Like My Friend Paula, Most Americans Today Are Considered Poor and No Longer Middle Class
7 min readJul 22, 2024
Growing up, I knew my family was lower middle class. My dad always had a job but we lived hand to mouth at times.
Some of the memories from the 80s/early 90s, I have blocked out, but some came to the surface recently:
- Holes in shoes. Using duct tape to repair them
- Empty fridge. I got in a strange habit of rearranging the existing food (usually mustard, milk, apples) to make it look like there was more food than there was. I did this the other day. My husband asked what I was doing. Then I realized I had gone back to that time when food was scarce.
- We couldn’t get new school clothes. If we did, it was from Salvation Army or Kmart.
- My father washing plastic wrap, after using it so he could reuse it
- Staying home when classmates were going on summer vacation. The school I went to did a lot of field trips, so I was able to travel a little like to Boston, NYC, etc.
- Getting made fun of in school for not having the right clothes
- Because we couldn’t afford a computer or word processor, I used an old typewriter to type my school papers.