Gillian Linden

Early Monday and the children still asleep, the garage filled with bags of paper plates and pizza crusts that my husband had piled into a corner before leaving for the city. I’d received text messages and emails thanking me for the party — Such a pleasure . . . Lovely night. They were being polite, of course, but I liked to think there was some truth to it. If so, it would be due to the qualities of a summer evening, the sky turning lavender, the lawn becoming cool.

I was standing next to my son in the cold. We weren’t speaking, but the silence was companionable. I thought it was, anyway, though the morning had been full of acrimony. There’d been a fight about the shower, a fight with his sister about toast (“I’m sorry to have to say this,” she told me, “but I wish I had a different mother”), a fight about high, yelping laughter, not welcome at any time of day, least of all before 8 AM.

Minnesota Women’s Press is sharing this commentary as part of January’s National Poverty in America Awareness month. In the United States, 42 million people are living in poverty, including nearly 40 percent of single-mother households. One in three individuals who experienced poverty as children will remain in poverty as adults.