The Price of Poverty

When I left home

and began my education at Maryland Institute College of Art, I didn’t tell anyone where I came from. I winced each and every time someone nonchalantly asked, “ So, what do your parents do?” or “ Who have you studied with?”

These inquires were so offhandedly made, I immediately understood the people making them had the advantage. There was already the assumption that I came from a different world, from a two parent partnership with economic, social, and upward mobility; from parents with real career achievements. A majority of my peer’s parents were doctors, lawyers, and other upper-class professionals. As such, certain opportunities were expected. I didn’t realize all this when I went away to school. But it became clear people with my background were in the minority in a place where the tuition was more than forty-five grand a year. After all, an art education is a gamble and people with financial stability are far more likely to take such risks.

I was in competition with students who possessed an arsenal of paints, brushes, and an endless supply of canvas. I remember one Russian student in my class worked on 8ft canvases and wheeled her paints into the room inside a giant trunk! At the time, I was creating abstract paintings on brown cardboard repurposed from my moving boxes. I could only afford 3 tubes of paint.

Criticism always hurts a little, especially at first. But, with time you become less reactive and more reflective. That being said, I’ll never forget the sting of my fellow classmate’s criticism of me in a formal critique. The young cultured woman from Russia accused me of not really caring about art because of my choice of materials.

She had no idea how important art was to me. She didn’t know that art truly changed my life. Art was my religion. I clung to it the way a drowning person clings to a floating branch. It was the only thing that kept my head above water. It provided a place of refuge and I submerged my thinking and feeling in the quiet contemplative act of pressing pencils and brushes against blank paper and canvas. My home life was anything but serene, yet through the act of creating something new, I too could become a tabula rasa and fashion a new self through the process of imagination and restorative practice.

I was one of the lucky people. I escaped into the magical realm of the arts. But, among the elite, I felt like an outsider looking in.

Sometimes, the sense of trepidation has been nearly insurmountable in social situations. Even today, though I have a deeper sense of peace with my past, I struggle with the necessity to be true to myself because I am all too aware that where I am from is not a comfortable place for most.

I have never known how to matter-of-factly explain my familial situation. Once, I would have side stepped the question of my parentage, and at times even lied to get out of the difficulty of meeting that conversation with candor. But I have determined that it is my duty to be earnest and to embrace my whole self with the kind of audacious self-love that I deserve. And, if it makes other people uncomfortable, it is because they need to grow along with me.

So now, I tell people, I offer the information, that I am the daughter of a schizophrenic mother… because I believe that this conversation is necessary. Because the inhuman treatment of those without the ability to articulate their own plight requires us to champion them. I have to say, I am extremely appalled with the political climate, and this perplexing embrace of a Darwinian approach in regards to our future.

If it had not been for all the gentle souls who assisted me and mentored me, all of the programs available to needy students and gifted artists, and all the financial support I have received, I would not be here today. I hail from a woman who never worked a day in her life. My mother lived on SSI and was resigned to a mostly morbid and desolate existence. I was raised by my grandmother on her social security checks. My grandmother owned her own house, but she lacked the funds to maintain it and it fell apart piece by piece around her, until the ceiling caved inside the kitchen and you could see the sky through a hole in the roof.

I come from a blue collar place where the average education level, when I was growing up, was the 10th grade. I was raised in an environment where I listened to my mother’s disorganized speech. My mother and my grandmother never graduated high school. My grandmother often misspoke. So, I have feared mispronunciation, or the use of an improper tense.

No doubt, I have overcome, through education and reading, a great deal. But, there isn’t a week that goes by without some mistake—a hot flush of my ears and cheeks—an embarrassment. It is humbling to have read as much as I have, and to have loved knowledge as deeply as I have, to have caressed words in books and recited passages until I have learned them by heart, and yet to know that there is always something more, some history, some reminder of past limitations that I have yet to vanquish.

I think it is important to remember that there are people with insights in this country, and of course all over the world, who do not speak up from a fear that a single sentence will give them away. That they may be susceptible to ridicule for some limitation that is not within their control. There are people who (rightly) fear that they are unwelcome, and there are people who believe they are not knowledgeable enough to partake in the conversation of the future, even though that conversation most certainly includes them. It is no secret, that as a society, we like to shame people to keep them quiet.

