What Screams "Wow We Were Poor" When Thinking About Your Childhood? | People Stories #433

what memory from your childhood makes you think while we were poor realizing that we were living in my aunt's backyard in a tent and not camping for three months then getting kicked out and living in a car barbecue sauce sandwiches the wow moment when i offered a friend one and he laughed when he saw i wasn't joking i was invited over for dinner pretty often after that he's good people still a good friend almost 30 years later i lived in the projects in compton when i was around nine my neighbor dominic who was the same age as me and just as poor gave me a syrup sandwich one day when i told him that mom forgot to buy me bread for toast she didn't forget she couldn't afford it i ate that dank sandwich like it was subway hot dogs and macaroni every night having campouts at the fireplace because we couldn't afford the electric bill church people leaving boxes of food on our porch my mom is the strongest person i've met raising a young child as a widow and making the poverty seem fun or invisible no words for how much i admire that woman who food box day was the best day real meat and we had to eat it fast because it was already or almost expired mmm i never questioned where it came from i grew up with just my mom we were poor on food stamps and welfare but she made me realize just how good we had it she'd volunteer us at soup kitchens make me work out meals on wheels and once she spent some of our meager savings on food for a friend of mine whose dad had bailed and his mom was trying to support four kids by herself we loaded up the shopping cart and took the food to his house it was 7 p.m and his mom was trying to put the kids to bed because she had nothing to feed them when she saw all the food she cried as we left my mom said see no matter how bad you have it others have it worse your mum is amazing give her a hug for me my mom making powdered milk for our breakfast at the tulsa greyhound station at 4am on the way to cedar rapids after dad split she sold everything she owned to buy five one-way tickets back to her hometown for the two-day trip we had half a can of powdered milk three cans of vienna sausages and a loaf of three day old bread from the piggly wiggly vienna sausages are just barely good but dang every so often i get to craving for them reminds me where i came from i remember we were dirt poor we're still kind of our except all my siblings and i now work i remember my mother once taking us to burger king and just watching us play she didn't buy anything for herself never has this isn't the worst but to me it now makes me sad remembering my mother in a base trench coat watching us play both my parents are incredibly humble it makes me want to cry how people can be so selfless and yes ramen soup and food stamps once my dad mom sister and me started a spring cleaning in our house and we didn't have dinner that day at that time i thought it was because we just had forgotten about it but now i realize we didn't have money for food and my parents were just trying to distract us so we won't be hungry that's got to be heartbreaking for the parents the three months we spend playing board games together keeping all of our perishables in a cooler cooking everything on the grill outside and going to bed early i never really thought about why we weren't watching tv or anything like that until i went to take a shower with nothing but cold water i just thought we were playing camping we had candles everywhere for the night so i thought my parents were really good at setting the scene for it after about a month our neighbors let us run a giant extension cord from their patio outlet to our house to power our fridge keith if you're a redditor and remember your dorky poor neighbor jessica back on 48th street thank you and your family times a billion i'll never forget the kindness you guys treated us with you're all pretty amazing people three also i'm sorry for ditching you that one day to hang out with that little [ __ ] lenny because he had a pool it was hot as balls and i was eight i hope to whatever god is out there that your sweet neighbor keith is a redditor i once asked my mum why all our shopping was tesco value she said it's because the blue matched the kitchen god bless parents as the green isn't as pretty and matching in the kitchen my mom scrambling to get us fed before darting after her second or third job every night she was a very very determined single mum but we struggled i never had to think while we're poor i knew it we had no power or water for a week my mom worked double shifts to support my five siblings and i she had a second job at one point of time i barely saw her she had dead eyes and the only thing i could do was give her a back massage when she got home because she had back problems we lived off of ramen i picked peas and pecans to help with bills and pay for my christmas presents i'm noticing a common trend with these stories mostly single mothers with three or more children jesus that is a heartbreaking statistic going out to pick up empty beer cans on a sunday morning so that we could sell them on four one p each about one or two c i also remember my mum looking for coins everywhere like down the side of the sofa or what was left in her purse and at the end we had some small amount of money like 1.37 and she had to go find something to buy for dinner with it i remember begging to go to mcdonald's where i would have a happy meal and my parents would have nothing and watch me eat i didn't realize it at the time but they couldn't afford to order a meal for themselves really makes me feel like crap to think about it now they tried so hard to make sure that i never felt the effects of their struggles i can relate to this i wish i still spoke to my mother because i'd like to take her out to dinner to a real nice restaurant once i feel like i owe her that at least i remember going dumpster diving with my dad when i was a young