It’s a Friday and it’s raining when you wake up at
7:30. You meant to get up at 5:30 to get
an early start on work, but the rain sounded so nice and your bed and partner
were so warm that you drifted off, thinking it’s Friday, that you’ve got all
weekend to finish your work. At that gray hour you don’t remember the mound of
graduate school homework you’ve got, and it seems reasonable to close your eyes
again. So you sleep in, and the kids actually wake you up. You make chocolate milk for one, coffee for
yourself, and tell the oldest there’s instant oatmeal, or they can ask their
father to make Malt-O-Meal when he leaves the toilet.
She wants to know can she have chocolate chips in her
oatmeal. Yes, you say, because you’re
feeling indulgent after receiving some food stamps. She wants to know how many. You think for a moment and then say “Nine.” You’d been down to a couple freeze pops and a
few items that didn’t really make a meal of any kind when your case had finally
gone through the system. You felt like
shit that you couldn’t buy your daughter any new clothes for her first day of
Kindergarten, but she looked good anyway and didn’t seem to mind. You’re glad your kids remain young enough to
be comforted by a chocolatey after-school snack, that they’re too young to know
what it means to live below the poverty line.
To say you are grateful for the public assistance is an
understatement.
Your coffee’s ready so you trudge upstairs in your pajamas,
because you know you have to go out later and you’ll shower then, so why bother
with a bra and real pants now. Working
at home as a medical transcriptionist is fabulous and you know you’re lucky to
be able to pick and choose your hours in order to get your master’s degree, to
have a job already set up wherever you go. Your son and daughter come in and out of your
office, interrupting you and asking you to get them things from downstairs even
though their father is downstairs. You
send them down to ask him most of the time, but sometimes you take breaks to
give them a bath or make them lunch.
