HUNGRY: How Poverty Changes Everything

And What We Can Do About It

*Poverty sucks all of the truth of the core of who you are and blows it back out onto those who never needed the reminder. It breaks spirits and backs with its relentless black hole of need. Its hunger is never satisfied. It’s a rock face with no footholds. It exploits, persists, drains, and damages. And it will continue to, as long as we continue to uphold systems that thrive on it’s existence.*

I currently spend the majority of my days yelling at my two-year-old Bernedoodle to get off the counter. Anxiety spiraling over my eight-year-old’s hives or orthodontia or sleep patterns. Planning what’s for dinner three weeks from now. (It’s this, once a week, over and over.)

I have one pair of sneakers I love and one pair of slippers for the days I fantasize about leaving the house but never do. Every time I open my kitchen cabinets, I hope to only find one mug there- my mug. (It broke years ago and my heart is still broken.) But I have plenty others to choose from.

I have one tried and true pie crust recipe (thank you, Allison Roman) and have made Deb Perelman’s Boozy Baked French Toast for at least 15 Christmas mornings. My kitchen is steeped in tradition that bathes my family in respite.

These may sound like completely banal, suburban mom mentions to you. Ordinary. Not even worth the space they take up on the page. There are anything but.

In my 40 years of living, I have fluctuated between just above poverty levels, sustained financial vigilance, comfortable enough, and then back again. Sometimes, we have been “successful”. Sometimes, not. I remember having a daily dream of being ill ( yes, I was so tired I dreamt of getting sick) and being able to just walk into a Walgreens and buy everything I needed without checking my debit card balance.

When I was first married I was still a senior in college and we lived in the basement of our church as “missionaries”. R worked at the mall during the day and I finished student teaching. We went shopping in our parents deep freezers and they pretended not to notice when whole chickens went missing. My mom generously helped us with the deposit for our first real apartment when we decided perhaps a church basement wasn’t the best place to raise a family. We got grown-up jobs that hardly paid the rent but that didn’t stop us from begging, borrowing, and stealing our way into our first house. We have always owned someone, something.

Our first baby came after the devastating loss of her never-earthside brother, and with her, the remnants of a high-risk pregnancy that nearly killed me. Out of work, out of breath, and out of options, I started renting our rooms, and eventually, selling my own jewelry to buy formula. The life group we hosted on a weekly basis for years paid our mortgage for a few months to help us. I would wake to grocery bags on our back steps. A basket full of greens from someone’s garden. A freezer full of my favorite ice cream was dropped off by someone who had a key. (Everyone. Everyone had a key.) It was enough to buoy us, but not sustain us. We made too much to qualify for assistance ( I know, because my husband worked for the Department of Welfare). We didn’t make enough to cover housing costs, a vehicle, or put food on the table.

We limped along for years until the financial stress, the unprocessed grief, and more losses piled one after the other. We were pregnant with our second earth-side child- my fifth pregnancy- when we could no longer hold the weight and our world broke apart. We lost our house. We lost our hope. We lost our faith. We lost what I now refer to as our first marriage.

My youngest ran off the bus today right into my arms, in my front yard peppered with red Maples. We walked through the double doors of our old Victorian around the pieces of chalk on the front porch still lingering from the fall. I schedule Shoprite pickups and pay for summer camps and pool memberships in February. Sometimes, the tears still come when I place a few things in the cart and know I don’t have to hold my breath when I run my card.

This “ordinary” life at most junctures of my story was not a whisper of a possibility. The lingering scars of struggle still hiss in the dark that this level of comfortability will not last. The shame of the threat of poverty runs deep; the depth of it, jarring. It is enough to take my breath even now.

I sit at my own kitchen table to work my full-time job; the pellet stove at my back to keep away the draft, soup simmering on the stove. There is always music playing. There is always too much to eat. We can never find socks. When I make too many cookies, I drop them off at a neighbor’s. Sometimes the dark threatens but I am choosing to be brave this year, and show my teeth. That starts with telling the truth.

I was once a young Mom with a good job who sold her rings to pay the electric bill and buy bananas. If you think your inner circle is untouched by such circumstances- perhaps you need to wonder why you have not been a safe place for them to share. Because I guarantee you, they are there. In your PTA, at your child’s concert, or in the grocery store. They are lonely, full of shame, and completely broken by a system that benefits by keeping them so.

It will not stop until we say it aloud.

In 2023, 47.4 million Americans lived in food-insecure households, which means they didn't have enough access to affordable, nutritious food. This includes 12.2 million adults and 7.2 million children.

According to the official poverty rate, 36.8 million people (11.1 percent) lived in poverty in 2023, unchanged from 2022. However, according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which accounts for the cost of living and the receipt of social safety net programs, the poverty rate increased by 0.5%, from 40.9 million people (12.4 percent) in 2022 to 42.8 million people (12.9 percent) in 2023.

I could probably talk relentlessly about how hunger and poverty are policy choices. We can enact our power to promote policies that ensure all adults and children are fed, clothed, and safe, and we should. We can also simply start by humanizing those who find themselves stuck; by normalizing the struggles we face by being honest about them, and by helping one another through.

The only way to fight stigma is with the truth.

The only way to fight hunger is to be fed.

Thank God we’re more than equipped for both.

Are you?