child he would hold me up so i could describe what i saw inside the dumpster if there were soda cans or glass bottles he would lower me into the dumpster and i would throw the cans and bottles out onto the ground where he would collect them then he would get me out i received one of those grabber tools as a christmas present and we used it to grab cans easier i suspect the only reason i was given the grabber is so we could collect cans more efficiently i thought it was great fun at the time but now i realize we were poor my dad died when i was 14 and these are some of my most treasured memories of him this whole thread is heartbreaking but that last sentence has me breaking down dennis and taco bell were a luxury afforded for only the highest of celebrations i was allowed to get one pair of brand new pants for christmas each year because i was six feet tall in middle school no less and couldn't wear the pants at the va thrift store anymore so they had to be ordered from a catalog my mom made deals with the local grocery store to buy their almost expired meat now to be fair my parents had been ranchers and were aware of how to judge properly aged beef it was expired because the dyes they used leeched out and the meat looked grey lord of the rings fellowship is the first movie i can recall seeing with my mother in a theater i was in college cable tv and soda were things i only got to experience at my grandmother's house however one of my first slumber parties i got to invite over two two friends i was so excited we cleaned the heck out of our tiny mobile home i swept the rickety front porch i think i was aware that our house was tiny low class and cluttered like a lot of poor people my parents boarded on being hoarders because i badgered my mother endlessly about making sure the boxes of storage were out of sight and the piles of old lumber my dad cleaned and resold as firewood was straightened up when the first friend arrived she walked through that tiny packed trailer gazing around like it was a mansion afraid to touch anything and her first words to me that night are burned into my soul your house is so beautiful can i live here forever i told my mom sincerely that it was okay her and my dad couldn't buy me christmas presents because santa had me covered she cried my two brothers and i ate toast for breakfast top ramen for lunch and popcorn for dinner for our entire summer while our amazing mother worked three jobs to keep a roof over our heads my 12th birthday cake was just a big rice crispy square with little gummy candies that spelled my name out i freaking loved it of course but man i never knew we were poor never i only understood when i was much much older my mom never let me feel like i had less not for a moment i love you mom collecting beer cans with my dad after a grateful dead concert in the 80s we ended up getting like 200 and probably a disease or two we often ate at soup kitchens with homeless people when your sick's food is food but looking back we were destitute i also recall going stretches without food lying in front of a space heater too weak to move moving once a year because we were about to be evicted eating eggs and only eggs every day for three weeks living in a garage with a dirt floor bathing in a kiddie pool with the holes duct taped up while my mom cooked on an oven rack supported by cement blocks when i was a baby my parents couldn't afford a fudge so my dad walked into a store and asked if he could work for one which they did let him and we had that fridge in our house for 20 years i think the time that i realized we were poor when i was 12 my mom was working two jobs she would get up in the morning get me and my three brothers ready for school drop us off go to work she would pick up an up after school take us home tell us to be good and then go work a second job till nine at night all while taking weekend classes at a college we got boxes of food every couple of weeks from one of the local churches so we didn't do so bad for food we didn't really have many toys we ended up having a more wealthy family give us a big tub of legos and that was pretty much it couple things stand out for me as best memories this one summer my brother took the lawn mower and went house to house for a month looking to mow people's lawns for 10 a pop he would start out at like 10 a.m and come home 5-6 in the evening he was 10 mind you he collected all this money and when he had enough he bought a used n64 with like two games silly thing was we didn't have a tv to play it on my mom was so incredibly proud she went and worked extra horror and got this super bad cheap 12 inch tv for us to play it on it was the coolest thing we had until way way later i think it was that same year my mom was working hard and i knew she was saving up money for christmas presents but my brother got sick in october and had to go to the doctors i don't remember what or why he had to go but my mom was sad a lot we didn't have health insurance and what little money we did have was gone i remember christmas day hearing my mom sobbing in her bedroom door closed and as boys just in the living room playing the doorbell rang and my mom told me to get it it was an old guy who lived down the street from us he had a box of toys for us some old some new the look on my mom's face was i don't have the words but the look on his face as my mom hugged that guy and cried was awesome too it took my mom almost 10 years to finish her degree while raising us her big dream finally got realized and about seven years ago she went to work as a music teacher she bought her own house new car i can't tell you how proud of her i was this last year was the very best for her she had started doing wonderful things she had started writing a book about technology in the classroom had been asked to do a presentation at the national teacher conference and had just finished her masters it all changed when i received a call she had been murdered i think the most painful time of life was