"That no one will come and take it away." Yeah, that fear...

Fundamental for good mental health.

Great mother

I know exactly what you mean. 😓

During the worst of my family’s years of poverty, we had the same three meals for months on end: big honkin’ pot of pinto beans, big honkin’ pot of white beans, big honkin’ pot of navy beans. Each pot would last our family of seven two or three days, then we’d move on to the next one, again.

That your dad allowed you live in poverty when he had the means to support you better is on him.

When I was a kid we had a wood-burning stove. It was this huge metal box that sat in the kitchen and we had to go once a month to chop wood in the timber to supply us from fall to early spring. First thing in the morning it was so cold until it heated up and even then the upstairs bedrooms had no heat. When it was really cold in the winter I slept under the table in the kitchen in my sleeping bag. We had no A/C in summer, it was open every door/window and turn on the fans.

Still a problem if you live in the US

I can afford stuff now and when I go home and find something I want to eat, I just eat it knowing I'll be able to replace it

We (society) should do more to feed children fruit and veggies. That's why schools should have free healthy meals for their students. The kids need it and will benefit in more ways than one.

Never bought Kleenex until I was late 40’s. Good stuff, lol

Yep.

24 hrs of clean running water will do it for me. Just running water out the fawcett everytime I need it.

If you live where mullein grows, we call it "camp flannel" for a reason. The leaves, fresh, are very good TP. Yes, I've done that. Maple tree leaves, too. You can't flush it, but it beats nothing.

Snacks back home were "What is edible, growing, and available?" Thank God I was raised in the country on a farm. FYI, you can make a good snack out of more than you know, but please learn for at least one year, so you can ID plants when they don't have flowers or fruit. Annoying AF that guidebooks don't show those pictures, b/c some edibles you don't want when they've flowered/fruited.

By the time I entered high school, I was so near-sighted that I had to sit in the front row, and even though our lives had improved considerably by that time, I didn’t get glasses until I bought them for myself at age 19 because I had a ticket to see Artur Rubinstein play in one of his last live performances, when he was 89 years old and nearly blind, and I wanted to SEE as well as hear.

24 hrs runing water IS SO A BLESSING

I thought it meant time for a while

I'm not poor, and I do this anyway.

My older daughter grew up poor in Haiti till I adopted her when she was 12. For all the bad -and there was a LOT bad- she still miss the kind of support and camaraderie I think you seldom find among the middle class and rich.

it was very exciting to make a costume with my parents as a kid. I’m sorry today’s kids are buying ready-made costumes, the magic is lost

The year I was 11, my parents started their own business and they had a good product, but it turned out to be just a fad rather than the next big thing like they had thought it would be. They had put pretty much everything they had into it and weren’t able to pay the mortgage on the house, which I found out one day near the end of fifth grade (so I was 11. My brother was 10, my sister was 8, the next brother was ~2-1/2 and the baby was shy of six months) when I came home from school and everything we owned was sitting in the living room. We spent the summer in a Bohemian friend’s mountain shack, replete with a hot plate in the “kitchen” (a long, low room about 85 steps up the side of a mountain, with poison oak all over the place, including those steps), a small room where all seven of us slept, and an open pit beside the cabin as our toilet. And there were biting flies.

Actual bedroom with a bed you don't have to share... not even with pets. A bed just for yourself

Where I grew up we needed school uniforms. Everyday, come home from school wash the uniform( Shirt, shorts, socks) for the next day and do that for the whole year. If we were lucky we didn't grow in height and were able to use the same uniform for next year ( had lot of stitched patches on the uniform). Looked ridiculous one year wearing shorter clothes. And we had to be very very careful with the shoes.

A takeaway is a massive treat for me because I grew up not having them. Once a month I get so excited about it I spend three days deciding which food to get.

This is my everyday

It sucks how the system designed to "save you money" only really applies to people who don't need to save it in the first place

Everything OP mentions is in fact a luxury. In my country only for rich people, no way for someone middle class