I have wondered on many occasions, times when I have faked it in order to get ahead, if I am a fraud. I often fear that I will be dismissed because of that part of me I am unable to overcome or successfully hide.

There is a lot of shame in poverty. People don’t respect the poor, or the uneducated. There is a great divide in this country, and it is the absence of shared language and experiences. And perhaps, even more threatening to our survival is a lack of empathy or the cultivation of empathy.

How do I explain to strangers that my mother never graduated high school, that she was a pregnant teenager with a low IQ and learning disabilities? That a lack of quality healthcare, and awareness, meant that treatment and early intervention never happened, that life for my family has been a constant struggle?

Experiences make a life. My experience taught me what poverty looks like from the inside looking out. I watched my mother come home week-after-week with wads of bloody gauze in her mouth, and pools of coagulated blood stiffening her pillow after multiple tooth extractions. A poor person doesn’t even ask why, but the short answer is that Medicaid doesn’t pay to fix really bad teeth, it only pays to remove them.

Poverty looks like a thirty-three year old woman who has lost all of her teeth and her dignity. My mother waited years for a pair of dentures that were so poorly made, she couldn’t stand to wear them when she ate… It meant being so drugged up on prescription meds she accidentally left her new teeth on a fast food tray. It meant hours passed before she realized she smiled with her gums. It meant the indignity of watching my mother jump into a dumpster in the parking lot. It meant this poor, frantic woman was braving the rats because she knew she might not be granted another set of teeth.

It meant she had greasy, half chewed, rotten food all over— But she didn’t find her teeth because sifting through that dumpster was like sifting through sand, and her whole life was passing through her fingers. Standing in the muck and the grime, robbed of her sanity and any hope of escape from poverty, she was engaging in yet another futile act. The quicksand of poverty, and the loss of her dignity was already such a part of her. What happens to people when their whole lives they are up against it ? Up to her head in rotten-shit, my mother couldn’t see straight. She was panicked. And when a person is panicked, running scared, then they are just running from one crisis into another.

Poverty takes a ninety pound woman and turns her into someone floundering under the burden of more than double her weight. Improper healthcare, diabetes, medicine related thyroid disease, lack of nutrition - all these things- change a person.

Try living on Welfare or Disability. It’s not living. When someone is severely schizophrenic, and doesn’t have the cognitive ability to scramble an egg, she must choose between cigarettes (which increase serotonin, and bring moments of clarity) and food.

When my mother became extremely ill and I entered her small, dimly-lit, and roach infested apartment, I found only jars of grape jelly in the fridge, and grape popsicles in the freezer. I sifted through her dirty clothes, looking for something to take to the hospital, only to realize that my mother was so poor she didn't own underwear.

I had to sift through sweat-ringed pants, all inside-out, only to find, that after I turned them the right way, they were more yellowed because she had been wearing them on both sides. She couldn’t afford to do laundry…

I found a bag of rolling tobacco and rolling papers without finding filters. Poverty means not buying regular cigarettes. Poverty means not paying that little bit, that pocket change, to filter the smoke.

For a decade, insurance did not cover her replacement dentures. She went on a list. For years. And just when it looked like she was going to have a new mold of her gums, insurance stopped providing for teeth and eyes. It was as if the government decided she could do without both. How would you feel without eyes and teeth?

My mother couldn't cover her regular bills. She could never save for those "extra" things. Living without teeth limited what she could eat. This, in combination with an insanely limited food budget, meant malnourishment.

The price of my mother’s poverty meant that she would have inadequate representation and followup. She would have psychotic episodes and lock everyone out-- stop answering her phone. Sometimes she lost electricity, or the phone was turned off. She was so sick, she hid in her apartment with a broken foot and didn't seek treatment.

Eventually, my mother would be found unresponsive. She would nearly die in her apartment, and narrowly escape a brain hemorrhage and aggressive pneumonia.

