Keep on Carrying On

“The food stamp program, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is proud to be distributing this year the greatest amount of free Meals and Food Stamps ever, to 46 million people.

The National Parks Service, administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior, asks us ‘Please do not feed the animals’. Their stated reason for the policy is because ‘The animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves.’ Thus ends today’s lesson in irony.”

When I read this, I was shocked, horrified, and hurt. To equate hungry people with feeding wildlife, completely devoid of sarcasm or humanity, is one of those unspeakable things you don’t expect to someone to think, little less speak aloud.

It wasn’t through the Oklahoma Republican Party that I encountered that disgusting nugget of repugnancy, though. It was mindlessly, enthusiastically, heartlessly repeated on social media by my friends and family.

Of course, they would have been abashed had they known that I and my family unit were five of the 46 million that the food stamp program fed. They would have sputtered and flushed, justifying that I was the rare exception in a overwhelming wash of druggies, the lazy, unemployed, illegals, and generally undeserving of our sympathy, efforts, and most importantly our hard-earned money. These programs were created for people like me, they insist; others take advantage of the system and exploit the funding intended for honest individuals, such as myself, and that is what in particular they take issue with.

How could they have known though? It was a shame I kept hidden close to my heart. That particular mortification, had it ever seen the light of day, would have stripped me a little of my humanity. It morphs you into a statistic, a leech on society, a drain on limited resources.

An animal.

I tell my story now because I want to show the other side, to give a face and a personhood to those that struggle financially. I tell my story to give you a glimpse into the reality of living in economic disadvantage in a developed country looks like. I made mistakes and suffered the repercussions; whether or not I should be left to starve for those crimes...well, I guess that is on the Oklahoma Republican Party to decide. Or you.

It is important to note that this is the first time this secret is being shared. Michael and I closely guarded it so not even our family knew what was going on. We didn’t want them to see how hard we were struggling, how we were drowning. A significant portion of it was probably pride. We had messed up, gone against what we had been taught, and we had every intention of suffering the consequences as our due.

....I am finding this hard to share...it is important though, I think. Knowing this side of things. Remembering this part of it; letting you see.

Michael and I had just found out I was pregnant, outside of wedlock, a 19 year old college sophomore and 21 year old junior. He had been trying to gently convince me that I might be gravid for a few weeks at that point, and who would have thunk it: he was right. I just didn't want to believe him because I was finally, finally, here on the first step of my journey to what I had dreamed about for as long as I could remember.

The first step was a costly one, though. At the insistence of my family, I had chosen a christian University and was paying for it in private school tuition with the help of my new friend, FAFSA. Federal loans, scholarships, and grants only go so far; many semesters I had to take out additional loans with my grandmother as a cosigner to cover the remainder. At twenty some-odd thousand dollars a year, I was projecting ending my undergraduate degree with a cozy $80,000 debt before med school.

Christian universities, as I have had (admittedly limited) experience with do not generally smile upon premarital sex of their students. They are attempting to the uphold Christian values of modesty, propriety, and celibacy, among others, in an environment of young adults hog-wild and free for the first time in their lives. There is a significant amount of repression and self-denial many of these students are familiar with, having been brought up from the knee to abstain from any and all risky and sinful behaviors. Not an easy task for any individual, little less an organization overseeing thousands of horny and unsatiated teens. But they've gotten by for decades now.

Looking back on it now, I am not surprised that the school knew before I did that I was knocked up. They called Michael and me into the office of the dean of students, a truly good and righteous man. According to the student handbook, we were both now facing expulsion from the university for not abiding by the code of conduct, and we both knew that.

They did not kick us out, however--they were loving and understanding, and had the campus physician examine me who then helped me find an obstetrician and set up an appointment. The Dean said that we could no longer live in campus housing at the end of the semester, but we could still continue to attend in the fall.

He also advised that I kept my delicate condition quiet and not post sonogram pictures about. In the past, when word had gotten out about students in similar circumstances, their classmates had met the news....unkindly.

This was back in 2007, right after the law was passed that a student could remain on their parent’s medical insurance until they were 26. This one fact saved me; my mother worked in a lab as a medical technologist and had what was referred to as “Cadillac insurance”. The insurance that covers everything, no co-pays, no questions. At least the baby and I would be taken care of, as long as she was inside me.

