The author felt ashamed of her debt as a single mother.
Courtesy of Emma Dowd
My deeply southern family raised me to never talk about money. We were poor, sometimes living in our car, and occasionally hungry. But we never said it out loud.Now, as a single mother of three kids with significant medical needs, I've worked several jobs to pay for their childcare and healthcare.Still, I ended up with $100,000 in debt. I was ashamed until I started talking about it with people in my life. My friends' reactions were surprising — and ultimately brought us closer.My family taught me that poverty was a state of mind"Always broke but never poor" was spoken so often while I was growing up that it was almost a motto. But the truth was, at least four generations before mine would be qualified to call themselves members of the "working poor" class.My family was neatly divided into two groups: those willing to admit that they were down and out, and those who pretended they were always flush. My parents were part of that latter group. They believed in keeping up middle-class appearances, even if the refrigerator was empty. I eventually fell into the same bucket.I never learned how to manage money. The only thing I knew about financial well-being was that more money was better than less.I found myself in debt as a single momAs a single mom, I became an extreme penny pincher, always working multiple jobs and saving as much as I could.
