I’VE BEEN DOING THIS THING with my mom where I ask her really personal questions. I’m no longer a teenager so I see the value in her words and experiences. Her grandmother was born a slave! My mom’s filled with interesting things to say. I always feel like a real adult when I sit across from her and ask her horribly intrusive questions and then she answers them honestly. For this conversation, we were sitting around my dining-room table in my small yet expensive and kind of fancy apartment in New York City. The last time the two of us sat at this table, we were trying to mend fences after a fight. I had hurt my mother’s feelings, but apologizing wasn’t enough since she thought I’d hurt her on purpose. The fight had dragged on for months and was still pretty alive. I remember yelling at her, “You see these walls? You see these ceiling-to-floor windows? This apartment that I live in alone? It’s EXPENSIVE! I pay for it all by myself, and when you need my help, I pay for your walls, too! I don’t have the time to plan out something terrible to do to you! I’m not plotting on how to purposely hurt your feelings. I’m a grown-up and I’m too busy working to keep roofs over our heads to take the time to try to hurt you!”
That fight was pretty intense, but on this day Mom and I were fine. Neither of us were mad, and I was realizing how little time we actually got to spend with each other. I thought, Now’s a great time to get to know her as a person instead of just a mom.
“Do you think you have more money than your parents had?” I asked.
“Definitely,” she answered. “Daddy hauled lumber and MaDear cleaned white folks’ houses for a dollar a day. I didn’t know we were poor, though. MaDear would get stuff from the people she worked for. They’d give her a broken TV or broken chairs, and we would fix them up. MaDear made our couch! And Daddy was so smart. He gave the whole neighborhood electricity. Daddy fixed a broken TV, and we were the only family in the neighborhood who had one. People used to come over every night to watch. House was always full of people so . . . I didn’t know we were poor. We were popular. I had a great time!”
I envied her childhood. I envy her adulthood sometimes, too. Once when Mom and I were in a different fight, different yet the same as that other fight (Moms! Am I right?), she said to me, “I guess it’s harder to raise children in New York City. I had a great life growing up in Georgia. It’s too bad you didn’t get to experience happiness like I did as a child.”
Aunt Dorothy was my mother’s sister. She was the only person I knew who had a staircase in her house like people on TV. The rest of my mother’s family, who lived in one-level homes in the South, didn’t have staircase money, but Aunt Dorothy did.
As for us, when we left my father, we went from a three-bedroom apartment to just one room in that house, so the staircase turned out to be beside the point. My brother and I weren’t really allowed out into the rest of the house, so our one room was where we lived. My mom bought a TV and a microwave for our room. It dawned on me that finally we were poor. Actually poor! No matter how little I asked of my mother, no matter how much I worried, we were poor anyway. My nightmares had come true.
I was always worried about money as a child. At the age of seven, I’d be really excited to go get the mail, and I complained that the only people who got any mail were my parents. My dad joked that he should put the electric bill in my name. I didn’t get my dad’s humor back then as it so rarely showed its head. I panicked. I had never thought about paying bills before, but all of a sudden I was responsible for keeping the electricity on in the entire apartment! Again, I wasn’t. But I was forever changed and made aware that everything had a cost.
While I didn’t yet know that we were poor, I knew we weren’t rich because we weren’t white. Back then I thought that being rich was only for white people and Michael Jackson. We lived in a three-bedroom apartment with two bathrooms and a terrace in Brooklyn. Of course we weren’t poor! Duh! But I started asking how much everything cost. I was worried about what we could afford. I stopped begging for things, and started asking, “Can you afford to buy me this?” while ready to accept the answer if it was no. (I don’t remember if I ever got an answer at all. I probably didn’t.) When my parents asked what I wanted for Christmas or my birthday, I would comb through the Toys“R”Us catalog in the weekly paper for toys I didn’t necessarily want, but that I felt were inexpensive enough. I was just doing my part to keep us from being poor. Maybe I am a good person?
After we moved, I blamed our new poverty on my father, who was still in our old three-bedroom apartment that was basically a mansion compared to our new standard of living, and I was pissed. As an adult, as soon as I figured out I didn’t want to grow up in Brooklyn anyway, I assigned less blame on my father, at least moving-wise, but when I was a child, it was really comforting to place blame on him for our situation. I had worried myself into believing that if I wasn’t selfish I could keep my family from living on the streets. I’d conned myself when I was just a child into being responsible for an entire family. Fuck that noise. It was really nice to come face-to-face with my fear and get to blame it on someone else. I truly hated my father then, and that hate brought me a calming joy for a while. A peace of mind. It wasn’t my fault. It was his. Now I can just go back to being a kid!