Joy Comes in the Morning
Have you ever gone to the store and had your credit card declined? If you’re anything like me, you immediately want to justify the situation.
“I swear there is enough money in there! I would never overdraft my account,” I’d say to a 16-year-old cashier who could care less, he just wants me to hurry up.
This is exactly how I felt the first time I went to Kroger to buy formula with a WIC card. I was standing in the aisle trying to decipher what size formula was “WIC” approved along with trying to figure out how to know how much formula I could buy. Is it unlimited? I knew about the first of the month from working retail but wasn’t sure how every benefit worked. Humbled myself, opened google. Problem solved.
I gathered up my 6 cans and headed to the register to pay. Having worked in retail a very long time, I will always use self-checkout if it’s available; nobody bags my groceries as well as I do. There isn’t a chip on the WIC card, so I swiped and a receipt spit out. That was easy. Wrong. As I gathered up the bags to leave, the self-scan attendant stopped me, “Excuse me you haven’t paid for those,” she said.
Probably rolling my eyes to myself I clapped back, “Yes I have, here’s my receipt.”
I was about to have my first experience in poverty discrimination.
“It’s not that hard to use! The first receipt tells you what you have left. You for sure don’t have six cans, that says three and you have to go through the next screen to get to the payment,” she said, very annoyed.
“I’m sorry this is my first time using the card,” I replied.
“You girls really need to figure out how to budget these better and go through the check out if you can’t use the card,” she barked.
Whoa. Did she just stereotype me? Who does she think she is?
“You’ll have to excuse me, I just got custody of this little guy this morning and I’ve never had to use the card to buy formula, so I had no idea. He was taken from his mom and they just dropped him off without enough formula. I’m not on WIC and I’ll just use my card if it’s that big of a deal.”
I’m pretty sure she didn’t say another word, just clicked through the screen and finished the transaction.
What’s wrong with that supervisor, right? Sure, she lacked compassion and was very irritated at having to do something extra, but really, what’s wrong with me? Why did I feel the need to justify any of this and why did I feel like I needed to prove my worth by touting how I didn’t use WIC?
I left feeling like a snob. I didn’t want to be classified as poverty ridden and I was mortified that I had been. Angered even. But why? Privilege. I would’ve told you I genuinely cared for everyone, that I would never look down upon someone or single anyone out, but simply by saying I didn’t want to be “like that” I was discriminating.
For the first time on this journey I could relate to Jade. A simple task that I needed help with caused someone to think less of me. Taxpayers had paid for that formula. Plenty of people in this country opposed that piece of plastic I used to pay for it, and sadly, I knew a lot of them. Serving the least of these takes on a new meaning when you get a minuscule glimpse of what their every day looks like. They are judged on their lifestyle just by the plastic they use at the store.
I’d encounter this same cycle of privilege and judgement at the doctor’s office when I showed Michael’s medical card, at the WIC office every month when I had to load the card to buy his baby food, and at job and family services when I had to switch his cash assistance to my name. But every once in a while, I found the compassionate people. The ones who cared and who wanted to hear the story. The story of the girl who had no home and moved in with me. Who had no family, so we now had her baby. They cried or offered encouragement, checked in on me when they never had to and they have no idea how much I needed them in those first few months. I didn’t just value their kindness, but I valued what they did for my attitude. They had no judgement when I walked in the door, no preconceived notion of me being “just another girl using the government,”. They treated me like a person and reminded me to listen more and talk less. I needed to do a better job hearing the stories of everyone and not lumping them into a category. You are who God says you are, not the rest of the world. I’d encourage you to think about a time when you were quick to categorize some and consider how you can stop doing that. I know I still struggle here, but I do realize that being in their shoes is the hard way to learn the lesson.
We had dinner that first night as a family with Michael and I tried to give him a bath and a bottle and start a bedtime routine. Remember he was watching TV most of the night until they went to the shelter and word on the street was he cried all night there. When Rylee cried at night I put her in bed and nursed her back to sleep and it worked for nearly three years and then it backfired for the next four, so I’m no sleep expert ok? I bounced him, I walked around, gave him more formula, bicycled his legs. Nothing was working. He was screaming uncontrollably and I had zero motherly instinct for him. I was trying to console a baby that my body didn’t know. He didn’t like to be held. More screaming from him and more crying from me. Why did I say yes to this? What in the actual hell were we thinking? I could not do this.
When we got married our whole wedding was planned around the word joy. You’ll find it all over our house. We have these giant canvases D painted me for Mother’s Day that read “Joy comes in the morning,” hanging above our bed. I bought my midwife a necklace that said the same thing after I delivered a hefty ten pound Reid on the bedroom floor in the middle of the night. As I bounced Michael, screaming and vomiting (reflux rookie) most of the first night, I let the tears fall and prayed those words over and over. I knew this wasn’t like a tough babysitting gig where the kid whines a lot. This was life. Right there in my arms, was a baby, whom I had now had the responsibility of nurturing and caring for. One who was opening my eyes to my own judgement and forcing me to evaluate how I looked at the world. Do I get attached? Do I keep a healthy distance? For now, I just put the baby in the car and drove around, praying he’d fall asleep. I needed to check in on Jade in the morning. I knew she was on thin ice at the shelter. By the weekend, it would start to crack.
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I just love the courage and the raw emotion. Thank you for sharing and caring. And I don’t mean that in a Hallmark way!
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