The Kid has become the resident baker. This is way awesome, since he has mastered the boxed brownie mixes and we are all regularly treated to “dope brownies” (brownies covered in carmel butterscotch sauce that make you dumb as a stoner).

The other day the Kid pulled out a bread maker (we were broke broke broke and hungry) and made two loaves of bread from a mix. They were awesome and delicious and totally made us forget that all we ate that day was bread.

Today he has gone a bit further in his kitchen experiments and is making Challah from scratch.

Challah, peeps, is probably my favorite bread product ever.

And we have been running around the house all afternoon saying things like “Challah-lueia” and other strange things while we wait for yummy deliciousness.

Can I just say that if teenagedom means a child who bakes delicious treats whenever I want, then I think I will survive it.

I got a bone to pick. (What’s new, bone picking seems to be my primary occupation).

See this here horrible Great Recession has inspired a certain class of overeducated white folks to throw off the trappings of privilege a live a simpler life where they mix with the locals and remember what “it’s all about”.

I call that poverty tourism (cough*Barbara Erenrich*cough).

And just like tourism in third world countries, you’re not really helping us by condescending to visit. More often than not, what your doing is giving your voice privilege and precedent over the voices of people who have no choice but to live in Povertyland. You are the reason that articles and opinion pieces and studies and solutions never come from the people who are most familiar with the daily ins and outs of how to live in a world where you are not allowed enough resources to sustain life.

Perhaps you all should hear a story.

My mother and aunt grew up dirt poor in Detroit, the children of a single mother who worked as a waitress. They were really familiar with what real poverty looked like.

My mom met my dad in a commune in San Francisco. The dude who headed the commune was a trust fund brat who had thrown off materialism so that he could experience the pure life of the poor. They didn’t eat meat. They didn’t drink coffee or use sugar. Mom had about as much of the sanctimonious blow hard’s schtick as she could take (and being without caffeine or nicotine- I can just imagine how grouchy she was).

“You never know poverty till you haven’t got a dollar in your pocket” (or a trust fund collecting interest from daddy) she told the trust fund brat.

The story goes that she left after that and dad went with her, where they immediately got hamburgers and coffee with milk and sugar and smoked cigarettes.

That’s how my parents met. But the moral of the story is that you can’t CHOOSE poverty. If you have the ability to CHOOSE, then you are not really poor. Poverty is not a lifestyle choice, it is forced upon you like shackles and makes everything in the world more difficult, not more pure or simple or clear. It weighs you down, trips you up, makes even the most normal of tasks like feeding yourself and your family a balancing act worthy of circus acrobats.

We don’t want you to visit us here in Povertyland. We want to throw off our shackles and learn to live without the extra burden. But every time one of you chooses to visit, our struggle is lengthened while you idealize us natives.

Stop it, let us speak for ourselves. Listen when we tell you what we need, it’s not that different from what you need, it’s just a zillion times harder for us to get.

When you’ve done everything you, everything you are supposed to do, to protect yourself and your child from an abusive ex, and the system fails you at every turn.

First go read this story (triggers, triggers, triggers, peeps) from The Curvature

Then as a wee bit of a refresher, read this old post of mine- Getting Out is Never Easy (also- triggers triggers triggers)

Getting out of an abusive situation is never easy, and the help that is supposed to be available to protect us is not enough. I had to give up on the system and run away. Even after 12 years of no communication, I was afraid that the Kid or I would be hurt at his 8th Grade Graduation. We skipped the public ceremony and went out for Chinese tapas instead.

Katie Tagle did everything she was supposed to do. She left him, she filed police reports and applied for restraining orders. She tried to keep her son safe in every legal way possible.

That system failed her and her child. That system refused to acknowledge the evidence in front of its eyes and chose too rely on make-believe stereotypes of vindictive women and their hard-pressed male victims.

I got lucky, but I also had to leave a city I loved, drop all my friends and only communicate with people who had never met, talked to, or heard about my ex or who were related to me and were supposed to take my side. It’s a big sacrifice. Could you pick up on a whim and leave everyone you know? Could you function without access to credit, or references from bosses who smoked pot with your ex every weekend? Without a bank account, or a cell phone, or a forwarding address? Or even a lease in your name? Would you even know how you go about getting a car loan without having it show up on your credit (try tote-your-note car lots. The cars will be crappy and old and the odometer will probably be rolled back, but it won’t show up on a credit report). And this was all before Facebook and MySpace and Twitter and blogs. I got way too comfortable and assumed that a decade’s worth of absence would make him disappear. I was wrong.

