Reply #239: I think poor kids should get Oscars or some kind of academic credit for mastering invisibility.

[EFerrari]

This isn't to let dead beat parents off the hook or any adult that could have taken a step. They are responsible.

But, this thread has made me remember how much of a second "job" hiding our poverty was for me while I was in my early teens right through high school.

I have no idea where I got the idea that you should hide poverty. In all honesty, I probably didn't even know what the word meant or maybe I believed it meant other people, not us.

We lived in a segregated suburb in Silicon Valley and my mom was an executive. She supported me and my brother and my grandmother and her attendant and somewhere in all of that, things unraveled.

But, those "things" weren't supposed to "unravel" in our neighborhood, so we just soldiered on. I don't know what my mom went through, exactly, except that she was working without any net at all. At some point, she stopped being able to work at all.

I only remember feeling embarrassed because I didn't have the quarter for a popsicle on Fridays. In those days, the school provided everything from books to pencils so that Friday treat was the only thing that could go wrong. I could usually find stuff at home to pack for my lunch and my school didn't have a cafeteria. When I couldn't find anything to eat for lunch, I just didn't eat lunch but I also didn't tell anybody. Sometimes I walked home at lunchtime anyway because it was something to do with the time. If my friends asked, I just said I forgot my lunch or lost it.

As things got worse, I stopped asking my friends over to play and I stopped going to their houses very much. Worrying if Mom was going to be home for dinner and then, worrying what I would find to cook for my brother if I could find him. I was eleven and he was six.

Shortly after, there was no money for so many things but I remember my mom telling me, there was none for clothes. We had a sewing machine, though, so, I learned how to sew and used to walk to the discount store and look for the cheapest fabric I could find to make my school clothes. That's some nerve, when you think about it. What kid thinks she can fake buying her clothes at Sears or Penney's hoping no one will notice enough to mention it? Maybe "delusional" is a better descriptor. I don't remember what my brother did for clothes except he always looked untidy, he needed a hair cut and his clothes were too small. But the point is, kids will try to find a way to solve the problem. They're little problem solving machines. And, if anyone asked me, I just told them I was learning to sew and in our suburb, that was like saying you were learning Gregorian chants. There was no reaction because no one could imagine what you meant. And no reaction was exactly what I wanted. I just needed to be able to go to school because going to school meant keeping connected to my friends and to my teachers and to some hope that change was possible.

I don't remember going to a doctor or to a dentist. My mom used to tell us we were fine when we got hurt because she was terrified of having no money for a doctor. That's just the way things were for a few years. My brother and I are lucky nothing really bad happened to us during that time. It's hard to believe that many families don't go through those times.

I loved school. It was a paradise for someone like me. There were capable adults all over the place. Books, clean rooms, stuff that people talked about that had nothing at all to do with the home I was living in. But, it was also full of potentially awful moments like when we were asked to buy Junior Scholastic books and magazines or, to bring treats or, to buy special clothes for events or to order class pictures or even, to bring Valentine's Day cards or Christmas cards or to put in money to buy our teacher a cake for her birthday. My teachers were the best people I've ever met. I don't know how much they guessed or knew because they never made me feel badly and only on a couple of occasions did any of them approach this thing that I was even hiding from myself at ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. But the school had a culture and it probably worked just fine for most kids. And for those of us just hanging on in the periphery, it was something to look forward to more days than it was something to dread.

But, I can't help thinking that the inequities keep us back 'way into the future when it's so needless -- even just the little ones that a school could mitigate. Those kids like me that try to make our poverty invisible often wind up making all of ourselves invisible and that's no way to excel at school. That's no way to inspire a counselor to help you make it to college or even to provide you with a transcript you might need to get a job. That's no way to prepare to face life after school when you have no homeroom teacher that knows your name. It's exactly the opposite of networking, of reaching out to the world and saying,"Here I am, whaddaya got?" as our kids should be able to do as their birthright in this country.

This whole cheese sandwich thing makes me wonder how many times Bill Clinton or Barack Obama hung back or didn't press forward because their mom was poor. They did fine, finally. But most kids aren't Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama weren't Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. They were just kids who needed lunch just like everybody else. We should be able to give them that damn lunch and not burden them with this whole other job of concealing their poverty into the bargain.

You never know who those cheese sandwich eating kids will turn out to be given half a chance.