This is what my life was like growing up in poverty.

(unfortunately I have almost no pictures of me as a child but dug up a few to accompany my story)

It wasn't straight away that I realized I was the poor kid. My mom was a single mom but did her best and we were not middle class but for awhile we were "passable". Then when I was about 7 my mother drove drunk (again) and took the front end of a car off and my brother and I were sent to foster care. They told my mom she wouldn't get us back for many years but she turned her life around to the best of her ability and got us back in one year.

My mom then owed a huge amount of court fees and owed a lot of money to the apartment that she had somebody looking after, he trashed the place and was late on all the bills. Pretty soon, we were poor. Obviously poor. We were going to food banks weekly, and we were still hungry a lot of the time. My mom was able to buy eggs often because they were so cheap and she would try to cheer us up by making cakes a lot, because just eating eggs got depressing.

The worst part for me was getting picked on at school. In one school we had uniforms but it was still obvious I was the poor kid. My one pair of pants had trademark holes and my few shirts didn't look much better. They also weren't fitted nicely the way most of the girls clothes were. I didn't smell nice with lotions and perfumes. I didn't have accessories. I looked very poor and this made me singled out. I endured snickering, laughing, and muffled comments about how I looked. It hurt, a lot. School became a very miserable experience for me and I woke up every morning with knots in my stomach and left every day crying.

I remember one day it particular. I was starting school at a new place. (we moved a lot around California) I showed up with sports sandals and socks because those were the only shoes I had. The teacher singled me out in front of the class demanding to know why I was wearing those and angrily asking if I had read the clothing requirements. I told her I had but that these were my only shoes. She then had another girl escort me to the lost and found where I got an ill-fitting pair of black and white shoes that reminded me of tap dancing shoes and cut off my circulation just a bit. The entire experience was mortifying and set my first impression, solidifying my position as the poor kid. The poor kid with no friends. The poor kid that gets teased. The poor kid that goes home crying every day.

This went on until finally at the age of 12 I asked my mom to pull me out of school.

When I was 12 we were living in Highlandtown, MD. It was the worst neighborhood I have ever lived in and we lived in pretty bad parts of Los Angeles. But the segregation between blacks and whites was very prominent in this neighborhood. In Los Angeles, I had a group of friends in my neighborhood who didn't care that I was the white girl. We ran around playing just the same. In this city I went to a school where I was the only white kid (aside from one girl) and I got severely bullied. People were following me home, ripped off my door, threw bricks through my windows, and tried to jump me every day.

I went to school one day with a sharp letter opener and decided the next person that messed with me I was going to stab.

Somehow, on this day nobody did mess with me. Probably because I had some sort of deranged "I am done. Don't fuck with me." look in my eyes. So I went home, dropped the letter opener on the table and told my mom if she didn't pull me out of that school I was going to end up killing somebody. She pulled me out immediately to start "home-schooling" me which was really "no-schooling" me. I plan to write a blog all about the severe bullying I endured living in MD later but this marks the end (sort of) of me dealing with going to school as the poor kid. I was still the poor kid but I was the poor kid in my basement reading books and listening to Simon & Garfunkel. I wasn't the poor kid who walked home every day crying.

I still did,however, still cry a lot because people were trying to attack me every day. Until it eventually got so bad that my mom moved us to Florida, fearing for my life if we stayed in MD. I decided to try out high school in Florida and while I may not have been as obviously "the poor kid" because of my few choice hot topic items I was now the weird kid. I didn't fit in with the goths, I didn't fit in anywhere. And from a lifetime of abuse I now had extreme anxiety that singled me out. I was once again the kid crying every day on my way home from school. After having my wig pulled off during a pep rally revealing my shaved head and the entire auditorium of kids laughing at me I decided once again that school wasn't going to work for me.

She pulled me out that day and I ended up getting my GED.

I've got a secret for you. I am still the weird kid. But I am now proudly, confidently the weird kid walking home with a smile on my face.