The Working Poor

by David K. Shipler

  The survivor’s intimate relationships are driven by the hunger for protection and care and are haunted by the fear of abandonment or exploitation. In a quest for rescue, she may seek out powerful authority figures who seem to offer the promise of a special caretaking relationship. By idealizing the person to whom she becomes attached, she attempts to keep at bay the constant fear of being either dominated or betrayed.

  Inevitably, however, the chosen person fails to live up to her fantastic expectations. When disappointed, she may furiously denigrate the same person whom she so recently adored. Ordinary interpersonal conflicts may provoke intense anxiety, depression, or rage. In the mind of the survivor, even minor slights evoke past experiences of callous neglect, and minor hurts evoke past experiences of deliberate cruelty.… Thus the survivor develops a pattern of intense, unstable relationships, repeatedly enacting dramas of rescue, injustice, and betrayal.1

  Abuse in various forms may lead to early sexual involvement. One study found that “emotional deprivation, particularly at an early age, may predispose adolescents to seek emotional closeness through sexual activity and early parenthood.”2 Another, based on a sample of 1,026 young African-American women in Memphis, found that while nonsexual physical abuse had no correlation with early pregnancy, sexual abuse did. Girls who had been molested as small children tended to have consensual intercourse at a slightly younger age (a mean of 14.9 versus 15.6 years old), and they became pregnant earlier (at i6.7versus 17.4). “Clinicians should consider a report of child sexual abuse from an adolescent to be a red flag for early sexual activity,” the report concluded. “Such adolescents should receive appropriate family planning counseling and be referred for mental health counseling to reduce the risk of premature pregnancy.”3 They should be, but they rarely are, especially if they’re poor.

  Among low-income families, then, sexual abuse emerges as one mechanism transmitting poverty to the next generation. Abuse occurs among the affluent too, but the well-to-do have other mechanisms to propel their children forward despite what happens inside their own suffering. Parental ambition and high expectations, the pressure to succeed, the access to education, the drive for professional achievement all add up to a sense of entitlement and opportunity. Survivors often engage in anxiety-ridden efforts to please, which in certain families means excellent academic performance.

  The dynamics can be quite different in low-income families, where the abuse is added to a pileup of multiple stresses. Overall, one in four or five girls is sexually abused, researchers estimate from polling, but the percentage may run higher among low-income single mothers. Journalists covering welfare reform have encountered many poor women who mention being sexually abused, seeking protection from their mothers and being disbelieved, having their sense of safety shredded and the refuge of their home undone. One white reporter who had written on the subject looked confused when I told him about the girl on the swing in New England. But was she white? he asked. Yes, I said, it was practically an all-white town. Kara King and many of the other women who had talked with me about having been abused were white. Well, he confessed, he’d thought the problem had something to do with black culture. He seemed taken aback by his own prejudice.

  Wendy Waxler, just off welfare in Washington, D.C., had finished outlining her tight budget during our second conversation when she began to talk about the assaults that were woven into her childhood memories. Nearly thirty years had passed, and she was now determined to mask the scars by forcing herself to recover from failure, to work hard, laugh hard, and be a model to her handicapped daughter.

  She knew nothing of her biological mother, only of the two foster homes where she had spent her first four years. “They believed in beating us for every little thing,” she said of that initial family. “They had this two-year-old. She was a foster child, too.… I remember one day; it comes like it’s a reoccurring dream. It’s like it won’t let me forget. [The foster mother] took the little girl down in the basement and beat her. I think the little girl peed on herself or something, and she got mad ’cause she got to clean it up. All of a sudden, I couldn’t hear no more screaming. The lady came upstairs, but the baby didn’t. I got scared, and I guess she saw the expression on my face. She said, ‘What, you don’t want to be here anymore?’ And I think I told her no. She told them people to come get me, and they did, and I went to the next foster home.” Wendy never learned whether the little girl had lived or died.

  The second family provided no sanctuary. They had another foster child, Paula, and two teenage sons who ran loose and free. “These boys used to take me and Paula in the basement, pull down our panties, and do—.” Wendy couldn’t finish her sentence. “Stuff like that you never forget, I don’t care how old you get. You never forget. Until the day you die, you never forget.”

