3-minute read time.
Please enjoy this piece by my little brother.
We didn’t have much growing up. Our mother didn’t work, and our father had left when we were younger. We would find odd jobs here and there, mowing a lawn, shoveling snow, raking up leaves, but it didn’t help much. Our mom would take the money we had earned, saying, “It’s for the house.” We never saw where the money went or what habit it fed this time, but we knew it wasn’t fair.
Getting food to eat was not always easy for us. Each month, we would go to food drives under the guise of volunteering, and our mother would leave with two times the allotted portion. Since we volunteered until the drive ended, we would get all the rejects: canned tuna, peaches, and green beans that had turned brown, but we couldn’t turn our nose up. The food from the drive would last us a week, but not much longer. Most of our food came from SNAP benefits and the Free and Reduced Lunch Program, so we’d go to the store and spend hours looking for sales and discounts. Some months, the SNAP benefits would be late, so we wouldn’t eat fresh food, instead relying on canned soups and yogurt.
Fortunately, we almost always had a place to live. We’d live with friends in apartments, always on the move; when we were both out of primary school, our mother finally got a house. We don’t know how she afforded it, but we didn’t complain. We were just happy to have somewhere to settle down. Three cats, a dog, two children, and an adult in a four-bedroom house. The house was a mess, even with four bedrooms we didn’t have room. We crammed in like sardines in a can, the rooms too full of our mother’s various lost hobbies. The only marginally clean room was for the pets, whom we all loved dearly. Unlike us, they never wanted food or places to sleep. Their litterboxes were never dirty, cleaned immediately after use, unlike our toilets, which were almost always clogged from when our mother would flush rotten food down them. Everywhere else was a warzone, ruins of our dreams and hobbies scattered over every square inch of the floor. We hopped from lily pad to lily pad over the rushing river of garbage on the backs of blankets and bags and rolled out carpets on top of each layer to protect our feet. We would eat in our beds, with no table to sit at. We stopped cleaning the fridge one day, leaving everything within to sit and rot.
Growing up was never easy for us. We didn’t have enough fresh food to eat, a clean place to sleep, or an enjoyable place to live, but we got through it. Our mother was not the best at what she did at times, she was not always a good role model, and she did not provide a home for us the way mothers should, but we loved her. We did not have much, but we survived.