when i was going through the stuff in her house taking care of the last few necessities when i heard a knock on the door the university she had been going to special delivered her master's degree standing there holding it something my mom had dreamed of and worked so damned hard for to get it god am it i'm done with this thread i was about nine and i knew my mom was struggling but i had no idea to what level it was two days before thanksgiving and my mom had picked my brother and i up from a friend's after a job interview she had when we got home there was a box sitting on the front porch in front of the door it had a turkey stuffing cans of veggies potatoes everything you need to make a nice thanksgiving meal we took it inside and set it on the table inside the box was a simple card that just said happy thanksgiving my mom sat down and just broke down crying my brother and i were confused she then told us that this was a blessing she had no idea who had left it for us but she had spent the last few days trying to figure out how to explain to us that she couldn't afford to buy thanksgiving food and we were just going to have hot dogs and top ramen some kind stranger knew about her struggles and brought us the food it was then that i really realized how poor we were at the time it is also something i have never forgotten when one of my friends told me she didn't like coming over to my house when we were young because she felt bad when she ate over cause we didn't have a lot of food and she didn't like taking what food we did have my mom was raising me my older brother and my younger sister all on her own at the time and did a fine butt job of it too that seemed really considerate of her though especially for someone so young after my sister was born my grandmother took little three-year-old me out to get ice cream to give my exhausted parents time to rest when she told me where we were going i looked at her and said do we have the money i have a similar story my uncle took me and my brother camping with him and his family our cousins and aunt and when he stopped to get gas i genuinely freaked out i shouted you put more than twenty dollars stop it my brother stopped me and just said they know i felt so embarrassed although it's a sad thing because it meant my parents were struggling it's one of my best memories all at the same time we asked for a mcdonald's not sure what sparked the idea but it seemed to become stuck in our little heads but my parents couldn't afford to take us instead of letting us know of this fact my dad made a mcdude the food was simple value oven chips and half a burger each with bread as a bun my father spent ages making fries holders from old cardboard boxes and wrapped the what he called half a pounder explaining why there was only half in paper decorated in the golden arches he even made himself a badge so he could serve us in genuine mcdonald's style from behind a counter table i realized then we were poor but i also realized how much my dad loved us i knew this family growing up they had two boys about my age not filthy rich people but definitely well-off more well-off than my family for sure when the boys and i were all pre-teens the razor scooter fat hit one day my family and their family are all hanging out and the boys mentioned they each want one i'm aware of how popular these scooters are so i know they are really expensive to buy so i tell my mom later that maybe we should all chip in a few dollars so the boys can have them by christmas which is still a few months away the boys parents had bought them each a new scooter by the following week made me realize that oh some families don't have to save up all year to buy a toy that the kid really wants i think it's better to have to wait for something that you want when you're a kid to be honest it teaches patience and the value of delayed gratification dish detergent as bubble bath and not getting any new clothes all hand-me-downs until i was about 12 then we got rich well my dad got rich and was nice with money cliff huxtable no your mother and i are rich you have nothing only having two shirts me and three of my siblings sleeping on the same dirty mattress in one room drinking expired milk and ramen noodles counselors and teachers coming to my house oh yeah i remember teachers dropping off bags of clothes for me and my sisters our mother couldn't afford to buy me new clothes so every summer she would cut the legs off all my jeans to make shorts at the time i got laughed at but little did everyone know i was hipster as frick what i thought everyone did this kids outgrow their clothes so fast it's not like they're gonna wear them the next winter when i was about eight years old or so i made the mistake of telling a well-to-do friend's mom that my mom sewed all my clothes including my winter coat i was never invited back to her house again what a bee power got shut off because my mom was so behind and at the same time my mom didn't have enough money for food and to get the electricity turned back on so we just ate frozen potato pancakes for dinner that night they were actually pretty good she later told me that was a low point as a mother but it didn't really bother me at the time and still doesn't anybody remember paper food stamps and anyone remember that if you bought a 25 cent little debbie snack with a one dollar food stamp you would usually get the 75 cents back in actual change i remember buying about 10 little debbies one at a time with 10 one dollar food stamps so that my mom could put enough gas in the car to get me to her friend's house so that i could stay there while the power was fixed after a mysterious january snowstorm knocked out the power to our house alone in fact that happened a lot those storms that would only hit our house waiting in line at the food bank for three hours before they opened because if you weren't there that early you were likely to go home empty-handed powdered milk nuff said having to use my coat as a blanket the