  Again she was rescued, this time when she was adopted by a divorcée without children. “By the time she got me she said I looked anorexic,” We ndy recalled. “She said my hair was all over the place, my clothes were dirty, and she said my teeth were green. She said it was a wonder they were still in my mouth. She said, ‘I saved you.’ ”

  But not from everything, it turned out. When her adoptive mother regularly dropped her off with a baby-sitter, Wendy was often left alone with the baby-sitter’s sons. “They used to do the same thing,” Wendy remembered, “take me in the bathroom or whatever, make me do weird things.… That was the first and only time I experienced anal sex. I think I was in second grade.… And my mother never believed me. She didn’t believe me. Thought I was lying ’cause when she asked the lady, the lady didn’t know anything about it.”

  Like many abused women, Wendy had trouble with men, with intimacy, with trust and love. Her mother struggled mightily to keep her off the fast track to poverty so frequently taken by teenagers who get pregnant, have babies out of wedlock, drop out of school, hook up with abusive men, go on and off welfare, drift in and out of low-wage jobs. Her mother expected her to go to college, and Wendy had been accepted by Howard University when, on her high school graduation day, she learned that she was pregnant. She was terrified of telling her mother, and once she did, her mother insisted on an abortion.

  We ndy resisted, then reluctantly went ahead. She had been carrying twins, she was told later. “After the surgery I turned around, and there’s a jar with these body parts all in it,” she remembered vividly. “I felt that was really cruel, because if you’re gonna have me go through something like that, don’t leave the result right there.” A chasm of disrespect opened between Wendy and her mother.

  Each pregnancy ended badly, like each relationship. Neither could be brought to fruition; for many years there was no birth or marriage, no successful pregnancy or loving partnership. A baby was stillborn. An engagement was ended by Wendy when the man hit her. Because she feared that another baby would die, that she would suffer and fail without support, she had two more abortions. Alone, estranged from her adoptive mother, and financially fragile, she could not afford Howard’s tuition, transferred to the University of the District of Columbia, and dropped out before getting her degree. Then she met another man she wanted to marry—and cancelled the ceremony when she found his flaw. “It was like a week before the wedding,” Wendy said. “It turned out he was on drugs, and I had to let him go. But I still had the baby in my stomach. I ended up losing the baby, the baby died. That baby lived for eight hours and died.”

  She had worked odd jobs at US Airways, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and elsewhere, but she couldn’t make enough to keep her own housing. Moving in and out with men, she was occasionally homeless, living in shelters. She got pregnant again and decided this time that even without the father’s committed caring, she would have the baby. “I said if I get rid of her, I’ll never forgive myself. If I let this happen again. And I made that promise to never to do this again. And I had to tell myself: Stop running. The fear should be over now. Handle this. The whole time I was pregnant, regardless of what happens, I was gonna lov
e this child and take care of this child.”

  The child, a girl she named Kiara, came three months early and weighed two pounds one ounce, born at D.C. General Hospital when Wendy was staying in a shelter. “Because I was homeless, they treated me like I was dirt,” she said. “The nurses acted like I didn’t know anything, I was a dumb so-and-so from the street.” She spoke up for herself and insisted on respect. She didn’t get it.

  Her daughter’s birth was not a happy event. “Because she was coming so early, they tried to tell me I wasn’t having contractions. I had contractions for three days. They tried to tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I had an infection. And I told them if I had an infection and I been taking this medication for this infection for three days, why is it still up there? … They all hooked me up to the monitor and left. I couldn’t page the nurses. For one thing the equipment wasn’t working. They didn’t come check to make sure I was OK. And I had to actually take both monitors, wrap a blanket around me, go in the hall, go all the way down the hall to the nurses’ station and say, ‘Excuse me, I’ve been calling you for three hours. I need more lubrication for the baby’s heart monitor—the beeping from this monitor is driving me crazy. I’m having contractions. I need somebody to check and make sure everything is OK.’ You know.

  “A nd they said, ‘Why are you in the hallway?’

