Sometimes when people talk about the difference between growing up “not rich” and growing up “poor”, my mind wanders towards the whole idea behind safety nets.
I’ve been cleaning the basement out lately, which includes rearranging stuff in the crawlspace/storage area. Which means I’ve found a few boxes we haven’t unpacked since moving back here in 2016. Stuff from the old trailer. Picture frames and baby clothes and toys my children have outgrown (because three years is a long time, and my babies are old, now).
It makes me partly nostalgic, partly anxious. Remembering what it’s like to be in your early 20s, with a kid and no fucking clue where your life is going or how to get ahead. I don’t know how we survived them. That Filipino idiom “clutching a knife’s edge” described our situation so perfectly. I remember the worst was when my husband got fired from his job (for falling asleep in a warehousing graveyard shift–because he was taking care of our 2-year-old while I went to school during the daytime). He wasn’t making a lot–in fact, he was making less than what we needed every month to live on at bare minimum. And we were relying on the extra pay from him doing a graveyard shift. I seriously thought about dropping out of school. We managed to figure out a childcare situation with the help of my parents and a close friend, and I continued college slowly, with courses here and there. Some days I was running from lab straight to wherever my daughter was getting cared for.
What is it like coming from the lower classes? It’s having few, if any, safety nets. My immigrant parents can help if I mess up, but not forever–they don’t exactly have a nest egg for themselves, either, and are only getting by because they’re employed. If one of them loses a job, their finances will also tank. There is no situation where I can ask them to pay our mortgage, let alone take care of us for a month or two.
We come from a family where people worked their asses off, and then some, and even then it’s like…living with a gun pointed to your head. Your whole life. Even when you have extra money, every dollar is weighed against the potential of it saving your life–should this go to groceries first? What happens if someone loses their job? How long can we maintain what we have until we can find another one? This is further complicated by the fact that everyone within my immediate family work in highly skilled, specialized environments. This means always being at the top of your game just to be able to bring food to the table–just to have what some people consider the basics. Shelter. Transportation. Clothes. Not having to think about starving tomorrow. Maybe even a bit of dignity.
About three weeks ago, someone rammed into the back of my husband’s work van in broad daylight, in regular traffic. Just minding your own business, following the rules, and someone decides hey, they weren’t going to apply to her. He walked out okay, but is still suffering from whiplash and vertigo. The first couple of days from the accident, he pretty much just slept, and I wondered how the hell we were going to survive if he could no longer work the physically demanding, labour-intensive job he gets paid well for. We’ll be fucked again. I’d go back to work myself, but supposing I did get hired with a three-year gap on my resume, I’d earn much less than he is now which means I’d have to take a second job on top of that.
There it goes, the anxiety. Anxiety about every decision, weighed against its potential to save or minimize damage to a life where anything could go wrong at any moment. I’m tired, but then I look at my children and think I don’t want that for them. A generation ago, my mom was an orphan in a rural part of the Philippines, scrounging for food to eat from the woods to supplement what little her elder half-brothers and half-sisters could spare. We’ve come a long way since then. We need to keep pushing forward, I tell myself. Because you’re either going up or you’re going down. Not having safety nets means all you’ve got is yourselves and even though sometimes it fills you with pride to have gotten far (we’re certainly no longer in our trailer days anymore), most days it just leaves this blood-curdling sense of impending danger. What happens tomorrow? How do I continue to protect the people I love in the face of uncertainty?
I don’t have an answer, but it sure provides great fuel for my fiction.
