When I was in third form one of my siblings became seriously ill and Mum spent her time driving between her multiple jobs and Starship Hospital. I barely saw her at all during these weeks, as she'd be working night shifts, then day shifts, then evenings at the hospital on repeat. I would get myself to school in the morning, and return home in the late afternoon, handwash my only school shirt, eat toast for dinner, and do my homework in front of the TV while my shirt dried on a clothes rack.
Over the next several years it became a variety of normal if the power was cut off when I got home. It wasn't weird that we didn't have a phone for long periods of time. It wasn't strange that we didn't have any food in the house, and that a $20 note left beside the fridge was my lunch and dinner for the foreseeable future. I would walk around the corner to the phone box and call the power company to negotiate turning the power back on, and then walk to the fish and chip shop because a scoop of chips was only $1.50, and there was no electricity to cook with anyway. I would practice my viola and set up candles on the table to do my homework, and sometimes I could almost pretend like it was an adventure.
As a teen I learned that being poor is a collection of experiences that whittles away at your self esteem. I saw the looks checkout operators gave when Mum handed over the letter stamped by Winz, when we had to put items back because the food grant wasn't enough to even cover the essentials. I observed the face of our landlord as mum managed to convince him that she would be able to pay the rent on time next week. I watched the pawnbroker shrug as my mum explained that the $30 he was offering for all her gold rings wouldn't even cover enough petrol to get her to work for a week. And I watched my mum use all of the tricks she had to keep us afloat. Mum's skill and strategy was magical and fierce, and it did keep us afloat, just. It also gave me a bird's eye view of how New Zealand's class system works.
By midway through fifth form, the armpits of my school shirt had rotted out. There is a limit to the amount of teenage sweat and cheap deodorant one shirt can absorb, and so I spent the next summer wearing my school jumper no matter what the weather, until by luck I found another school shirt in an op shop. To school prize-giving, I wore the pair of good black vinyl shoes my mum and me and my sister shared.
You learn about people's values quickly when you're poor. You learn that people are terrified of poverty. That rich people blame poor people for being poor because they desperately want to believe that their own decisions will keep them from ending up that way. People hold on to this because they can't handle the truth, which is that material wealth is all just down to stupid luck.
You learn a lot about yourself too. You learn that you understand power and fear a lot more than rich people. You learn how to not live in servitude to these things. You learn about hope, and reasoning, and generosity. You learn that money is transient, that sometimes you have it and sometimes you don't. You learn that the amount of money you have doesn't equate to your value as a person. You learn about scarcity, and that one is really hard to shake. I often think about the ways Mum tried to protect me from feeling poor and how she managed to preserve a feeling of possibility in our house. I now know that she did it by ignoring what society tells poor people they should prioritise. She decided that sometimes it's more meaningful for a 14-year-old to have their first pair of jeans than it is for a car to have a warrant, and that giving your child a sense of opportunity is worth giving up a well-balanced diet for. She decided that learning was the priority and she sacrificed her own needs for it.
When I turned 16 my music teacher gave me a job in her orchard and I used my wages to buy a viola. I recently asked my mum how we could afford for me to take music lessons even when we couldn't even pay the electricity bill. She replied "because I knew it was important".
And that's the crux of it all really. There is no logic to being poor, because it's not logical that anybody should be poor. Collectively we have more than enough, and we should place value on sharing it. We need to stop equating luck with effort. We need to understand that nobody plans on ending up poor - that the thing about being poor is that poor people do not make themselves poor. It's our society that perpetuates conditions of poverty that makes people poor. And that needs to change.
Kiki Van Newtown is the parent of two kids, and raises them on a diet of hashbrowns, soysages, and feminist discourse in upper Lower Hutt. Between convincing her young children about the merits of wearing pants and bringing home some bread and butter, Kiki performs with her wife GG and best buddy Jason in their band HEX. This article was first published by The Spinoff and is reproduced with permission.