  “I said, ‘Because I’ve been trying to get your attention. I’ve been yelling. I shouldn’t have been yelling.’ … I said, ‘You treat me like I’m a paying patient, OK?’ And this went on until she was born.… See, that’s the way they treat people who don’t have money.”

  Then came the alarming news. A homeless shelter was no place for a newborn, she was told, and the premature baby, once released from the hospital, would have to go to a foster home until Wendy had a place to live. “I told them, ‘No way,’ ” Wendy declared. “ ‘Nobody’s gonna raise my child but me. I’ve been in foster homes. I know what they’re like.’ ” Only a single alternative presented itself. “I bit my tongue. I bit my lip: I called my mother. I said, ‘Look, I had the baby, I know we’ve had our differences, but I am not having anybody raise my child except me.’ I said, ‘I need to stay there until I find an apartment. As soon as I’ve healed enough, I’ll go look for an apartment,’ which I did. My mother agreed with me. And I think that’s when I first got respect from my mother.”

  There was a second blow: At eight months, Kiara was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, caused by a brain injury before or during birth. The little girl grew into a cute, smiling, drooling toddler—except that she couldn’t toddle. She would never walk; she was destined for a wheelchair. At nearly four, she could barely talk and would never do so fluently.

  We re it not for these handicaps, the typical pattern might have been broken, for Kiara was experiencing nothing close to Wendy’s early trauma. “I spank Kiara,” Wendy admitted, “but she got to really, really do something wrong. I don’t spank her for every little thing. I may just pat her leg a little bit. I don’t use belts. I don’t use paddles.” Whatever devotion Wendy’s mother had shown by being tough and concerned had compensated for some of those early years of deprivation and abuse, Wendy believed.

  Even as she struggled into loving motherhood, however, Wendy could not pull herself out of the abused past that foiled her search for a loving partnership with a man. When she finally married, she chose badly. Her husband, suffering from depression and rage, became more adversary than ally. Two months after the wedding, he quit his job at a delicatessen because he “wanted to live off me,” she said. They had a healthy baby, but he sat at home, refused to help with child care, complained about the food she cooked, and called her office colleagues to make jealous threats about fictitious advances that he imagined they were making. “He was very insecure,” Wendy said. “He would get mad at me ’cause I kept telling him, ‘Get your black ass out there and get a job!’ ” He drank. He tried to hit her, “but I beat the snot out of him,” she said, laughing angrily. “I picked up the phone and beamed him between the eyes.” She laughed again. “I punched him in the face, I tried to hang him with a hanger.” She let out a joyous roar of delight. “I hit him upside the head with a frying pan … a big old cast-iron frying pan.” She laughed and laughed. He fled, and she filed for divorce.

  Survivors of sexual abuse have often been observed as extremely protective of their children, sometimes excessively so, peppering them with “no, no, no,” in a manner that destroys the youngsters’ creative inclination to explore and learn. Wendy displayed some of that anxiety, but it was hard to tell how much derived from her own history and how much from her older daughter’s disease. Doting and dutiful, Wendy was determined to maximize whatever possibilities Kiara had in life, just as she was trying belatedly to maximize her own. She now had a reason to be a role model.

  “I feel that everybody has their mishaps, everybody has their setbacks or whatever. It will take a real strong person to overcome those,” Wendy said bravely. “By her seeing me overcoming mine, I’m hoping that’ll influence her to overcome hers.”

  “Call me Peaches,” said the woman with the hard pain in her eyes, the small scar over her left cheekbone. She must have chosen the pseudonym in irony or in yearning. She was too bruised, too bold, too callused, too frightened, too worldly-wise. She was living in a homeless shelter and running Xerox machines for a fancy law firm in Washington, D.C., a job that delighted her and put her on track toward satisfaction. The office where she worked was located in a temple of prosperity. Its vast marble lobby was framed by massive columns, a wall of palms, and a crystalline glass tower opening to views of sky and buildings. The place where she lived, in a dangerous neighborhood, was populated by broken women who stole one another’s food.