We started looking for an apartment off campus--we couldn’t go too far, as I could not drive and we only had one vehicle. Michael was working at JCPenney’s, folding clothes in the children’s department for just under six dollars an hour. I had worked there too, but had been laid off after the holiday season; I couldn’t get and keep a job now, as sick as I was. My new obstetrician was threatening hospitalization for fluids and nutrition if I didn’t stop dropping weight, as I was down to 102 lbs at five months pregnant and still as sick as the first month. Even those that knew of my indiscretion could scarcely detect it, and those that didn’t wouldn’t have known at all by the diminutive bump I sported.

Working forty hours a week, Michael was bringing in about $800 a month. We found through luck a small quad across the street from the university for $500 a month, plus utilities. They didn’t require rental history (which we didn’t have), though we had to get a cosigner with Michael’s grandfather to move in, as well as a loan from my grandmother to help us cover deposits and first month’s rent. There were deposits to turn on utilities as well, though we didn’t know that at the time. It was located down an alleyway, between a frequently robbed taco restaurant and a cemetery.

The cemetery was not too bad--our neighbors were quiet and there were often fresh flowers out, the grass well maintained. The taco restaurant sold cheap family sized meals. We didn’t have any furniture when we moved in, except a twin sized mattress on the floor, a decades-old blue recliner, and a rolling media cart the psychology department had thrown out. It wasn’t too bad though, and after bills were paid we still had maybe $50 for gas and food each month, depending. School was a little cheaper because we weren’t living on campus or getting meal plans any more, though in retrospect the costly meal plan may have been advisable as there would have always been something to eat.

I had to take the fall semester off--I was due at the end of September and didn’t think that I would be able to handle school work and a new infant. Not really the type to babysit, I didn’t know anything about children or how to take care of one.

So, Michael went to school and worked at the department store, and I stayed home. There was nothing to do, except clean the house, take long walks and even longer baths. I had a pet guinea pig named Jabba, a chocolate colored little rodent that kept me company during the lonely days. I read a lot to the baby; I didn’t have children’s books yet, so I read whatever I had from high school and college, mostly classic literature like “Sherlock Holmes” and “Paradise Lost”. I also sang to her.

I knew by that point that I was carrying a little girl. My doctor’s visits were frequent, first because I was losing so much weight; then because I failed by glucose tolerance test and was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. My body was not providing enough sustenance for the baby and my body wasn’t producing enough insulin to utilize the little sugars I was able to keep down. By summertime, I was improving slightly, able to small bits of food down, the weight loss less pronounced each month.

We were trucking along however. Michael was stressed from working and keeping up with school work, the imminent baby and my fragile state, and the pressures of impending fatherhood and matrimony.

In Church of Christ tradition, you don’t impregnate a girl. You are to exercise self-control, ignore your baser instincts, and wait for marriage before coupling with a woman. Monogamy and celibacy are God’s way.

If you cannot achieve the golden standard and expectation of abstinence and are caught expecting, you do the honorable thing--you marry the girl.

That is how Michael and I were both raised, strictly and devoutly Church of Christ, so it came as no surprise that we were now under the verbalized supposition that we would wed, as quickly as could be arranged. Thankfully, the days of shotgun weddings are more or less waning, so we were not coerced or forced down the aisle; we decided that we would wait until after the child had arrived before we would discuss nuptials. When I was eight months pregnant, Michael surprised me by bringing home a beautiful little diamond ring and matching wedding band and proposing.

Michael is situated in the now, living to fight another day, surviving and making it. I, on the other hand, am more of a future thinker. I wanted to make plans about our eventual wedding, discuss how we wanted to raise our children, look at houses. Most of all, however, I wanted to talk about THIS baby.

As soon as he would get home, exhausted, sore, miserable, I would start pestering him. I had been home alone all day long, desperate for human contact, intelligent conversation, attention.

In all the pregnancy books and blogs I read, all the articles I had perused, that is the one thing they never mentioned. The enormous and crippling loneliness. Michael didn’t understand this, in the same way I didn’t understand how he needed his space, a break from thinking and talking and being “social”. We were at opposite ends and needing different, incompatible things, and we were hurting for it.

He didn’t want to talk about baby names, and his response to any baby-related decision was, “Whatever you think is best. You have done more research at this point than I have.” It wasn’t that he didn’t care; it was that he had no more room in his head to house one more thought. At the end of summer, he got a job with the Lubbock school district, at a small title-1 elementary school as a computer teacher. It paid slightly better than JCPenney, but after insurance for Michael, taxes, and Texas Retirement System was taken out, we were still bringing home around the same amount as before.

