Sunday, January 13, 2013

Poor White Trash

Feeling quite a bit better today.  I'm still coughing and wheezing a bit, and my sinuses are still acting up, but I'm still improving.  My mother is still in the hospital.  She's only speaking one or two words at a time.  My father is taking care of her.  My sister (who lives several states away) is, I think, exhausted. 

I can't even visit my mother.  I would really like to go and visit her.

It's hardly the first time this has happened--that somebody in my life became seriously ill and I couldn't visit.  When my mother-in-law lay in the hospital dying several years ago, I couldn't visit.  My mother's brother had passed away, she was across the country, and I didn't have a babysitter.  And my mother has been hospitalized before, when I've been unable to visit.

Maybe it's partly because I've been so sick so many times, in isolation, that I wish I could reach out to the people in my life who are sick right now.  And watching everybody struggle through this illness has really brought home to me how isolated we are here.

Every month we count on my sister sending cash.  If she were too ill to do that, it would really hurt.  Especially if it happened while my parents were also unable to help.  We depend on that grocery money every other week.  And their help with bills.  It would quickly become a catastrophe if neither of them could help us.

My husband is trying to carry the financial load all by himself, with one part-time job, but he can't do it.  We have a few dozen dollars in the checking account, and nothing else coming until this Friday.  The grocery money will be due about that same time.  We spend the last grocery money keeping the lights on.  We get no help from the government, or from any charity.

And it's not just a financial problem.  My husband has been carrying other loads, too--having to go to work no matter how sick he feels, afraid to miss a single day.  Having to go to drill weekend no matter what.  Running every errand in the house at the moment.  Get every prescription from the pharmacy.  Taking the girls to all their church activities. 

He carries the total responsibility for our girls' social life, such as it is.  I can't network with other women.  I can't even go up to people in a group and ask how they're doing--I don't even know which person is which.  In a noisy group I have a huge amount of trouble carrying on a conversation.  It's basically impossible to hear.  It's become undeniably apparent over the years that this isn't something I'm going to be successful at.  I tried to pretend that I would catch on eventually.  But I have been a total failure at networking, and my children have paid a price for that.

And my husband--he'll have to take my daughter to her surgery.  I'll probably try to go, too, but even if I were completely well, I couldn't go by myself if I had to--I can't even find the hospital.  I hope I can even walk as far as I need to once we get there.  We'll certainly all need to walk slowly so I can keep up.

I should be going grocery shopping before the surgery, but I've learned (over and over again) that I can't be doing that to myself.  I'd make myself sicker all over again.  My best bet is to try to recover from this round instead of making myself sicker and then taking a hard fall the next time somebody exposes me to a tiny virus, or having a relapse after walking through a parking lot in the cold.  And it's not as if there is actually enough money for groceries anyway.

We're on our own here.  All I can do is depend on the groceries that have already been stockpiled (kudos to me), and hope no more bills get seriously out of control.  I would certainly hate to have to call my father while he's with my mother in the hospital, to ask him to give us more money, or to call my sister to ask her to pay a bill.  It may come to that.  I'm lucky to have them.  At least we can keep a roof over our heads--no small matter.  It's more than some people have.

And there's no one else to help.  No one to drive me to a routine doctor's visit tomorrow.  No one to keep an eye on the girls if I did go.  No one else to drive me to the hospital for my daughter's surgery if my husband were unavailable.  No one else to help take care of my daughter after her surgery if my health were to take a turn for the worse.

I've done my best to raise my girls to be self-sufficient.  I've tried to drill it into them that if I'm sick, they have simply got to step in there.  I've spoken to them lately about the need to just make the best out of the way things are.  They're all old enough now to realize that we're poor, and that I am alone, and that some kids have more friends than they do, and get to have decent clothes and go on vacations.  Welcome to the real world--there are lots of kids making do with a lot less.  At least they're not being raised by drug addicts, or being beaten, or missing meals.  At least there are books in the house, and internet access.  At least the neighborhood's safe.

Maybe it's one of the important lessons in life--that you make the best of whatever situation you find yourself in.  Maybe a cushier life wouldn't even be the best for my kids.

I wonder if it's just self-pity.  It's been a dark, dreary day outside today.  On top of that, after having been so sick for so long, perhaps I could be forgiven a smidge of self-pity.  It could be chalked up to fatigue, and a not-quite-yet-up-to-par level of oxygen in my blood.  But there's nobody to ask how we're doing here, except for the other sick members of my own family.  Nobody to keep an eye on how we're doing.

And it goes past that.  I'm homeschooling in isolation here.  I deal with my illness in isolation.  I go outside and pray--in isolation.  My husband goes to work, and church, but he deals with a lot of the fallout from being married to me in isolation, too.  Not much support out there for him, either--mostly just people not understanding why I don't work outside the home.  It's our own fault we're struggling financially--it was our decision that I be a homemaker that did this to us.  I'm not really that sick.  I'm not really struggling to drive, or recognize people, or hear what's going on around me.

I've spent too much time lately trying to convince government agencies and doctors that I'm not faking it.  It'll be worth it if I ever actually qualify for Social Security or food stamps.  But it's stressful.  My biggest battle is mental--not letting it get to me when I get sick, or the bills pile up, or I can't do things for myself, or people's negative attitudes toward me trying to redefine me into a piece of lazy white trash when that's just not where I want to go.

My children deal with this isolation, too--the lack of family except for those same immediate family members who have stuck by me, a lack of parents' friends, or even neighbors.  It's a good thing there's a church.

There are a lot of other families out there, almost an uncountable numbers of families, dealing with their problems in isolation, some living in poverty--far worse than ours.  I wasn't aware of them, growing up.  I wasn't raised around poverty, or drug abuse, or crime.  I didn't see people being told they're worthless, year after year, fighting not to believe it, fighting not to let their children believe it.  And I fortunately wasn't raised around people who were already convinced of their own worthlessness.  That worthlessness may be our worst enemy.

I hope someday we can all do better than this.

 






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