  “I have no idea who my parents are,” Peaches said. “The people that adopted me died before I was five.” The foster family that then took her in, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, inflicted debilitating cruelties. They were black, as she was, but evidently not as dark, for they ridiculed her color. “I’ve been locked out of the house, told that I was nothing,” she said, “just like my mother: black, ugly, bony—just worthless. So what the heck, I just existed within that household.”

  And she existed to support the household. In the summers, she said, “I worked from the time I was eight years old in a factory filling buckets with scalding hot tomatoes. That’s how you have to get the skin off, put it in a bucket. Now this is a bucket the size that you use to mop a floor. You got ten cents for a bucket, push and pull. You can imagine … just pushing and pulling buckets on and off, pans on and off, doing that hard work, six o’clock in the morning until the evening.… Illegal labor, but I had to work. That was my summer.”

  She still wore the brands of punishment imposed by her foster mother. “I got scars all up my arm,” Peaches said, showing the twisted shapes like burnished metal. “Didn’t press the collars right, I got burned, because I didn’t do it right.… If I ever breathed sideways I’d get a whippin’.” Adolescence overtook her with confusing stealth. “They didn’t really give any input to me,” Peaches recalled. “I’m a woman, and as young women do, you come into a change where you have your menstrual cycle. I didn’t know what was happening to me. It wasn’t told to me. It was like, ‘Oh, what did you do now? Oh, come on.’ There wasn’t any, ‘Now, this is what you do, this is what I expect, you’re a young lady.’ ”

  Her childhood suffering did not end with the end of childhood. She mentioned no sexual abuse, but the anguish of the physical and emotional battering continued to reverberate. “People look at me strange,” she remarked. “It’s like, ‘You act as if you haven’t interacted with people, you have a disability.’ Well, I haven’t. I never went to a movie. I never went to a circus. My girlfriend treated me to a circus, I was in my twenties, about twenty-seven … I cried because I’d never been to a circus. That was something new to me. I really didn’t hang around with a whole lot of people. I stayed at home beca
use I didn’t have really any choice.

  “I noticed something else about myself. When people talk about their friends, their buddies, the relationships that you have from high school, I don’t have much to say because I didn’t get to interact, so I didn’t develop those kinds of friendships.… The last couple of years I went to an integrated school. Well, heck, I didn’t feel worthy among black people, so you know I didn’t feel worthy among white people. So I was even more isolated.… I didn’t know what I was worth, because I was always told I wasn’t worth anything.”

  After Peaches graduated from high school, the foster family kicked her out. “The first time I had sex I got pregnant” and got a scolding, she said. “ ‘You’re just like your mother, no good, blah blah blah.’ I’m like, well, excuse me, nobody really sat and told me anything about myself to make me feel like I was worth the while for anything, so an older man had sex with me. I didn’t like it. It hurt.” She did not have the baby, on this or any other occasion when she got pregnant. Instead she joined the Job Corps, where she was raped by a pimp who wanted her as a prostitute, and she rapidly descended into hell. Along the way, she tried to hold onto fragments of independence. “I’ve prostituted myself,” she confessed, but not for a pimp, she asserted, only as her own boss. “I couldn’t see me doing it for nobody else.”

  In a desperate search for a touch of caring, Peaches picked one wrong man after another and was whiplashed between a dream and a fear—the dream of having an idyllic family and the fear of creating a home like her foster home. “I’ve been pregnant several times, but the only thing I think that kept me from having children was the fact that all of this replayed in my mind. And if I was not going to have a man and have a home like I envisioned that a home could be from watching TV—‘Hello, honey, I’m home,’ instead of, ‘M-F, you so and so,’ … I was not going to bring a child into this world,” she declared. “Now, I wanted that textbook family with the husband and wife and home and maybe a dog and a cat, two kids, and a car and a house. But I could never really get ahold of it. I could never get ahold of it. That thing eluded me. I fought, I cried, I agonized over it, but it just eluded me, because I had too many things going on with me. I didn’t know what it was. I just exist through life, go from day to day, just work, go have your drink, party every Sunday through Saturday.… If someone would just come in and at least pretend that they love me, I can make it work. I would give and give and give and give until it hurts. And it did. It hurt me.”