After the baby was born, I hoped things would improve. I could find child care for her when she was a smidgen older, start going back to school and to work, and we could move forward. I had the whole semester off in which to get this set up, and I was confident and sure we were on the upswing. Michael’s parents had moved down from Colorado and brought with them a lot of secondhand furniture for our little quad--we got a bed big enough for the both of us, a tomato red couch covered in floral print, and a whole infant room set up. Our home looked like a home and we were starting to look like a family.

Healing from the c-section took longer than I would have anticipated. I spent as much time at my parent’s house as I could, though it was eight hours away from my life with Michael. There I could plan and prepare for our wedding, the date set for November 24th. It was the weekend after Thanksgiving, held in my hometown church in Argyle, Texas. Argyle was the tiny little town I spent the first eighteen years of my life, boasting a population of just 1600 while I was there. It was six hours from where we were in Lubbock, and two hours from my parent’s house in Tyler.

I was lucky that my family and Michael’s were helping with the cost of the wedding, as we could not have covered it on our own, but times were tough for everyone--I believe my entire wedding cost less than $1000. We borrowed what we could, kept costs down as much as possible. This was right at the front end of the 2007-2009 recession. 

In between nursing the six week old baby, during the long, sleepless nights, I handmade three hundred invitations, addressing every envelope by hand and sealing them each with a gold-colored stamp.

Even as agreeable as a baby as she was, having a newborn was not easy, especially for a first time mother. Post-partum depression took a stealthy and complete control, easing into our lives as the insultingly and misleadingly named “baby blues”. At times, I resented the baby, for waking me when all I really wanted to do was sleep; for demanding so much of me, my body, my time, my energy. Nursing came perfectly natural and easy for her with no struggle or pain, and still I loathed doing it, hated feeling like nothing was mine any more, not even my person. After three months, I switched to formula. The guilt was unbearable, aided largely in part by the newly acquired WIC.

The Women, Infants, and Children program was the first government assistance that I sought. I could not afford formula on my own, were I to make the switch. It is a wonderful program, to which I was eternally grateful for in the coming years. 

They advocate for the child though and there is a commonly accepted medical fact that breastmilk is superior to the sugar-laden formula. Their employees, particularly the lactation consultants, are coached to provide support and information for the mother so that she can breastfeed if at all possible.

This is a noble goal, to be sure. In practice though, it can come off as condemning and hurtful.

Regardless of why I was choosing to discontinue nursing Emerald, I was not expecting to be so firmly “encouraged” to reconsider. To me, it was the decision I had to make to maintain my sanity. I was confused and felt attacked--it was as though I had gone in there with the intention of letting the child starve to death. No! I had every intention of feeding and caring for the child as I had done for the last ninety days; I just couldn’t do it the way they wanted me to any more.

The emphasis was that my decision was selfish. I was not thinking about the health and wellbeing of my child, but rather my own comfort. There was no physical reason that I was unable to nurse, was there? The unhappiness, the “blues” would go away. Nursing may even help the mood swings, they assured me, a sincere lack of conviction evident by their sidecast eyes. The decision to start nursing again wouldn’t come back though--that was forever. Didn’t I want what was best for my baby? Didn’t I want her to have the best start in life?

To escape the unrelenting assault, I finally lied and said that my milk had dried up. I cited medical articles I had read regarding prescription drugs, the link in birth control and lowered milk supplies. Despite their skepticism, they let the matter drop and we were given a monthly allotment of formula.

The way WIC works, you have a plastic card similar to a debit or credit card. It is prefilled each month with a certain amount of grocery goods--when Emerald was a newborn, we got formula, milk, certain types of cereal, cheese, and juices. In the store, there was the bright pink “WIC” sticker like a beacon, calling out which lowest priced goods you could purchase using your WIC account.

It saved us quite a bit of money, being on WIC, and ensured that we at the very least had things to feed Emerald. More months than not, her parents did not have enough food to eat. We traded in and pawned what we could from our previous life, not so we could buy luxuries but for essentials.

I know this story is starting out as a downer. Those first few years...they were hard.

Keep in mind the end though. You already have the end of the story. Hold on to that. One of my favorite quotes, the one I wrote on my arm during the darkest times of my life: 

Next time: The Wedding and After.