Lived Through This
As a Former Poor Person, Grocery Shopping Still Makes Me Anxious
Growing up just south of Detroit, Michigan in the 1980s, my girlfriends and I played a game called “MASH” that was supposed to predict what kind of house we’d live in. We’d dream about being “rich” or famous and many of our conversations revolved around how glamorous our future lives would be.
Oddly, I never realized my family was on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Yes, food was restricted to meal times only and sometimes, there was “welfare cheese,” but everyone around me lived a similar life. Some kids were even poorer with no heat and worn-out clothes. My family, however, always had a roof over our heads, heat, and new school clothes. (Dressing appropriately for school was a huge deal in my family, and we only wore those clothes to school.)
There was also this sense that college was a waste of money — especially for a girl. My grandfather had dropped out of school in the 10th grade and both my parents only graduated high school. (To be fair, this was normal in the 1970s.) Still, I studied hard and pushed myself to take the hardest classes I could and get good grades because college was my goal. So when my dad made me take a typing class so I could get a good job as a secretary, I was furious. I wanted to be the boss, not the secretary. This…
