BY STEPHANIE LAND
SOCIETY
SEVEN YEARS OUT FROM NEEDING to use food stamps, and it’s interesting what still triggers that feeling of humiliation that consumed my life back then. Yet I always feel it when I use a self-checkout station at the grocery store. As a college student who earned money by cleaning people’s homes, I used an EBT card, the debit card supplied to spend funds granted through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), to buy food I couldn’t afford otherwise. Often my cart held our usual essentials like butter, pancake mix, and eggs, but on the days I added candy, cupcakes, or cookies, I hoped no one witnessed me using the card. I’d seen the posts on social media about what people bought with their SNAP funds. Somehow it was wrong for me to buy treats for my daughter’s Christmas stocking.
This sentiment—that a child whose family relies on government assistance should be denied something that other kids feel entitled to—goes beyond the “poor people can’t have nice things” outcry. When people projected anger toward struggling parents like me for purchasing Christmas or Easter candy with food stamps by complaining about it online, it felt like an attempt to punish or shame me, a poor person, for getting pregnant in the first place.
Just a year out of college, somewhat propelled into a niche after an essay about working as a maid went viral, I began experiencing some success as a freelancer. It should have been a moment of pride. But every personal essay published brought with it hordes of hate-filled messages. People emailed me to say I was no better than vermin, and needed to be committed.
I’m not sure why I thought the anger would die down after I shared my experiences in a best-selling book or after a Netflix series inspired by it had some success. Perhaps I expected a bit more empathy for a mother just trying to do her best for her child and create moments of joy amid financial precarity. And yet there it was, one of the first online reviews of my second book, and the woman was upset that I’d given my kid so much ice cream.
THE TWO BOOKSare an intimate history of the first seven years I spent mothering my oldest daughter alone. For nearly that entire time, I fought for resources, for housing and food security, and to get a degree from a four-year university. I went hungry often, lived off peanut butter and jelly, and worked a physically demanding job before fighting to stay awake
