Quotes from Stephanie Land

It didn't take me long to go from financial stability to fearing homelessness.

I grew up in what some would call an immaculately clean home. I hated my mom a little for it. I wasn't allowed to paint my nails, since they'd chip and 'look trashy.' My brother and I didn't run around in clothes that had holes or were stained.

Many of my single mom friends and I had a fear of appearing poor, especially when we bought groceries with food stamps, or used WIC checks for milk.

I would never want people to point at me and say, 'Well, she got herself off of food stamps, so anybody can if they work hard enough.' It's just not true.

I'm white. I have privileges as a parent that many others don't. Of not only teaching but expecting my daughter to stand up for herself because I have no fear that harm will come to her when she does. I am reassured by her teachers that her willfulness will do her good as she gets older.

Nobody wants to admit their kid is the one with lice. Not only because of the work involved in getting rid of them, but because lice are still associated with dirt, grime, neglect and often poverty.

I grew up exploring my neighborhood and beyond, and would love to give my daughter that kind of freedom.

I don't like to think of goals I set at the new year as resolutions. I like to think of them as summits on my personal mountain. Each year gets me closer to the dreams I want to achieve, and the goals are those benches to sit and enjoy the view along the way.

I'm a huge believer in universal childcare.

For nearly a decade, I thought it was obvious that I was poor.

It's unreasonable to expect people who scrape to get by to have emergency savings.

Once I thought that if you had a house on a hill with a fence and 2.5 baths and 3.5 kids, that was happiness. I naively thought that if I lived in a house like that there was no reason for me to be stressed or depressed, that the things I was experiencing would be untouchable and solved and I would do great.

Over the years, as I lived in low-income housing, collected government assistance, and lived well under the poverty level as I put myself through college, the comments people made about poor people started to sting. The poor are dirty. Hoarders. Their houses are a mess. Their kids are wild, untamed, and feral-looking.

The small things that make Christmas magical are the things children will remember. It doesn't matter what they open on Christmas morning, I don't remember what was in half the boxes I opened as a kid. What mattered were the decorations, the cookies that were mysteriously eaten, and the stockings that were filled.

Hunger changes you. As your body begins to claw at you, your stomach churning in anger, every person who shares a photo of the fancy meal they're about to eat is no longer your friend.

Christmas has rarely been a joyous time for me. I'm estranged from my family, and sometimes I don't have my oldest daughter with me.

My family, for generations, has struggled through the effects of working blue-collar jobs long past the age of retirement.

Parents of all income levels deserve options for child care while they work so they can be free of the worry that their children are cared for and safe.

We need to look marginalized people in our community in the eye and listen to their stories of struggle, heartache and impossibility.

To me, the only way we'll see a collective change in this country is by listening to people who have experienced life in the margins of society, who have lived less privileged versions of my story, in systemic poverty and facing structural racism.

I think my biggest role as a parent is teaching empathy.