Face It

You don't know me.

You see me pushing my cart through the grocery store, with one of my sons in the cart's seat, and all you see is someone who doesn't look old enough to have a child. You see the too-short, too-dark hair, the nose ring and multiple earrings, possibly one or more of the tattoos. You see a child too dark-complected to be anything but multi-racial. You see the absence of a wedding ring or an engagement ring on my finger.

You don't see who I am. You don't see who we are.

We live on the border here, my cohorts and I. We cook your fancy restaurant food, serve your drinks, clean your houses, pump your gas, mow your lawn. We struggle through the winters in a town designed for summer people. We live without health insurance, 401K's, the new car every few years, the home and summer home, the prep schools for our children.

We were lucky if we got to go to college. Most of us either had to quit high school to go to work, started working while we were in high school, or immediately thereafter. Our lack of higher education is not a lack of motivation - it's a lack of opportunity. It is not a lack of intelligence - we have families to feed.

We don't have the platinum cards in our wallet, the cocktail rings. When we drink, we drink hard, and we laugh harder, not knowing when we'll be able to afford the next outing. We do nothing half-heartedly. Love, live, mourn, cry, we feel it all full-tilt.

We sleep on secondhand mattresses under thrift-store sheets, and our sex goes unaided by the pharmaceuticals the doctors prescribe the wealthy.

We're the Medicaid mothers, the fathers that work two jobs to put food on the table and diapers on their babies. We're a class of our own. The working destitute. The ones who struggle to make the best lives for their children that they can.

Your summer getaway rests squarely on our shoulders. I see your sneer, your attempts to freeze me with your cold looks of disdain from under your teased and borrowed-blonde hair. You try to envelop me in a cloud of scorn rivaled only by your reek of coconut tanning oil and trust-fund money.

Be warned. It takes fire in the spirit to survive the way we do, and the flames from these hazel eyes will melt any icy hauteur you aim at me in a cloud of greenish-brown steam.

We have that fire. The passion it takes, the way we take every snub and dirty look and condescending sneer thrown our way. It fuels our rage and scorn. It gives us stories to tell at the pub after we've finished taking your money. We walk home after a long day of work with a satisfaction you'll never know, the glow of a pittance earned and maybe a drink or two. We smoke our low-class cigarettes and mock you, behind your backs and to your faces. While we might depend on your business to pay our bills, we also hold you hostage. If you were to succeed in driving out the ruffians, the hooligans, those tattooed unwed parents you hold in such low regard, your vacation paradise would vanish. You need us more than we need you, and so we come out ahead.

Do I expect you to see this? No. Does it bother me? Occasionally, for my children's sake, rather than my own. But, here's the thing.

I have that passion. The fire that burns inside me will not be checked or abated. It may consume me in the end. But it gives me the will and the nerve and the courage I need to live my life the way I live it, on my own terms. I'll bend it to my own whims and be taken and accepted for who I am. Pity me, mock me, revile me. Tell me I'm going to hell for whatever petty stupid reason you concoct in your stuffed-shirt brain. I could care less. I have the light of friendship, family, love. The people who care for me do so for me, not for my assets, and that's something you'll never know.

And that's why, dear heinous bitches in the grocery store, I answer your sweeping glares of contempt with my glance of condescension and pity. You'll never be me. You'll never have the life experience, the golden memories, or the hard-knock wisdom I've spent the last 28 years battling to attain. You'll never have the fight or the fire that I have. You'll never have spirit, just a  pale imitation. I have everything you've tried to replace with possessions and monetary wealth, and I'm not going anywhere.

You know what? I feel sorry for you.