progress happens, and the preciousness of each human spirit is taken for granted. A gentle rain of material, spiritual, intellectual, social, creative, and compassionate nourishment flows into our lives along these human connections.
My child watches and listens and drinks in this, too. He begs continuously to visit a particular couple renowned for their hospitality. They have created a home of beauty in all its forms, a home full of laughter, learning, and kindness. He gravitates toward it like a flower to sunlight.
Humans are born with the capacity to recognize peace and wholeness; it is the ability to create it that must be learned.
Most people who are as poor as we are will never have that chance to learn.
I once brought a friend, low income, to dinner with me with this same couple. For months afterwards she talked about it like a fairy tale peasant who had been transported for one night to dine at the palace. She'd never before been in a home where everything actually worked, where there was space to sit and enough to eat and most of all where the hosts were rested and centered enough to be gentle with one another and open-hearted with all their guests, a place where everything had been thought of and anything missed was not a big deal to fix. She had never experienced anything like it. She was thirty-nine.
For the fifteen years that I had known her-- one of the smartest, hardest-working, and most careful planners I have ever met-- she had been trying to create a functional life... without ever actually having known anyone who had one.
Please, pause one second to read that again. For fifteen years, she had been trying to create a functional life... without ever actually having known anyone who had one.
Think about that.
That is the position of most of our neighbors. They are poor people from poor families with poor friends. They work alongside poor people, and the devout among them belong to poor congregations renting space in basements and back-rooms. Access to the internet and email are mostly fragile, irregular, or absent.
"Toss the toxic people" from life? "No one needs negativity"? Advice for people who have the privilege of picking and choosing their human resources. Try following that advice when a family member shows up beaten black and blue and begging for crash space, again. That chain-smoking old woman who never stops complaining? Keep her on your side, she's the only adult trustworthy enough to watch the kids after-school. And you don't want to be telling your best friend any bad news about her fourteen year old daughter when you are depending on the girl to come with you every day to hold your four month old baby in her arms in the backseat on the drive home from daycare.
These are the conditions in which a mother is capable of ignoring the clear signs that her husband is raping her daughter; these are the conditions in which a daughter is capable of hiding those signs from her mother.
Opportunities for simple friendships are more rare in lives with not enough resources and too much unpredictability. There is no money, no time, no brain for hobby groups, or shopping around to find the best fit in a spiritual community, or making it the extra two miles to the Alcoholics Anonymous group where everyone laughs instead of the group down the block where fights break out. And hardly anybody volunteers with a nonprofit organization, because hardly anybody has it in them to go meet, greet, advocate, and do good for strangers when your brother's girlfriend is hiding out from her ex in your kid's room and grandma's best friend needs a lift to the hospital asap because her grandson's tires finally blew out and his car crashed but you need to be back home by 10:30pm when your own best friend's sister's son is going to swing by after work to see if he can do anything about your toilet so you won't have to have the landlord in when you've got your brother's girlfriend hiding out from her ex in your kid's room. Comfort-based boundaries are a non-issue when the consequences of not being there for the people in your life is that somebody's going to lose their job, going to lose their home, going to lose their family, going to go to prison, going to die, and you know this happens because you've seen it happen but you are not going to let it happen to your own. So you skip another meal, skip another shower, give up another couple hours of sleep and scream at your kids to get that homework done in the pinched hope that they won't lose their one shot of getting out of this place as you head out the door to do what needs doing for somebody you may not even like.
Let's not even get into the strain of the involuntary relationships unique to poverty-- social workers-- generally regarded by the solvent as professional do-gooders and by those of us who are not solvent as a fiendish combination of dentist and I.R.S. auditor. That's the bedrock of #6 Government, which I hope like hell I'll manage to write up someday, but it's also an extension of the profane power of all involuntary relationships over the poor. The sales help. The bank clerk. The fellow driver asked for directions. The supervisor standing by the hospital's policy of not accepting a third party check as I stood there sobbing with the money from Family Services clutched in my hand, my starving newborn in his father's arms, and the breastpump we needed on the other side of the counter. Poverty in general means greater unmet needs, more need for help fulfilling those needs, and far less likelihood of getting that help. Poverty kills off your people skills, I said once; I don't have a better way to put it than that.
Generalities, not only in how we are seen, but in how we see, play a huge role in setting the tone of what connections we can make. We are forced to look at the same societal big pictures from a very different angle. My tiny child's world is sharply divided into Jewish-community spaces that are clean and cheerful and welcoming and full of pale people with "good" English versus our neighborhood spaces that are dirty and chaotic and wary and full of the skin-shades and tongue-tones of the Mid-East, West Africa, Southeast Asia. Don't think he doesn't notice. Don't think all the little children in this neighborhood don't notice. Don't think that we who are immigrant, refugee, elderly, of many colors, of many radically differing abilities-- we who are too many who must share too little-- are not keenly, bitterly, and constantly aware of the lines of identity and privilege among us. Nobody on this block is colorblind or cultureblind; it takes an astonishing amount of insulation to build up that kind of blindness. We have to leap to lightning-fast judgments of people and situations, for the sake of safety, and yes, we must lean heavily on probabilities, and prior experiences in making these assessments. It's a good idea to make eye contact and share a few words with my neighbor when he's out walking his toy dog and it's not a good idea to do so when he's out working the corner as a lookout for the new heroin dealer, and these are assessments I need to make as my child and I step out to take our garbage to the dumpster.
Big pictures, different details. For my solvent friends finding a way to both house our own homeless and take in more refugees is an abstract ethical imperative, and I assure you that I have no less sense of the ethics and the imperative, but, with all due respect, my friends, you are not watching street people die because their shot at a home got pushed back another couple years while the logistics get straightened out, you are not watching the refugee families already here drowning in the phenomenal alienation and hardship of the America that I live in, and I am watching this with my child.
"My" child...
Very few marriages survive poverty, the ability to travel to see friends or aging relatives becomes a thing of dreams, but there is no human connection more primal than this one.
In poverty, we live in fear of our children being eaten alive by a system more relentless, more nonsensical, and more traumatic than any monster in the cloest.
Every single time my child is within a foot of a faucet I think of the mother I met as she held and rocked her four year old as services were on their way to take her child away. They were homeless, brown, and didn't have good English-- three strikes, stigma-style-- so when the child had grabbed the faucet getting washed at a friend's house, splashed a palm-sized second degree burn to the leg, that's all she wrote.
Privilege isn't just resources; privilege is, fundamentally, one's chances of being listened to and believed.
And the most ineffable wound of all is this burden of raising up our children in the company of our fear that we may not be able to raise up our children.
