I'm dining alone in a basement, next to a rumbling furnace. My boys are both out. Sam, 12, is working on a science-fair project with his classmate Jordie. Ben, 15, is spending the evening with friends.
I am bereft. I can barely eat. It's not the solitude. It's not the furnace-room ambience. It's the menu: leftover spaghetti.
Sam comes home later, all happy. I ask what he had for dinner. "Boeuf bourguignon," he says, smacking his lips.
I'm not happy he's had a good meal. I'm jealous.
I've been eating cheap carbs for 11 days now, and it's starting to get tedious.
We're in our new home, the basement of a tiny 1970s bungalow in Scarborough. My boys are living with me during our month on minimum wage, while I, a pretend single mom, work as a maid.
Sam understands this isn't a completely far-fetched scenario. "If Dad went and gambled all our money and lost it, and didn't take care of us," he says, "we would have to live like this." (In fact, my non-gambling husband is on standby to shuttle the kids back and forth to private school, music lessons and hockey games.)
We call our place The Hovel. It consists of a kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms, with no living room. It's also illegal -- an official at the Scarborough Zoning Information office told me this week that the property is zoned as a single-family home. But I didn't think about legal issues when I rented it for $750. I was desperate to find something affordable.
Our new home is on a quiet suburban street near a No Frills grocery store and a Wal-Mart, and just around the corner from a laundromat, a cheque-cashing outlet and an adult-video store. Sam has brought one Game Cube video game and Ben, his computer. During this month, they're not to use their magnetic-swipe cards at their cafeteria. Instead, they'll pack a lunch.
But Ben's happy because The Hovel has better Internet; it's free, along with utilities and basic cable. We also get unlimited use of the landlord's washer and dryer, which is good because my after-hour maid chores include laundering the day's rags.
So what if we have to flush the toilet three times and the walls tilt so the doors bang into our foreheads? The Hovel is cozy. Cozy, as in, Sam and I have become roommates, sharing a double bed. Ben refused to sleep with Sam and appropriated the room with the single bed.
Sometimes, though, The Hovel feels like a prison. We can't see out the tiny, high windows. And because it's dark by the time they get home, the boys don't go outside. Instead, they do push-ups on the dirty carpet.
In the 19th century, when Charles Dickens was 12, Sam's age, he went to work in a bootblack factory after his father was sent to debtors' prison. That experience informed his novels, especially Oliver Twist. In 1933, George Orwell described his ordeals as a dishwasher and vagrant, in Down and Out in Paris and London.
More recently, Barbara Ehrenreich described her low-wage existence in the United States in her 2001 bestseller Nickel and Dimed. Last June, Morgan Spurlock, of Super Size Me fame, did the same in his documentary series 30 Days.
But none of them brought children along. Kids change the equation. Nurturing offspring is an elemental part of motherhood, beginning with breastfeeding. Of all the humiliations inherent in poverty, there's no failure more resounding than being unable to feed your kids. "Nearly a quarter of food bank-using parents go hungry, so their children rarely or never go hungry," says a 2005 study by Toronto's Daily Bread Food Bank
I worry that the boys and I won't make it through the month. Strange as it sounds, at first I don't know what I'm actually earning at the company I call Maid-It-Up Maids. I keep crunching the numbers. Now, it seems after paying rent, I'll net $8.75 per person per day.
If this were real life, I'd get a monthly federal Child Tax Benefit of $204.67 and a National Child Benefit Supplement of $268.66. Our daily per-capita budget would swell to $14.38 a day -- but we'd still be $7,631.08 below Statistics Canada's "low-income cutoff line."