I still, fucking still, get startled by men who resemble my ex in even tiny ways. I still lose sleep when I hear noises, perfectly explainable tree or wind noises, outside my windows at night.

All that and I got lucky. The Kid is alive and safe. I am alive and safe. Any abuser apologists are on my permanent shit list (you know who you are) and don’t get access to the Kid or me.

I think I know what Katie Tagle is experiencing right now. I think she is blaming herself for not breaking the law, keeping her son from his father, and running. But she shouldn’t. Living in hiding should not be the only option for a woman protecting her child. That tiny family shouldn’t have to be the ones terrified of every door knock or phone call or email. She did everything she was supposed to do to keep her child safe according to the Justice System. And the people that really failed her son, the judges and her ex, are free. The judges can hide behind their black robes and superiority and “justice” to avoid shouldering the blame for their accessory to murder. Her ex took the coward’s way out.

It’s nice when facts back up all the complaining I’ve been doing on this little site.

Such as the American Dream is a load of shit. A child born into poverty in America has a 1.3 percent chance of making it to the upper class. 1.3 percent. That’s it.

It’s not a question of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, it’s not a question of hard work over laziness or intelligence over ignorance. It is more akin to the odds of winning the lottery, which may explain why so many poor people are willing to put their faith and their cash into tiny games of chance with little likelihood of payoff, the odds are very familiar to them (us, me).

But this isn’t a natural human state. The division of haves from have nots is neither normal nor natural nor to be expected. Unemployment doesn’t exist in nature. Neither does credit or money. As a species, there are more than enough resources on this planet to feed and house us all, only complex and unnatural ideas of trade and surplus and profit and ownership prevent that possibility. No one really dies because there is a lack of food, but because there is a lack of money to buy food.

I’ve written before that I hate charity, and yes I know how hypocritical that is being that I live on the kindness of internet strangers and their charitable acts. But this story may illustrate to you, my few dear readers, why charity is the worst way to solve society’s problems.

My dear aunt lost her front tooth last week. We all suffer from abysmal teeth, likely to break if we even think of eating something as hard as a corn flake. Her front teeth were capped or crowned or something like that 30 years ago, and needed to be replaced 20 years ago. But she has no insurance or money, and there were always more important things like feeding children or paying utility bills that got in the way. So it wasn’t a surprise when her front tooth broke off.

But it was painful, and even though we have been doing our best to reassure her that “it’s not too noticeable” she is humiliated by the big hole where her tooth used to be and her new inability to pronounce f sounds like a grown up.

She goes to a free clinic to get medical care, and they gave her a prescription for antibiotics and set up an emergency appointment with a dentist who sometimes does work for the clinic for free.

She rushed off to the dentist with just a half an hour’s notice. He could squeeze her in and she was so excited. She’s been hiding her face behind her hand since the tooth broke. She was going to be fixed, or at least put on the path to being fixed, to being able to smile and talk and not hide.

4 hours later, she came home in tears, still gap toothed and humiliated, but now feeling much worse because the dentist’s act of charity didn’t come with human decency.

He didn’t look at her medical history. He had assumed she was there so he could do a cheap and easy extraction with no plans to fix the problem. He jammed the needles in her mouth and cut up the roof of her mouth. When she complained that he was causing her pain he said “I don’t have time to treat you like a human being”.

I don’t have time treat you like a human being.

That is what you get with charity sometimes, more often than sometimes even. You get half assed care that isn’t what you actually need and you get treated like less than a human in the process. And you are supposed to be grateful for it, no complaining about rough treatment or unfairness. Just suck it up and be glad someone is willing to be in the same room with you. Your poverty makes you untouchable, and it is an act of charity just to tolerate your presence.

I have seen some amazing acts of kindness. I have had my ass saved by strangers and my kid fed by anonymous people in the ether of the internets. I have also seen some horrendous things done in the name of charity because the people on the receiving end are poor and desperate and not allowed to complain.

I would much rather live in a world where basic needs are not left to the whims of other people. You can still be kind, you can still be charitable, but no one’s life or health should depend on whether someone has the “time to treat you like a human being”.