I had to put my mother on life support. Watch her face bloat to twice its size. See her change into someone unrecognizable. Her fingers swollen to the size of sausages. Her skin splitting at the seams.

It felt like a miracle when my mother was able to get off life-support. Fortunately, she had the benefit of a watchdog; she had someone demanding answers from doctors. They had to look someone in the eyes.

I was lucky; I could camp out for two months; I could be there. Not everyone can leave a job. Move temporarily to another state. Find comfort and a place to rest on the couches and in the spare bedrooms of friends. Not everyone has a network.

Also, for people on the outskirts of society, having an advocate is rare. I understand that my mother was one of the "lucky ones." She had health insurance and SSI benefits. She lived in one of the better States for a person on Disability. But what she had was hardly adequate. Prevention is worth a hell of a lot more than maintenance after the shit hits the fan. The status quo isn't good enough, we need to do better.

How much did it cost to keep a woman alive on a ventilator, for round the clock care in Intensive Care, for the rehab that ensued, and to keep a person maintained in a nursing home for the rest of her natural life? Certainly the money could have been put to greater use preventing such a tragedy.

The price of poverty is great. It means you don't have a choice in how the script gets written. It means you don't have a choice how the money is allocated. It means you get what you get. Poverty means that at the age of fifty-eight, my mother’s permanent residence is a nursing home. And, it has been her residence for the last seven years.

The price of my mother’s poverty and poor mental health is chronic pneumonia. Continual emergency departures from the nursing facility into Intensive Care. It means black and blue arms from IV lines. Bruise swatches that look like giant ink stains across her belly… It means four insulin injections a day. Oxygen 24/7 with breathing machines and treatments that bring only temporary relief. A full-face respirator mask every night.

My mothers’ poverty resulted in inadequate mental health care and treatment, advanced COPD and congestive heart failure. My experience has taught me that poverty is an absolute evil. It robs people of their loved ones. It beats people down into the gutter and it makes them feel unworthy and ashamed.

I don’t know why so many people want to keep the status-quo. I can’t understand how in the richest country in the history of the planet, we have such poverty. I can’t understand why we are not ashamed. This is where the shame is. It reside here in our hearts. It weighs heavily on our collective conscience. I can’t understand how we don’t see it as a cancer on our collective souls. I wonder how many depressed people do we have to have in this country before we recognize that a future without hope, without a safety net, is simply not a future at all.

We blame the poor, instead of looking deep into our own hearts. It should be the goal of society to invest in its people and to protect them from hopelessness. I only see the benefits of a society in which suffering is mitigated. Giving people a living wage, education, and good healthcare, should not be considered a revolutionary act. It is, at it’s heart, the beginning of what is truly Democratic. These thing would be an equalizer in our society. They would bring about a change in perception.

I would happily pay more taxes to provide a real safety net for the vulnerable. That safety net isn't really a handout, but an opportunity. If there were more social workers, addiction programs, more visiting nurses, counselors, teachers, etc., the world would be a friendlier place. Caregivers wouldn't be under siege, or burn out as easily. More good people would have jobs and less people would fall through the cracks.

Imagine how much better we could feel if there were no homeless people to pass on the streets each day. Imagine that sick feeling you carry in the pit of your stomach gone. These unwanted people in our society are family members and neighbors. As individuals, we cannot help everyone; but together, we can.

Maybe I can see it most clearly, because of my experience, but I can’t understand why one would have to have such intimate knowledge to recognize the truth.

I wonder, will you love my mother?

She is a beautiful person.

I can only hope, that through my experience, and being open about where I come from, I might convince people not to write off the poor, or the mentally ill, but to invest in good faith in an egalitarian future. A future where education is open to everyone. A future where we extend the olive branch to the stranger amongst us. I do not think it is so radical to choose the road to inclusion. It is a difficult path. But I believe we must awaken to the knowledge of our common vulnerability. No one is immune.

Can we build a humane future, instead of a road leading to our own destruction?

I don’t know what it will take to convince people. I can only hope individual voices, and conversations— this kind of honesty—will give us the moral courage to transform the sadnesses here. Whether we know it or not, it is our sadness too.

*