Singing the Poor Girl Blues

I grew up poor. I don’t say that to get sympathy. It’s just a fact. It made me who I am. It makes me appreciate what I now have. My kids have heard some of the examples. They mostly laugh. They really have no idea. When they were young, money was tight, but as our income increased, they never knew what they had to do without. Sometimes, when they see videos of themselves as babies, they’ll say, “Mom, we didn’t even have any furniture!”
First, the reason I grew up poor: My mom was widowed and didn’t have much in the way of life insurance from my dad; only enough to buy our tiny house. She also had low-paying jobs; as a waitress, then a bartender, then a cook. The result: not a lot of opportunities.
Here are some examples: Our house was a WW1 era war house, one and a half stories, with one bathroom and no basement. It had a crawlspace that would flood in the spring. It was poorly insulated. It was tidy, but because we didn’t have a dad, there wasn’t a lot of upkeep or renovations done until I was much older. In particular, I remember that although I loved the sound of rain on the roof, I soon learned to dread it. For more years than not, a few minutes after the rain started, we’d wait to hear the drip, drip, drip of the rain in the attic room my sister and I shared. Even if we were sleeping, it would wake us up. In a really bad storm, it would drip from three or four places throughout the room, all because we couldn’t afford to re-shingle the roof. We would place bowls under the drips. Plastic bowls were better because stainless steel pots made too much noise. It’s a far cry from the relaxing sound of rain on the roof to an annoying drip into a pot.
Also related to our house; for many years it wasn’t insulated, and we never did have air conditioning. Our attic room was unbearably hot in the summer. This drove us to sleep on the floor downstairs that we called “the little room” for reasons that I can’t recall. If it was still too hot, we’d set up our old canvas tent in the backyard and sleep there, sometimes for most of the summer. It seems strange to me now that we did that, but as an alternative, we would have a basin of ice water and sponge ourselves down throughout the night, almost as if we were feverish. It was an uncomfortable, sleepless night, and one that I was not pleased to repeat, if I could avoid it.
Now I appreciate a well-shingled roof and an insulated and air conditioned house.