In reading this story I’m not sure whether I should feel sympathetic or … what. Master’s Degree, divorced, three kids, “decent salary” county secretary job with health benefits, and some child support from her ex.
In her elaborate explanation of how agonizing this all was for her, a brilliant women fallen on desperate circumstances I kept thinking how much would a simple dinner with rice and veggies really set her back vs the imperative of the soup kitchen? Where is all that “decent salary” going?
We don’t know how much she was making. $10 an hour? $15 maybe? Evidently not enough to pay $1800 for the summer child care the kids were going to.
What the poor moms I have known do (IME) is either find a cheaper day care or leave the kids home alone (probably illegal in that case as the oldest was only 11. They have to be 12 here.)
The article doesn’t give us enough data to tell us how much that “decent salary” was.
It’s actually a pretty common pattern after divorce for the woman to make choices that maintain stability for the kids, especially keeping the house to minimize disruption for the kids, that turn out not to be financially viable on her single income. In this woman’s case it also apparently means not being able to get a good return on her investment in education. It’s not rare to have to move to take a job that uses a master’s degree. Even if she could take a long commute instead of moving, that’s not very practical for a single mother of 3 kids, either. Also, sometimes the woman compromises on other things in the settlement to keep the kids and the house. Maybe that’s why his support payment on 3 kids is apparently less than $600/month?
So what does that mean for her using the food bank? I dunno. But in situtations like that, something is going to break. It’s pretty darn hard to support 3 kids on one income paying for childcare. Maybe what gives is decent childcare, like NinetyWt mentioned, or maybe it’s food. Or maybe it’s going to be foreclosure.
Hopefully her knowledge of the system extends to how she can take a tax deduction for the childcare expenses. But even with that, childcare is probably $1000 a month. Assume a decent salary of $36k. Figure roughly 1/3 to taxes, 1/3 to housing and, during the summer, 1/3 to childcare. Not a lot left.
I don’t begrudge her use of the food bank/ soup kitchen.
What’s particularly unsympathetic about her? Income and expenses didn’t match up to the point where she had trouble feeding her kids so she availed herself to the charity of the people running the soup-kitchen.
Although without the soup-kitchen her family’s situation may not have been as desperate as other beneficiaries of the soup kitchen, the people participating in running the soup kitchen want to help alleviate human hunger and they seem to be doing so in this circumstance.
I don’t see that she’s forsaking funding food for her own family to purchase an HDTV, so I’ll say it’s alright. She also seemed to have some sort of desire, intention, and plan to improve her family’s financial situation rather than force them to rely forever upon the soup kitchen (which she apparently successfully executed), so I really can’t be offended. I’ll agree with her, it was a responsible choice for her and her children.
Read the article, did you? $1,800 a month just for day care alone. The putative child support is about $600 monthly. That’s still a hefty chunk of change… probably more than half her monthly salary. Presumably there’s mortgage, utilities, car upkeep, clothes… doesn’t sound like they’re living exactly high on the hog.
Since she did mention she’s scrimping to keep them in the same school and same neighborhood as before the divorce, I’m thinking maybe she hasn’t yet downsized from the two-salary house to the one-salary one. In this housing market, maybe she can’t.
Since school is starting, and she’ll presumably have to spend far less on child care for the school year, she probably figured that this was an emergency strategy to get her through the month. With luck the school has an after-school program, she’ll be able to feed her kids for the next nine months, and is probably hoping that by next summer she’ll have more control over cirumstances.
She’s been sacrificing potential income in order to give the kids stability–which I admire. I sympathize with her situation.
That story just made me sad. It sounds like she’s doing the best she can. Clearly, she’s not trying to rip anyone off.
Could some home ec whiz swoop down on her household and demonstrate how to produce meals containing adequate calories and nutrition on whatever pitiful sum she can spend on food every month? Probably. But:
Knowing how to prepare nutritious food on a tight budget takes substantial time and knowledge. She sounds like a smart lady, but that doesn’t mean she knows six ways to cook soybeans. Nor does she necessarily have the time to slave away in the kitchen chopping carrots and baking Cornell bread.
Very cheap, nutritious food isn’t necessarily going to appeal to the palates of her children, at least at first.
Honestly, I kind of rolled my eyes at that article. She sounds like an overly dramatic person, trying to make her situation sound more dire than it really was because she is one of those people who thinks being poor is cool (yes, I am thinking of the William Shatner cover of “Common People” as I type this ).
If you have a bunch of friends who can bail you out with gift certificates for food after they find out you DROVE (in your own car) your kids to the soup kitchen ONE TIME, you’re really not in the same boat as an impoverished inner city single mom who truly doesn’t have any money, doesn’t have a car, doesn’t have a nice job, and doesn’t have anyone to turn to for help.
