Was I Poor?

Clay and I always talk about perspective. Perspective and relativity. How someone can size up the problems in their life based on what they have been exposed to. Here is my story (which everyone who knows me already knows):

When I came to the US, I was 4 years old. It was 1984. We moved into a single apartment (separate kitchen and bathroom, one room was both living room & bedroom, walk-in closet) near downtown LA. And by we I mean my mom, my dad, my sister Fatima, my brother Eduardo, my 3 uncles, and I. Yes, 8 people in a single apartment. Of course at the time, it didn't seem weird or unusual, that's just how it was. We had a bunk bed that Eduardo and I slept on, a fold out couch my parents and Fatima slept on, and my uncles slept on the floor and in the closet. From 1984-1990 we would live in 5 different apartments until my parents finally bought a house in Watts.

Now, Watts is what you might call the ghetto. Again, growing up, it didn't sink into my consciousness that I lived in the ghetto. Projects, gang violence, food stamps, drug dealers. Yes all of these things were present in my neighborhood, but for me that didn't seem out of the ordinary because that's just how life was as I knew it. And not just me for me but for everyone around me; our family, our neighbors, our friends. We all walked by the same projects, we all heard about someone getting shot, we all worried about getting jacked on the way home from school, we all complained about the long lines in the grocery store on the first of the month. We weren't the only family that shopped at thrift stores, swapmeets, wore hand me downs, only got a new pair of shoes once a year, only had one uniform for the entire year (sometimes 2-3 years, we had to outgrow it before we got a new one, and I mean ONE). We didn't go to Toys R Us or shop at the mall. But neither did anyone else. Or at least no one I knew.

It wasn't until I got to high school and some of the other students joked about where I lived that it first started to sink in that maybe I didn't live in the best neighborhood. Mind you, up until high school I had gone to my local Catholic school. When I graduated from 8th grade my mom refused to send me to any of the local public high schools and said she would rather I not go to school than to end up at any of the local schools where she was sure I would wind up pregnant or in a gang or worse. So to make a long story short I found a small magnate school in South Central Los Angeles and that's where the other kids made jokes about my bus not stopping at the bus stop and me having to tuck and roll out of the bus dodging bullets. And this was from the kids who grew up in SOUTH CENTRAL.

Mind you, yes I knew there were better neighborhoods, as in rich neighborhoods. So I figured you either lived in something similar to my neighborhood or you were rich, no in-betweens. So even those in the suburbs were rich to me.

So anyways, back to me realizing maybe I grew up poor. High school made me realize that there were still levels of bad neighborhoods, with mine being towards the bottom. Again, to make a long story short, I threw myself into being a good student (which I realize is the only way to getting out if of my strict household) and eventually ended up at Cornell University, which I didn't even know existed or even understood what an Ivy Leauge was until I applied (when they sent me a free brochure and I thought, NY sounds far away to me!).

So I got to Cornell and the jokes started all over again. Ghetto Maria. Maria from Watts. You can take the child out the hood but you can't take the hood out the child. Mostly I think it was my stories of the 8 people in the single apartment, the bad English grammer sometimes, the green card (the majority of my friends had been born in the US), the tales of me swimming in a trash can (one summer my dad once took one of the green trash bins, cleaned it out, filled it with water, and let us splash around it in), playing street in our backyard, using leaves as money when we played store, using the junk cars in the backyard to reenact movie scenes. Less toys, more imagination.

I will admit though, fear was ever present. Before we got metal bars on our windows (when we had just moved in), I used to sleep with a metal bat by the bed in case someone tried to break into our house through the window (my bed was by the window). It was silly; what would I have done with the bat really? I was a kid, like 10-11 years old. But the bat made me feel safer, like I could protect myself. I stopped worrying about it once we got the bars, or at least I stopped worrying about someone breaking in through the window. I would wake up in the middle of the night and sneak around the house, hiding, double checking the doors and the windows to make sure they were locked. When I heard strange noises at night I remember being deathly afraid that someone had broken in. It wasn't until I got to college that I lost that fear. The feeling of being unsafe in your own home. Ithaca was so safe, so secure. Students walked around freely at night. So safe.

Anways, to continue, all my life I've defended my childhood. That's just the way it was. It was a happy one for the most part. I was aware we didn't have alot of money, that the lack of money was somewhat a big problem and caused many an argument between my parents, but we also still went to a Catholic school, we always had food to eat (I don't remember ever thinking we only had a little bit of food), we were never on welfare. We still went to Shakey's every now and then. We still had a Nintendo. So how could I have grown up poor?

But then I talk to Clay about how he grew up and of course the difference is great. According to him I did grow up poor and it amazes him sometimes that I don't think so. But it's relative to me. I saw people who were also worse off. People all over the world are worse off. I was not poor in comparison.

So I kind of relate this back to my life with cancer. Sometimes people tell me they admire me, that if they were in my situation they wouldn't know how to handle it. But the thing is, my life for the last 2 1/2 years has been with cancer so that's just how it is now. So all the little problems that come with living with cancer seem just that, little. Because I deal with them day in and day out they don't seem out of the ordinary. My life doesn't suck now, it is not worse, it just is. In fact, I feel like I have a happy life. My life now, even with cancer, is better than what it was a few years ago. Yes I worry about my health, yes I would rather not have cancer, but cancer has not ruined my life. I am a stronger person because I've overcome the obstacles that cancer has brought.

Sometimes I try to imagine how different my life would have been if I had not gotten cancer and I honestly don't know if it would have been better. I really don't. I look at what I have now, the kind of person I am now, the things that make me so happy now. But like the, "Was I poor?" conversation, maybe someone else wouldn't think my life was so great.

But I don't care. I wasn't poor and my life doesn't suck. It's not perfect but that's ok. I'm still happy.