My week started with someone sharing her story of a childhood with an abusive alcoholic father. She wasn’t able to focus in school when she went because she was consumed with worry about her father coming home and killing her mother. Can’t work good jobs if you can barely read, I was told, and that was a new take on the root of life-long poverty for me.
Later that evening, I was told a story about an 18-year-old young man who had attempted suicide over the weekend because he was starving to death and wanted to die. Imagine being so hungry that you wanted to die! I cannot wrap my head around that no matter how hard I try. That was a story of poverty for a young person aging out of one system and not able to survive in another.
I was interviewed by AJ+ this week. They filmed me at work, leading a meeting with impacted folks about building the #RattleTheWindows movement here in West Virginia. The next day was the interview portion, and they went deep. I cried a few times while answering their questions; some tears were from revisiting stories that I’ve been told and others were because I was revisiting parts of my own story that I hadn’t thought about in a long time.
On Wednesday, I visited Mountaineer Food Bank and saw over a million pounds of food in the warehouse. I listened to where they served and who they served. I was in awe when I was told how many programs they ran to feed as many people as possible.
And then I went to visit folks who had lost everything they owned in the 1,000-year flood almost three years ago. I listened and looked at how those folks are still trying to put their lives back together.
When I arrived home, my family went out to eat. I saw so many families I knew in there and smiled because I knew we were all there because our tax refunds finally dropped. Families were excited as they sat around the tables, enjoying the treat of being served and eating well. And then I looked across from our table and saw a woman with a much older man. She was passing out at the table, her head going lower and lower toward her plate. My kids noticed her, too, and began to ask questions. I prayed that she was drunk and not high on heroin with her sloth-like movements. Everyone either stared or pretended it wasn’t happening. The waitress refilled the man’s glass and took his dessert order.
Nothing to see here.
We went shopping and I ran into a young mom whom I’ve known since her oldest child was a toddler and in my Early Head Start classroom. She began to talk about the video (from the Congressional hearing in Washington, D.C.). At one point she said, “You lifted so much weight off of my soul because no one calls it out like that.”
She had me in tears in the aisle. She shared a small portion of her life with me there in the store and blessed me by trusting me with it.
As I sat down in my home for the first time in 12 hours, I sighed and closed my eyes for a moment. I thought back on everything that I’ve heard and seen over the last few days. I sat with the storytellers. I sat with the news cameras. I sat with the long and rainy car rides. And I realized that this life is hard for so many of us.
It’s loud and messy and uncomfortable. It’s ignored, much like the intoxicated woman in the restaurant, by so many. And then there are the moments that keep us going. These are the meals served in restaurants that only happen a couple of times a year.
These are the excited smiles because there’s money to buy things that wasn’t there yesterday because it’s tax time. These are the unexpected conversations in the aisles at the store. And the hugs. And the tears.
I was asked by the journalist to make a statement about WV. It was suggested that I make a list, such as opioid crisis, water crisis, poverty, etc., but, instead, I began with hardworking. Resilient. Poor.
And I proudly said, “We don’t know how to give up.”
