The Hole in the Wall

My mother had been married a year when my father first punched a hole in the wall of their grimy Dayton apartment. They had been fighting, probably over something small, when my father, in his blowout anger, decided to scare my mother into apologizing and dropping the subject. In that moment, my mother knew she had married the wrong person.

My mother’s own father had rarely yelled after he and my grandmother had started going to therapy in the late 1970s. He stopped drinking when my mother was twelve. He was a calm and stable father who, despite working 50-60 hours a week at a steel mill, supported his two children as best he could.

The question I always had growing up was how could my parents have conceivably gotten together? They had little in common. Ironically, they had met in a Bible study group, and my father, when it suited him, used religion as a way to keep my mother in line.

However, my father was anything other than a provider; he was always gone coaching an arena football team in another state. He job-hopped from the time I was four until my mother divorced him when I was sixteen. My mother’s already paltry salary was stretched to the max while paying for two living spaces (our house and wherever my father had found to live) as well as food, clothing, and other miscellaneous bills, forcing us into poverty.

According to Sallie Krawcheck, a CEO of Ellevest, women’s number one source of stress is money. From what I witnessed growing up, I believe that statement wholeheartedly. I watched as my mother struggled to put food on the table, and only after the divorce, was I told that my father often ordered from restaurants when he was away (even when he had access to a kitchen.)

My mother hit her limit when I was around twelve years old and began quietly saving up for a divorce. Unfortunately, she was not ready to be saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt; that was my father’s stipulation if she wanted to keep the house. My mother ended up having to file bankruptcy, but her financial health has returned since divorcing my father in 2016.

The American Sociological Association published in 2015 that 69% of all divorces are initiated by women. From my vantage point even at sixteen, I could understand why my mother needed to diverge from my father. He was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and did little to treat it; he refused to take medicine and would only seek out a counselor when my mother threatened to leave him.

As someone with major depressive order myself who inherited many of the same symptoms and behaviors from my father, I realize it was difficult for her to deal with the seemingly-unending anger and mood swings. One moment, my father would be as happy as the shining sun and the next, his foul mood would wrap us all in a thundercloud.

Mental health disorders and trauma were plentiful in the last few generations of my family, both paternal and maternal. “1 in 5 US adults experience mental illness each year” according to the National Alliance for Mental Health, and those are just the people who report or realize they have one. Poverty or scarcity is one of the leading states that can have a profound effect on mental health. When you do not have what you need—whether it be food, water, shelter, or clothing—you feel stressed. Prolonged stress can lead to depression, which can cause one to miss work, perform poorly at work, regulate your emotions inefficiently, and in some serious cases, lose your job. If you are fired or miss quite a bit of work, you lose out on money, which could cause housing predicaments and could perpetuate the cycle of poverty, especially if you have children. Children are, firstly, expensive and, secondly, need a stable environment to succeed, and if they do not have one growing up, they can develop mental illnesses they are predisposed to.

My mother has thankfully worked through a fair bit of her own trauma. She is living with more financial stability now, having found a partner who can hold down a job.

My father, unfortunately, is a product of the cycle of trauma and poverty. His own father skipped from job to job and rarely expressed love to his sons. He was not afforded the same emotional resilience in childhood as my mother.

If you are a mother, especially a single mother in poverty, I thank you for pushing through the socioeconomic barriers that have held you back. It is a hard road to choose motherhood, especially if the partner you marry becomes a different person seemingly overnight.

Sources:

Epperson, Sharon. “Sallie Says: Leadership, Decision Making and Tough Conversations.” CNBC, CNBC, 20 Nov. 2023.

“Women More Likely than Men to Initiate Divorces, but Not Non-Marital Breakups.” American Sociological Association, 28 Sept. 2022.

“Mental Health by the Numbers.” NAMI, 3 May 2024.

Fell, Ben, and Miles Hewstone. “Psychological Perspectives on Poverty.” Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 4 June 2015.

Sutherland, Anna. “How Instability Affects Kids.” Institute for Family Studies, Institute for Family Studies, 29 July 2014.