Did you grow up po'? Trolling for maudlin stories!!!

[Atlas Mugged]

Lay 'em on me! Barefoot and selling matches in the snow to pay for momma's gall stone operation!

[LoZoccolo]

1. There are some right here, I think.

WARNING: There are some pornographic ads, I think, so you might not want to go here from work.

http://www.mymiserablelife.com

[ceile]

2. Someone slipped money under our door one year...

my mom thinks it may have been a guy she was seeing from church. 4 kids and no money for presents...don't know about a xmas dinner though, I was pretty young.

[roguevalley]

3. I thought we were pitiful until my friend began to tell me about her

life in Minnesota:

1. Her father dumped her mom with nine kids and she worked like a mule her whole life. She used to clean a church and have the kids help her. The church bastards used to leave money on pews and around to catch them stealing but her mom told them, dust it and leave it. They never stole but that's something, isn't it?

2. She used to make homemade pea soup on Monday and by Saturday it was so watered down it was like dish water.

3. They used to have chicken FEET soup. Her mom could only afford the CHICKEN FEET at the store. Ewwww.

Funny thing is, she married a guy who grew up pretty damned well off. When she and I were telling poor stories, he tried to tell us he suffered too. <G> He said they would eat the steaks and others when they turned brown. Couldn't sell it when the red turned brown. <G> We don't give him any respect. Poor widdow guy. <G> Good thing he's a total sweetheart.

[Atlas Mugged]

10. Yikes!!!!

The money trap in the church is appalling, but hardly surprising.

As for the chicken feet, it's the big secret ingredient in many a legendary Kosher chicken soup recipe. That's how it gets the rich yellow color, deep complex flavour and heavy viscosity. But - ewwww, nonetheless. I've never tried making chicken soup with them - it's just too creepy for me to handle.

[Xithras]

4. Lemmesee

We were without electricity at least one month a year because mom couldn't afford to pay the bills. I believed that Beef Ramen satisfied the "meat" food group until I was eight or nine. I strongly suspect that my mother prostituted herself more than once to pay the bills. When one of my moms pervert ex husbands was caught in bed with my younger sister, he offered my mom $100 to not call the police. She accepted, and it became a regular thing between them for several months (until my sister finally threatened to call the police herself). But no matter how poor we got, we never had a shortage of fruits and vegetables to eat...I didn't figure out until I was a teenager that this was because my mom used to raid the local farms and fields around harvest time to steal food.

Somehow, my family actually turned out 180 degrees off of what you would have expected. My much molested little sister today has a happy marriage and many kids of her own, I'm a college grad with a decent life, and my mom is a fundie right wing rethug.

[Atlas Mugged]

9. That's truly an amazing feat.

Horrible childhood - happy adults. Though your mother's "fundie right wing rethug" position is all the more startling when you consider that she literally prostituted you sister. Or maybe not. Your sister must have a spirit and soul made of steel.

[JVS]

5. I was so raggety, folks used to call me patches

[Forkboy]

6. I was so poor my neighborhood was in black and white

We were so poor when someone rang our doorbell I had to lean out the window and yell "DING DONG".

We were so poor my parents married just for the rice.

[skygazer]

7. We had to live in a lake

We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

[HCeline69]

8. You try to tell that to the young people today

and they won't believe you!