There are many reasons your income can disappear overnight. You might get sick, as I did; your factory might close; your employer might implement mass layoffs. We live in a society where precarious seasonal and contract work without benefit plans is the norm, and genuine poverty is something that can happen to anyone.
There’s a big difference between being “broke” and being “poor”. Poverty is the daily agony of not having enough money for groceries, or having to decide between buying food for your children and paying the rent. Real poverty is isolating. It’s living in fear of who will find out and how you will be judged. It’s worrying about whether social workers will take your kids, as I did for several weeks when things were at their worst. (There was a point in my shame about our poverty that even made me wonder if my children would be better off in a different family – thoughts that still haunt me.)