In fact, I would not have blamed the soup kitchen people for turning this lady away if they had seen it as taking advantage of a service meant to be used by people who truly don’t have any other way to get food - it’s just a credit to their generosity that they don’t mind serving whoever shows up no questions asked.
Sorry, lady, but you didn’t have to pay $1800 for daycare. You could have sent the kids to stay with grandma (or one of the aforementioned friends) for the summer or something like that if you really were desperate. If you want to decide it’s important to you to have luxuries like an expensive daycare, a house in your preferred location, etc., hey you’re free to make that choice in this country, but it’s obnoxious to then act like everyone should feel sorry for you because you’ve made a choice to live outside your means.
There are poor people out there who truly are victims fo bad luck or bad circumstances, but I think it’s kind of ridiculous for someone like this to act like her situation was totally out of her control.
That presumes that Grandma and her friends 1) aren’t working themselves and 2) would be willing to spend their summer taking care of someone else’s kids. $1800 for full-time daycare for 3 kids seems quite reasonable, not luxurious.
Yeah, that’s quite an assumption. I mean, my mom lives here in the same town, we actually get along with each other, she likes my kids…but there is no way she would take care of them daily for months on end. She works full-time, she has a life of her own. I know a whole lot of SAHMs, but I would have a very hard time asking that of any of them–they’re already busy and overwhelmed.
I do think she’s dramatizing the situation a bit, but hey, she’s a writer–that’s what she does. I think it was a real situation, though.
A friend of mine is a single dad with 2 kids, and works full-time. He has less money than I do (and I’m unemployed). ‘Taking the kids to grandma’ simply isn’t an option for him - one grandma is, to be frank, slightly unhinged, and the other works full time also and has arthritis. (She takes the 18 month old when she can, as do I, and the 3 year old goes to daycare, which costs my friend £500 per month on a £950 salary). The rest of his money goes on rent - he could maybe save around £50 a month by getting somewhere else, but he wants to provide as stable an environment as he can for his kids since their mum left.
Perhaps this woman was being slightly dramatic, but if she really feels it would be better for her finances and her kids to go to the soup kitchen this month, then what’s the big deal? I’m sure she didn’t make the decision simply because she couldn’t be bothered to cook one evening. And I doubt feeding her and her kids is taking food from the mouths of some starving person.
If my friend ever decided to take his kids to a soup kitchen I would hug him. (And he would only be likely to do it because he wouldn’t want to ask us for help.) And I would glare most righteously at anyone who criticised him for it! We don’t know all the circumstances with this woman, if she felt she had to do this then who’s she hurting?
I honestly don’t know what to think. I’d like to believe that, if she saw a need, then the need was there. No one (I hope) takes their kids to a soup kitchen because it’ll be fun.
On the other hand, I have a sister who is a divorced mother of four. She told me last November that things were very tight. Even though she owns her home free and clear, there are taxes and upkeep and heating to take care of. She had tried to sell her house and move someplace smaller, but no one came close to offering what she wanted. (I have no idea if what she wanted was fair). In this conversation she was explaining that the money she gets from her ex doesn’t go far and she said, “I’m not even sure how I’m going to heat the house this winter.”
I felt badly for her. She works full time, but, as I said, has 4 kids.
Well, a couple of months later I got an email from her letting everyone know her travel itinerary—she was going to Mexico on a week-long yoga retreat.
So, when someone who is squarely in middle class or above tells me they can’t afford something, I have to wonder what else is going on.
Most people who are squarely in middle class have a credit card tucked away that they can use in emergencies. I’m not an advocate of racking up huge amounts of debt, but I think that if I were in her situation, I would put some groceries on my Visa card before I would go to a soup kitchen. Her kids only need daycare during the summer, so she should be able to pay the bill pretty easily in September, once her expenses are $1800 a month lower. On the other hand, if she doesn’t have even enough credit to get a Visa card, that might tell us something about deeper problems she has that she didn’t mention.
She may have simply exhausted her credit, or she may never have built an adequate credit history while married. That happens to some women.
Honestly, I have to wonder at how comfortable people feel in judging the circumstances of someone they’ve never met. Do you honestly think someone with 3 school-age children hasn’t thought about these things? Does it give you an ego boost to think you’re smarter or more stable than someone with an advanced degree? I just don’t get it.
Your first possibility here was what I meant when I said she may have other problems she didn’t mention. The second I think is a stretch…you don’t need credit history to get a Visa these days…they give them to college students who never had a job.
I’m not judging her circumstances, and I know that if my husband and I got divorced, it would not be easy for me. It’s just that sometimes I wonder about these “it can happen to anyone” stories that seem to leave out details that would explain how it came to this situation. Frankly, it makes it seem a little bit like a political piece, even though she claims it isn’t. Actually, I should amend that. The fact that she goes out of her way to claim it isn’t makes it seem even more like it is.
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