Were we REALLY poor?

My mama hates it when I say we were poor growing up. I honestly don’t know what else she wants me to call it. After she and my dad finally divorced and went their separate ways, me, my two siblings, mom, her boyfriend, and his drippy ass Jheri Curl eventually settled after a month or so of couch surfing into a little ass one-bedroom apartment in south suburban Chicago.

There, my siblings and I shared a bedroom while mommy and her man slept in the living room on a pull-out couch that kinda turned into a mattress on the floor. I didn’t really know how much my mom was making way back then — it wasn’t something kids really were supposed to know. All I knew were the effects of our new simulated poverty.

For example clothes? Yeah. We were clothed. But not in the kind of clothes that would keep the neighborhood kids from roasting our asses every little chance they got. My mama frequented a thrift store known at the time as AMVETS and was able to score a raggedy-ass shopping cart full of pants, shirts, etc for all of us including herself for what seemed like pocket change. Didn’t matter that most of it was from a different decade. What mattered was that we had it.

We ate school lunch too — for free. In fact, one year, the district re-structured who and what qualified a household for “free lunch.” This new policy effectively kicked most of the kids we grew up with…