The Luxury of Feeling Unfulfilled
In her open-hearted memoir, Becoming, Michelle Obama describes her restlessness in practicing law, and her mother’s implicit response to such musings:
“Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit,” Obama writes.
My mom, too. Both my parents were children of Italian immigrants, raised in row-homes in South Philly, both achieving greatly but never lessening the mental grip on the fear of poverty, which I inherited like high cholesterol. In my senior year of high school, I approached my mom about taking a year off before college. I was smart enough not to talk to my father about anything, but most of all this. My mom heard me, leaned into me and did that staccato-poking-of-the-chest thing that is in the DNA of an Italian mamma. She said, loudly:
“Whaddaya wanna do? Clean toilets the rest of your life?”
And that was the end of the discussion.
So, I went to college and eventually to law school and found myself bereft in a litigation practice because, although I was good at — an Italian from Philly for Pete’s sake — all the lying and the fighting made me soul sick. Firmly on the “Mommy Track,” my salary was based on part time, or “flex” time (which for a woman means working twice as hard for half the pay) and I never made more than a teacher. As a single mom, money was tight almost all the time but my three sons and I had health insurance, food, and an old house in a tiny beach town. I had every opportunity my grandparents dreamed of when they emigrated from Avellino, plus the rock-solid love of a huge Italian clan. I’d call it a “safety net” but it’s more like a quarry — hard landings, hard love, but always there.
My mother was spot on, really, and decades later the gap between law school and cleaning toilets has never been wider. Stephanie Land’s memoir, Maid, Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother’s Will to Survive starkly narrates the counter-tale, the shadow side of my story. Stephanie was a single mom with a lineage of mental illness and generational poverty, carrying a karmic boatload of defeat. She is the woman my mom envisioned when she forbade me to put my education on pause. In her story, Stephanie does in fact, clean toilets to survive, joining the ranks of the working poor who do the filthiest jobs for the least amount of money. She doesn’t have the energy to “dream big!” or dabble in “prosperity mindset” because she’s always on the edge of homelessness with no family to fall into.
It’s a scary story and one that painfully represents the lives of so many in our country. About 78% of people in the US live paycheck-to-paycheck and 57% don’t have $400 in savings in case the car breaks down or there’s an unexpected medical bill. Twelve percent of Americans live in poverty (approximated by a family of four living on less than $25,000), and a third of our citizens are in “near poverty,” meaning they don’t meet the mark but hover closely. While I surely understand a lean budget, I never had to choose between food and rent while most people face that dilemma regularly. Some of us struggle with notions of “purpose” and “happiness.” This is a Caribbean vacation compared to the lives of the working poor.
The difference between Stephanie and me is that I had a generational leg up, grandparents on both sides who left Italy to become bricklayers, grocers, and tailors to raise kids who would be doctors, teachers, and lawyers. Even when I’ve hit on hard times — and I have — my siblings would never let me fall too far. Stephanie Land describes a deeply troubled and dysfunctional thread of a family, barely able to sustain themselves let alone her and her daughter. Stephanie says she “walked along a deep precipice of hopelessness. Each morning brought a constant, lip-chewing stress over making it to work and getting home without my car breaking down.” When you don’t have enough money to be secure, all you think about is that you don’t have enough money.
Land says that “when a person is too deep in systemic poverty, there is no upward trajectory. Life is struggle and nothing else. But for me, many of my decisions came from an assumption that things would, eventually, start to improve.”
I can’t imagine that daily “lip-chewing” distress without any hope at the end of the tunnel. Though Trump spoke to and promised much for folks in the Heartland losing their jobs and way of life, they’ve been left in the dust. America is not capitalist, it’s “corporatist,” and we’ve forgotten that humans are more important than money. We can’t just leave the job of hope to churches and nonprofits. It’s the business of all of us. If 78% of people are struggling, I’m sure not okay with that, are you?
Presidential candidate Andrew Yang wants to change the way our economy works so it’s “trickle up,” and everyone shares in the wealth the market generates. Yang’s signature program is the Freedom Dividend, $1,000/month to every citizen 18 years and older. The Dividend will be funded by a VAT (Value Added Tax) of 10% on tech companies like Amazon and Google — those companies with wild profits, little or no tax liability, and the power to automate away jobs in retail, transportation, fast food, call centers etc. It’s the deeply capitalistic notion of shareholders (us) sharing in the profits gained by those we allow to prosper. It’s not only do-able, but way overdue.
Imagine Stephanie’s life if she had a guaranteed income of $1,000 a month. She likely would have left abusive relationships way earlier — maybe never entered into them at all, for the sake of economic security. Her unpaid work as a mother would have actual monetary value. How many women take care of children and elders with no compensation or recognition at all? Imagine the drastic change in our landscape if everyone could move to prosperity in an economy that trickles up, not down, and takes the boot off the throats of the working poor, the young and the old who struggle every day to stay afloat.
My Mom would be proud of me today, using my passion and training to make a huge difference to most of the people in the richest poor country in the world. And guess what? As I work tirelessly for Andrew Yang I am, in fact, more fulfilled than I’ve ever felt in my work life. Imagine a country where everyone gets the breathing space to dream. How different would your life be if tomorrow you and your adult family members were sharing in the wealth this country generates? It’s the very best of human-centered capitalism. Andrew Yang is my legacy to my kids and grandkids. I will not leave them a country where a single Mom can’t survive. I will not. And I trust you won’t either.
