Lives on the Edge: Single Mothers and Their Children in the Other America
Polakow, V. (1993). Lives on the edge: Single mothers and their children in the other America. The University of Chicago Press.
Valerie Polakow is a professor of educational psychology and early childhood education at Eastern Michigan University.
Michael Katz
1.	Poverty, as Michael Katz points out, "no longer is natural; it is a social product." In a wealthy, powerful, industrialized society, which generates surpluses, "poverty becomes not the product of scarcity, but of political economy. Yet poverty has been artfully reconfigured as a social/cultural/psychological pathology, corroborated by a public educational discourse of deficiency and remediation. It is otherness that is at risk, reframed as an individual or minority problem in need of redress" (pp. 1-3).
Oliver Twist
2.	"She was brought here last night," replied the old woman, by the overseer's order. She was found lying in the street. She had walked some distance, for her shoes were worn to pieces, but where she came from, or where she was going to, nobody knows.
3.	The surgeon leaned over the body and raised the left hand. "The old story," he said, shaking his head: "no wedding-ring. I see. Ah! Good night!"
4.	The medical gentleman walked away to dinner; and the nurse, having once more applied herself to the green bottle, sat down on a low chair before the fire, and proceeded to dress the infant"
5.	The above prose is from Charles Dickens' recreation of the world of pauper children in nineteenth-century England. The story of Oliver Twist is a strand of social realism from the unfolding story of gender, class and state of which Oliver and his dead mother are examples.
Valerie Polakow
6.	Valerie Polakow goes on to say that 150 "progressive" years later, in the United States, we too can witness destitution if we choose to see it. In 1991, over thirteen million children were born into and lived in poverty, but we, like the "medical gentleman" before us, "walk away to dinner."
Heather
7.	Seven-year-old Heather was easy to identify as a "problem" second grader as she sat at her desk pushed out in the hallway. The children passing by told me that they were not allowed to speak to her; neither was she allowed to speak to anyone. She could not go to recess, nor eat lunch with the others in the cafeteria anymore.
8.	The teacher, Mrs. Mack, came outside:
9.	This child just does not know the difference between right and wrong--she absolutely does not belong in a normal classroom with normal children.
10.	Heather, now being sent to the principal's office, awkwardly slips in her flip-flops three sizes too big for her as she walks down the corridor in the middle of a a snowy December, dressed in a summer blouse several sizes too small and a long flimsy skirt. What had Heather done?
11.	I've given up on this child--she's socially dysfunctional--three times we've caught her stealing free lunch and storing it in her desk to take home!"
12.	Heather's school crime was indeed noteworthy. The child of a single mother, she lived with her sister and mother in a trailer park. They all appeared chronically hungry, particularly when food stamps ran out before the end of the month. Apparently, Heather had been caught stealing extra free lunch on three Fridays, knowing that she and her sister would have to wait until Monday for their next free meals.
13.	What do childhood and motherhood mean to citizens of the other America? The profoundly unequal and undemocratic landscape that the feminization and growing Infantilization of poverty have created in the United States has given rise to another discourse--a discourse of otherness.
Christy
Being Homeless and a Mother (pp. 90-92)
14.	Christy Fenton is white and in her mid-thirties. She is the mother of three children; one is a teenager and the younger two are in elementary school. Christy's "nightmare," as she describes it, first began when the father of her two younger children began battering her. After Christy had left him, he sexually molested both their young children while he was receiving visitation rights and paying child support. His parental rights were terminated and the children received extensive therapy with the help of a domestic violence center. Christy then went on welfare and lived in an apartment rented from a public landlord. The second "nightmare" began when the landlord, having decided to upgrade and renovate the property, forced his tenants to leave. Christy describes how their lives began to fall apart:
15.	We were only on a month-to-month lease and the judge gave us thirty days to move out--we had no place to go--it was summer, school was out and DSS gave us this voucher for a motel and you're only meant to stay there for thirty days, but there was no housing for us so they extended it--so we lived for sixty-nine days in that motel--DSS put us there--they said there was nothing else.
