I love these people very much. One is my mom. The others are her remaining siblings. Their beautiful faces tell a story of one generation of family, and the four different directions in which their lives took them.
Come below the mutagenic orange DNA helix if you’d like to hear a little more.
My mother is the oldest. Then comes Uncle B, Aunt C, and Uncle T. Their eldest brother died twelve years ago of complications from stubbornly untreated type 2 diabetes.
Two of this little group are middle class by the common understanding of income and employment. Two are lower/working class and have lived in poverty most of their lives. I’ll bet you can guess from their faces who is who.
My mother was pink collar - a nurse for thirty years who served every possible nursing position, acquired a business BS after 20 years of floor nursing, and a masters in hospital administration. Between her and my father (mostly her), we’ve always had health insurance and at least one steady paycheck to count on. She is retired now, as is my dad. Together, barring any personal disasters, they have investments and pensions that enable them to live comfortably, travel a bit, and think about what they are going to leave to my sister and I. She’s standing in the back.
Uncle T is the youngest. He’s not ready to retire yet, but he’s doing alright. He has a cane in this picture because he’s had some knee surgery. He and his wife own a home and some toys, like a boat and a motorcycle. He has an associates degree and a bunch of work experience in various fields, but wound up working for state agencies. He gets paid moderately well and he and his wife together make a decent lifestyle. He has a government pension to look forward to in a few years, and is ready to live pretty well in retirement. He’s on the left.
Now Uncle B, God bless him, has had nothing but trouble and strife his whole life. He was stricken with polio as a baby, was even the March of Dimes Poster Child one month. the first fifteen years of his life were about him trying to catch up in mobility and strength. He never graduated high school, never went to trade school, and wasn’t strong enough to work in the skilled trades. He’s worked for slightly above minimum wage jobs his whole life, struggling to get assistance for his post polio syndrome, and helping raise his stepdaughter’s children when she was in an out of jail and drug treatments. He and his wife, as well as various grandchildren they’ve had custody of, have always received government assistance. His wife is also disabled. B told me once that he would have prayed to just die, but he was afraid that the little ones who depend on him would suffer even more. He’s on the right, in the cap. He looks a decade older than he is, can barely walk, is in constant pain, and just had their assistance reduced because his oldest grandson was arrested and is in juvie and no longer living at home. He’s still working. He has no choice. They own no property, except their beater car.
Aunt C married a charming marine from Appalachian North Carolina and proceeded to raise three boys in the trailer that she still lives in. She’s had two strokes since her husband died of cancer. Until last year, she worked in an automobile assembly plant at the lowest paying job on the line, but she can’t do that anymore. If her husband’s family hadn’t deeded them the land her trailer sits on, she would have no place to live and would have to move in with one of her sons. She is completely dependent on public assistance and disability. Frankly, she needs home health care, but there are over eighty people on the waiting list ahead of her. She is resigned to dying way back on the mountain and just prays that someone finds her body before too much time passes. My mother calls her every other day, and if there is no answer, she calls the local police for a welfare check. The last time she called them, she was told very rudely that she is wasting police time. Aunt C is in the middle there. Not going gently into that good night, she bravely cakes on the make-up and dyes that hair so she can look her best.
Please look at their faces - their beautiful faces. Can you see the difference a lifetime of pain and struggle in poverty makes on the surface? If I had a million diaries, I couldn’t begin to share everything under the surface, all those ways in which poverty and ignorance and horrifically bad theology have worked on them and twisted them and made them think they are no better than they should be. I couldn’t begin to articulate all the ways in which they cling to God and guns and each other, how alienated they can be from the world that I know…that my mother knows…that Uncle T knows.
My mother’s children grew up to be middle class -my sister more so than me; bankers take home better salaries than pastors. Uncle T’s girls are teachers, married to paraprofessionals. They struggle right now, as all middle class families are, but they get by.
Of Aunt Cs boys, only one has left the mountains. He’s a music teacher. He’s also out as a homosexual and doesn’t feel welcome back home when his brothers get together, although he’s not been explicitly excluded. That breaks Aunt C’s heart a little. The others are struggling in the building trades, supporting several families as fall out from broken marriages. They get some assistance, especially during the off season, but THEY deserve it, of course. Not like those people…
Uncle B’s stepchildren…now that’s a story. I could spend several hours delving into how poverty has impacted their lives. One of my cousins died tragically in a car accident recently. Her husband is an over the road trucker, so they got by, albeit at the expense of time together as a family. But the other two….a series of children that couldn’t be cared for and had to be taken in by Uncle B, a few prison sentences for minor drug charges, minimum wage labor, a lifetime of assistance. Generational poverty.
You know what hurts me the most? Listening to Aunt C. and Uncle B talk about how they failed their children, couldn’t give them more than they had.
Look at their faces. They’re not all together as a family very often and they love it when they are. But life has taken them all in different directions; some were more fortunate than others. Still…you could see them all smiling, happy to be with each other, and you might not even know that.
Except for their faces - the mirror that reflects all the ways in which some have been failed. And some have not. And who would have known, when they were children, which would be which.
Aunt C and Uncle B don’t deserve what they’ve been through. Uncle T and my Mom don’t deserve to have not gone through the same thing. It never is a matter of what you deserve.
It’s simply a matter of what you get. At least, they’ve got each other.