Never Good Enough

I WAS FILLING my coffee mug at a church lunch when I was greeted by a woman with a smile I couldn’t miss nor soon forget. Her short blond hair was pulled back under a red hat. She wore an oversized black T-shirt as a dress. A few lonely teeth protruded from her lower gums when she grinned.

Speaking fast, as though we might get cut off at any moment, she reminded me that we’d met when I’d first arrived in Berkeley, several years before. She asked if I would pray for her.

“Sorry if that’s presumptuous,” she apologized.

“Not at all,” I said. “I’m sorry, but would you remind me of your name?”

“Kim. And yours?”

“Ryan.”

“What’s your last name, Ryan?”

“Pemberton.”

“Oh, a very WASP name!”

“That’s not me,” I told her abruptly. “I’m no WASP.”

What began as a prayer request soon devolved into a debate about Jesus’ divinity. In the back and forth, Kim referred to me as a WASP several more times.

“That’s not me,” I corrected her each time. “We’re not all as we look, you know.”

Driving home, my mind was stuck on my frustration with Kim and, specifically, my rejection of the label “WASP.” I am white and of Anglo-Saxon descent—mostly English. I am Protestant, even. But WASP still carries connotations of wealth—especially inherited wealth—that do not fit me.

Yet for much of my life, I would have been reassured if someone thought I was a person of means and status. Why was it urgent to me now to reveal the very thing I had spent the past three decades hiding?

Living in shame

As the oldest child in a single-parent family in the far Pacific Northwest, in a small town where dairy cows outnumber people 10-to-1 and the lone, blinking stoplight is more of a luxury than a necessity, I did my best to hide our family’s poverty.

Just off the driveway was a shed where we stored our garbage. Trash collection was another expense. Maggots tumbled out from black plastic bags when I opened the door just wide enough to heave another trash bag atop the pile. We never spoke of it.

In elementary school, I waited anxiously in line for the woman who took money for “hot lunch”—Mrs. Price, aptly named. I faked surprise when she told me, in a voice loud enough for my classmates to hear, that I had already charged too many lunches.

“How long are we going to have to use food stamps?” I asked on a drive home from the grocery store one afternoon. The look I received assured me I would not ask this question again.

College for me, as it is for most people, was a revelation of my identity. I was preparing for a developmental psychology lecture when I read that Head Start is a school-readiness program for children from low-income families. I had always assumed everyone went to Head Start.

My face turned red. I turned the page quickly, hoping not to be found out.

GROWING UP, I did my best to dress in a way to hide that my family was poor.

I didn’t understand friends who bought clothes at thrift stores to wear with irony or even pride. How could a used-clothing store be a place for fun? The weight in my stomach when my mom took us to Value Village stuck with me well into adulthood.

When my wife and I were first married, she bought clothes she thought would look good on me from stores I refused to frequent myself. That didn’t last long. She would grow frustrated when a garment hung, unworn, in my closet.

“You think you’re too good,” she would say, knowing something of my childhood, but not the depths of how it had formed me. “Too good”—for clothes, yes, but also for restaurants, or for schools, when it came time to apply to graduate programs. Anything that might reveal that I had grown up in poverty and wasn’t worthy or capable of better.

I’d get quiet, not knowing what to say.

Did she know it was only because I was trying to hide? I wonder now. Did I know?

An identity, not a status

I don’t talk like someone who came from poverty. As a 30-something with an education that includes top-tier universities on both sides of the Atlantic, my vocabulary hides my upbringing well.

But that’s not quite right. The word “poverty” betrays my education. Poverty is not the language used by those who live in it. Growing up, we did not “live in poverty.” We were poor. And that is precisely the problem. Poverty was not something we were in so much as something we were.

Poverty is conditional. It is circumstantial. But being poor? That’s ontological. It shapes who we are. It becomes our nature.

Somewhere along the way, I came to believe the lie that I was poor.

This realization set in fully my freshmen year of college. I attended a private university in the Pacific Northwest, thanks to a combination of academic scholarships, loans, and working in the dining hall.

I shared a room with another Ryan, also the oldest of three, whose favorite band was also Dave Matthews (it was the early 2000s), and who was also dating a Jen. We’d laugh at each new parallel discovered as the year began. But all those similarities didn’t matter. Our class backgrounds eventually divided us.

Although I earned all A’s, I came to the painful realization at the end of that year that I would not be able to return for my second year. When my academic scholarships ran out, I would be returning home: moving in with my grandparents and transferring to a public university. Before I was even finished packing my things, I watched someone else move into my role as Ryan’s roommate, someone who shared with him what I did not.

I am poor, I knew then, and they are not.

It is the lie I still believe at times.

Never fully at home

For as long as I can remember, I have tried to outrun this feeling of being poor. I may not be the smartest, my subconscious told me, but I can work the hardest. If I work hard enough, perhaps I can prove my worth. And if I succeed, maybe my children won’t have to.

My efforts have paid off, with multiple books to my name, degrees with honors from Oxford and Duke, and relationships that far exceed the social location of my birth. And I have the privilege of doing work that provides for my family, that I find meaningful, and that brings life to my life.

