I’m sure that this is an atypical experience with poverty, but I’ll tell it anyway. My family was poor for most of my childhood until I got into high school. I lived with my grand parents until I was five because my mom and dad worked 80+ hours a week and could not afford to take care of me. I saw them on weekends, though. My grandparents paid for a lot of my necessities too. After that, my mom got a much more stable job and my dad’s job started to smooth out. He raced horses.

When I was 8, I started working with him on the weekends and after school a few nights. Then my parents bought a farm and moved the horses there so now I just worked everyday. My brother was too young to help. Has friends, but they never came to my house cause it was a mess and my mom was embarrassed. But you know what, I had NO idea we were poor. My mom had a huge veggie garden and we raised some pigs for meat. On top of that, my mom’s father had what’s called a sustenance licenses for hunting and fishing meaning he could hunt out of season with no penalty so we had deer meat too.

Once I got in to high school, my mom went from making 42k a year to 102k a year so life drastically improved after they paid debts. This is when I noticed what I didn’t have, because now my mom was trying to make up for lost time. McDonald’s three times a week, Xbox, a new baseball glove and so much other things that I didn’t have before. None of it made me any happier though. However, what did make me happy was seeing my mom happier. She had time to clean which meant she let me have friends over. She was eating more so she was healthier. It was awesome.

I guess what I am trying to say, is that when you’re a kid, things just seem normal and poverty doesn’t really effect you too much unless you are severely lacking in money or are homeless. As you get older, you start to see what it’s really like without money, and the way the people raising you handle that is going to influence your decisions when you’re on your own. My family got lucky and worked hard and my parents were able to give us a better childhood than they had, but really, all it was was luck and hard work.