When we were broke, for many years, we grew our own vegetables, put up food, cooked from scratch, baked bread, went hiking, spent time outdoors, figured out ways to keep going without much money. It made us more resourceful and taught us to really appreciate being better off when that finally happened. But I look back on those days as probably being the happiest of our lives (of course that's partly because you came along then). What wasn't good was not being able to get the medical & dental care we needed and having to sell cherished books to keep the utilities from being turned off.
My friend responded that even though her mother is better off now, some of those things are things she still takes great joy in. Many of the things the she wrote about doing are things that I do now and are also things that are often found to contribute to ones inner sense of happiness. These are also things that decentralize power.
I am “broke.” I know ways to be less “broke”, but this involves seeing my daughter less, putting my creative passions aside and being less involved in my community. I LIKE my life. I grew up in a cage of desperate poverty, but I could also see the cages that money and materialism create for both individuals and society. Growing up in poverty taught me to be resourceful and learn a sense of security that did not come from having money, but in having community; my sense of connection from my creative life; my sense of happiness from within.
The word “poverty” has such negative connotations; it imbues a sense of powerlessness. Sometimes I replace the word with “economically poor.” For those with no resources in community or family, it very well could be powerlessness and poverty. There is dignity in being poor in a community or just to choose to live a simple life. I don’t feel like I live in poverty because my lifestyle has afforded me the privilege to step away from our hegemonic and unjust system, even if only a little bit; taking just a little power from said system and putting it in my hands. I will not accept that as a single mother either have to spend most of my day away from my daughter, leaving others to fill most of her emotional needs or live on welfare, in poverty and powerless.
Money is at the center of our culture; the word revolves around it, and that is what the dominant logic and the media tell us over and over. If you read the news, you would think that the only hope for our future is that “consumers” (what ever happened to citizens?) start spending more. When we didn’t buy enough last Christmas to make our economy grow as much as economists wanted, we were called stingy and scrooges in the media. When we were attacked by terrorists, the president told us we could support our country by shopping. “Shopping Therapy” is actually a real expression! Yes, consumerism is what keeps the system running smoothly, but our system is crumbling as it just isn’t a sustainable model (the rich have known this for decades folks).
Once, I spent a lot of time fighting the system, but I always wondered what would happen if the system I was fighting went away. Or if we were winning the fight. And what exactly were we fighting for? An authentic life? Real productive and fulfilling work? An end to our military terrorism on the world? A rich community life? Equality? Justice? Dignity? It didn’t feel okay to me, to my nature, to work for and perpetuate the capitalist machine by day and yell about it at night.
Ghandi said, “Be the change you want to see.” The Zapatistas say, “We are not here to change the world, something that is very difficult, next to impossible. We are here to create a whole new world.” And now as the world economy crumbles, what we are doing (or should be doing) is building a new world in the shell of the old, right where we live. Things will not fundamentally change unless we, the people, change. My idea of revolution is not about changing faces in the great halls of power, but diverting that powering into the hands of regular folks; building from the bottom up, rather than the top down. I find small ways to live my utopia today, in the here and now. What better way to bring about change than to live it? What would the world look like if we took some of the power away from money and institutions and diverted it into creating a sense of community? What would it look like if most of our activities involved no money at all. Our lives and our communities are the most powerful sites of dissent.
A new world is possible, but it won’t happen we don’t live in it. So, I grow vegetables, bake bread, cook from scratch so as to rely less on the industrialized capitalist polluting food system. I buy organic and local to cut out the “coyote” middle men, eat fresh food and saving the pollution involved in shipping. I find creative ways to reuse my trash before I recycle it or throw it away. I share a home because living together is how we build community and…learn to live together. I skip the rat race and instead of sending my daughter to a million enrichment classes a week I enrich our lives by learning kids songs on the guitar or spending a day at the beach with a picnic lunch and my daughter, living and learning together. We wish we knew more kids to share this money free fun with! Maybe these are all small things, but I think it is the small things, those small acts of resistance…added together that can make big changes.
Community service has opened up many opportunities to Ramona and I, such as free tickets to events, free theater classes for Ramona, not to mention the feeling of connectedness. I work a lot, I just choose to try to live a more integrated life and take as much control as possible as to where that energy goes. I work with my daughter, in the garden, distributing posters, cooking, or she plays while I make lesson plans. Sometimes she helps me clean her school which gives me a discount on her tuition. I also do house and pet sitting, and always ask my clients if their pets would appreciate playing with a little girl, thus “work” and life can happen simultaneously even in this culture, like it still does in so many cultures.
I do wish for more money sometimes for things like fixing the growing cavity in my tooth or visiting Ramona's paternal family in Costa Rica. I can’t get Ramona all the cool toys made of “natural materials” that many of her friends and schoolmates get, we settle for the plastic barn at the thrift store. But these are the choices I live with and I do not regret them because I will watch my child grow up, I will not let the capitalist machine drive that wedge between my daughter and I. I can do this without a husband to bring home the bacon.
In closing, I know there are many ways to parent. I know that sometimes mothers are earners and fathers are the nurturers and this causes me to rejoice! I know that the rat race does not affect all families the same. I know that everyone’s contribution to positive change can come from different places. Many children do great in full-time childcare. I wanted to share my activism and what my life means to me, largely because I feel us single parents are pressured to live the victims life in powerlessness. There are other options for single parents. I want to support the idea that we can be a society where we really do help each other out.
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