But the effort to outrun the ontology of poverty has not served me well. It has formed me in harmful ways. I have always been working to “earn it,” always hiding. When I enter a room, or if I stick around long enough, I still fear being found out—like that embarrassed boy in the university library reading about Head Start. Or the young boy in the lunch line, just wishing Mrs. Price would speak quietly.

This need to hide makes me feel as though I’m never fully at home. And I know I’m in good company.

“Now that I’m a writer, now that I’m a professor, now that I’m 37 and still happily single—the fact that I’m gay is one of the least queer things about me,” Vanderbilt professor Justin Quarry wrote recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “What I was most surprised to learn in that meeting [with other faculty and staff who are first-generation college graduates] was that nearly everyone present reported that their working-class status had had a greater impact on their experience as undergraduates—for some of them, on their entire lives—than did any other aspect of their identity, including race, gender, and sexual orientation.”

I serve on staff at an affluent, historic university church in Berkeley, Calif. I appear to be an insider there—but I regularly feel like an outsider.

When the students I work with as the university minister mention extensive summer travel plans, I’m reminded that our family never traveled farther than our car could take us. Unreliable as it was, we didn’t go far.

When I hear about students’ internships, I’m reminded of summers spent driving nails in dairy barn frames, not to build a career but to pay for a degree.

Whenever congregants ask where we live, where our kids go to school, or whether we’re renting or buying our home and cringe at the answer, I’m reminded, we don’t belong here.

On a recent trip to a conference with two friends from church, one, whom I love and respect deeply, said, “We’re all pretty much from the same class background at First Pres.”

I didn’t know how to say, “Not all of us.”

My frustration with Kim’s insistence that I was a WASP, I’m realizing, was that she was labeling me contrary to how I see myself. Part of my agitation was my dissonance with the socio-economic insider status she ascribed to me, a status I tried to resist, perhaps for the first time in my life.

The trap of ceaseless striving

“When are you going to come out of the closet?” my friend Claudia asked as we drove to a retreat center one autumn afternoon two years ago. She was referring not to my sexual orientation but to the poverty of my childhood and the dangerous ways it still shapes me.

“You need to protect your son,” she told me, knowing that my hiding has not always served me well, as I strive ceaselessly to do more, accomplish more, and, ultimately, be more. She knew this drive for achievement as a cover for self-worth risks harming my children.

I had no words. Only tears.

The ways in which I’ve been misshapen by my relationship with money growing up will not be changed merely by having more of it. If poverty is something I’m in, then more money can help get me out of it—however nebulous the parameters of “it” are. But if poor is who I am, as so many experiences have taught me, then no amount of money will bring resolution. Not to me, not to my children.

While financial challenges are a genuine struggle for most young families in the Bay Area, the greater harm for me has come in the striving to earn my sense of self-worth, always just out of reach.

To help my children avoid this trap, I will need to offer them an alternate understanding of who they are, one that reorients the relationship between money, identity, and how we see one another.

Seeing and being seen

In the Book of Acts, two of Jesus’ disciples, Peter and John, are heading to the temple for worship in the wake of their Lord’s resurrection and ascension.

It’s 3 in the afternoon when they’re stopped just short of the temple entrance. A man is begging those entering for spare change. Lame from birth, begging is his way of life. It’s fair to assume it has become his identity in this community.

The man asks Peter and John for some change. He sees them only as an opportunity for an economic exchange. We’re told that the two disciples looked “intently” at the man. “Look at us,” Peter says. It is an odd request. Presumably he’s already looking at the two men; he’s just asked them for money.

But the beggar listens. He fixed his attention on them, “expecting to receive something from them.” “I have no silver or gold,” Peter finally says. “But what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.” Taking the man by the right hand, Peter “raised” the beggar up, and he began to walk, for the first time in his life.

We are often blind to our neighbor—either because we hide from one another, as has been my custom, or because we are too preoccupied. Cues of clothing or vocabulary become visual or auditory shorthand, further distorting our vision. But this exchange from the temple stairs offers an alternative. Seeing and being seen in a way that is neither dependent on our economic need nor an opportunity for economic gain is a prerequisite to authentic relationships—relationships that offer vulnerability, healing, and even resurrection.

To see one another from outside the all-consuming economic cues that press upon us and constrain our vision provides space to see and receive Christ’s work in and among us, perhaps for the first time. And for those caught up in God’s inbreaking resurrection, such vision is no longer reserved for those privileged enough to not “see” class. This is the reality God is bringing about in our life together: seeing one another as neighbors, and sharing what we have, even if we don’t have much more than eyes to see, ears to listen, and a helping hand.

“And he entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God” (Acts 3:8).

Seeing and being seen, Peter, John, and the man who had been begging entered into worship together.

THREE MONTHS after that awkward encounter with Kim, I saw her again.

“Will you pray for me?” she asked, just before I stepped into the sanctuary for a Sunday afternoon all-church meeting.

“I was just heading into a meeting,” I told her, mindful that I was already late.

“So, you won’t pray for me?”

For the next 10 minutes, I listened. Then I laid my hands across the table between us, palms up; she placed her hands in mine, and I prayed.

I can see that you don’t feel like you belong here, I wanted to tell her.

Welcome.