When Poverty is Personal

This blog post is a part of NWLC’s Mother’s Day 2012 blog series. For all our Mother’s Day posts, please click here.

I spend a lot of time working with and thinking about the statistics of poverty – I think it is a valuable job and I love it. But poverty is more than statistics. Poverty is a personal issue and it is especially personal for me.

When my mom was a child, growing up in New England in the 1950s, she was poor. What did being poor mean for my mom? It meant that her family didn’t have enough to eat – sometimes they would divide up a head of lettuce and call it dinner. It meant that she and her three brothers had to decide who got to go to school on which day because there wasn’t enough money for everyone to have shoes – and if it was your day to be barefoot, you had to stay home.

When I think about my mom’s childhood, it pains me to think about all of the safety net programs we have now that her family could have benefitted from but didn’t have access to. In the 1950s there was no Food Stamp program to help my mom and her brothers eat. There was no WIC program to help my grandmother get the nutrition she needed while she was pregnant. There was no Medicaid program to help them with health care. There was almost nothing in the way of housing assistance and certainly no program like LIHEAP to help them stay warm during long New England winters.

I’m so thankful that there are programs today to help families like my mom’s. And even though I see it every day, I’m still shocked by policy makers who want to tear down the safety net that so many families desperately need. So for Mother’s Day, in addition to the usual card and gifts, I’m going to honor my mom by redoubling my efforts to help preserve safety net programs that help protect vulnerable families – families like the one my mom grew up in.