16.	There were rats and roaches; I called the health department and told them but they never came . . . Outside they were dealing drugs and there were prostitutes walking up and down . . . My children just lost there personalities--my eight-year-old stopped eating.
17.	Christy must show proof that she is actively searching for housing.
18.	So all this time I tried to search for an apartment with the $310 limit from DSS. I could find a two-bedroom that fit but not a three bedroom, and with three kids they say I couldn't live there.
19.	They say if you can do something about one of your kids . . . well what do you want me to do--get rid of one of my kids? And the wait for public housing is three or four years in some places.
20.	After more than two months of futile searching, while lodged in one room with no cooking facilities and no ice-box at a roach-infested motel, at a cost of over $800 to the DSS, which nonetheless declines to raise the housing allowance to comparable market rates, the family finds itself back on the streets. A friend of a friend offers his trailer, Christy and her children move in temporarily.
21.	We stayed in the trailer for September and October--there was no electricity and no heat but it did have running water--we got a space heater--it was okay--at least we were together and we had a place.
22.	At this point, just as the children have started a new school year and are adjusting to their new school, Christy is told that the trailer is needed by someone else. She manages to rent another trailer in the same trailer park.
23.	Well we thought we had rented it from the guy who owned it, but in the middle of January a man comes knocking at my door and tells us we have to leave--that his brother had no right to rent to us--so there we were--right back where we started--eviction--another move--and no place to go.
24.	In desperation, Christy goes to her mother for help. Her mother owns a house but is both alcoholic and physically abusive, and Christy is reluctant to take her children there. After four months they are forced to leave when her mother becomes violent.
25.	We tried--we really did--and she got more and more hateful. She's been alcoholic all her life--she put me through this as a child. Now she would go into the kitchen and say really mean things to the kids--she would take away their possessions and lock them in her room and then tell me, "Your kids are going to grow up to be liars just like you."
26.	. . . And then all the physical stuff broke out . . .When I came home from looking for a place I knew something was wrong--my oldest daughter was waiting for me. . . While I was gone my mother had pushed my son and knocked him into a TV, and he fell to the floor which cut the back of his head open . . .
27.	After I reported my mother to DSS, my sister--she's also an alcoholic--came round and she and my mother jumped on me, they cut my ear open and I had gouges of skin out of me everywhere, and my sister was screaming, "I'm going to kill you," in front of my kids.
28.	After the physical abuse, DSS removes the children from the grandmother's home, and Christy is again faced with homelessness. They are returning to the same dangerous motel, and once again the children have to change schools.
29.	Being back in that motel was devastating for us--we'd get up in the morning and spend all day looking for housing . . . and there's so much rejection--and you know you not gonna find anything--some days the kids couldn't go to school and here we are right back where we started, but at least we stayed together--that's what my kids keep telling me--no matter what we've been through--we stayed together.
30.	The family plummets into the shared fate of several million Americans who are both placeless and poor. Christy is referred to a crises center in another area. The center puts her in touch with a community, nonprofit program dealing with homeless families. The program offers a lifeline to Christy, helping her t o find housing and negotiate the DSS regulations.
31.	They really helped us--they took real good care of everything--the kids could go out and play--it was real safe for them--my kids began to feel a little better--they could see there are good people in the world out there--and now the kids are settled in their new schools . . and soon I hope to update my computer skills and then maybe I can find a job--I got good records from a while back.
32.	The two-year ordeal of Christy and her children temporarily ends as they find a home in which they will be entitled to remain for two years while members of the program's transition group. After that they will be on their own again and, if not self-sufficient, risk another fall into homelessness. Their program, too, is in danger of losing its partial state funding, which will severely limit the numbers of families to be helped in the coming year.
33.	It takes some sound and committed public investment to make a family viable rather than contingent with a safe neighborhood, neighbors who are role models, enough money for a clean and well-maintained apartment and for food, transportation, and health care, and suddenly the world changes--the mother, stretched and straining on welfare, now aspires to return to the workforce. But Christy's aspiration will be dashed if she cannot earn a living family wage. The minimum wage, as we have seen, is a set-up for destitution, a bipartisan legislative act grievously implicated in the continuing construction of poverty and, more specifically, of mothers' and children's poverty.