coat was a gift from old news boys one of our local charities i would get so excited to get their box every christmas even though i already knew everything that was in it new socks one pair of pajamas one barbie doll one board game usually a new pair of boots and winter coat i broke a window once and my mother was so upset she cried we had to stuff clothes and toilet paper in it until the store got more window glass she didn't want to tell me that we just couldn't afford a broken window replacement my mom and grandma would feed me dinner whatever they could find but it was usually good and relatively healthy they would always tell me that grown-ups ate after the kids were in bed sometimes in the morning there would be empty cat food cans in the trash we didn't have a cat at that point i've never asked but i'm pretty sure i know what was going on there i'm so sad now i hope they are better now i remember i used to stack garbage cans inside one another for a basketball hoop i didn't have any pavement in our backyard just rocks and dirt so i cleared the rocks away and drew lines for free throws and three pointers i didn't have a basketball but i did have a yellow kickball i took from school the ball wasn't round and was all lumpy so i guess they didn't mind the problem is the ground ice and flat and bouncing a lumpy ball on uneven ground is tough that ball flew all over the place but i had so much fun with my little ghetto basketball court my mom and i used to search for coins around our apartment so i could go to the pool few km away with friends on a gifted bike my mom also used to cry during nights because we didn't have any money then my mom didn't eat much for a few months because she wanted to buy me an atari so i could be a programmer i'm now a successful programmer in 1998 the undertaker threw mankind off heck in a cell and plummeted 16 feet through an announcer's table we got commodity cheese and butter and maybe other things too but i remember those large bricks of butter and cheese the most that's a pretty good clue looking back but my single biggest holy crap we were poor memory is opening the cabinet and seeing nothing but jiffy cornbread boxes we had that every meal i actually don't remember the repetitiveness of it just that visual of jiffy jiffy jiffy by the way i had no idea growing up that we were poor or that commodity cheese was unusual we're all doing quite well now brief political point worth making my family received government assistance for a few years when i was young then my mom finished her phd got a good job and that was the end of that if not for that help my mom could never have gotten her phd and she'd be less successful my brothers and i would have stayed poor at least until we were of earning age and we wouldn't have had an example of what was possible and likely wouldn't have gone to college etc that government investment over three six years paid off big time in that now all four of us my mom included a homeowners with good jobs who pay taxes government assistance isn't always for the lazy and it doesn't make everybody who receives a dependent on it in our case it was an investment with significant roy for the us taxpayer thanks for the political point no seriously it's awesome to hear positive stories about government assistance my mother my sister and i lived in one room together in my grandmother's house i knew other kids had their own rooms but i thought that was just the rich kids didn't know it was weird until i was around 10 or 11. if i was able to take lunch to school it would be peanut butter on one piece of bread folded in half no jelly and never a true sandwich i never thought about it until i got to middle school and hot lunch was all the rage and i was the kid sitting by himself either with nothing or with my abomination of a sandwich as a kid i chose not to eat lunch to save everybody money 2.50 day lunch was 12.50 a week they didn't have to spend and i was the fat kid that didn't like to eat food in front of everybody anyway all the toys i had were from my relatives on birthdays there weren't a lot of them but it kept me happy i would play for hours also mom was constantly working and when she was at home she was either preparing some stuff for work or cleaning so i spent most of my childhood playing alone or outside without support from my granddad i don't know how we would end i remember being a kid and one night the lights went out my mom convinced us there was a power outage but i remember looking outside and all the street lights were on and everyone else had their lights on at the time i thought nothing of it but now that i look back i think we didn't have money to pay for the light bill and they cut our light off we ate sandwiches with ham from a cooler with ice for a few days it wasn't the worst situation ever but looking at all these posts i feel like giving a shout out to all the parents protecting us from the bad world i miss my mom bad right now when i was young i always wanted a game boy advance but due to money restrictions my parents had decided to say no so as a result i drew my own gba yes out of paper colored it purple and would sit there for hours on hours just pretending to press the buttons i have no life that's so adorably depressing if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] bye for now

Channel: Updoot Studios

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Keywords: growing up poor in america, growing up poor, growing up poor documentary, growing up poor reddit, #updootst, updoot, updoot reddit, updoot everything, reddit on tap, toadfilms, pewdiepie, reddit, askreddit, funny reddit, reddit stories, top posts, reddit top posts, reddit cringe, comedy, reddit compilation, r/, r/askreddit, top posts of r/, askreddit reading, best reddit posts, top posts of all time, people of reddit, askreddit question, ask reddit, subreddit, sub, reddit stories 2021

Id: qI4JdpMNjnE

Length: 25min 3sec (1503 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021