Need Help? Look for the Strings Attached (Before They Strangle You)

About a year ago, not long after losing a couple of contracts, I bit the bullet and went to a food pantry run by a nearby Catholic church.

I’d been avoiding it not out of shame, but because I live on a restricted diet. Knowing that food pantries mainly rely on nonperishable boxed and canned foods, I wasn’t sure there would be much I could actually bring home.

Even so, I wanted to see if I could rely on these goods to take the edge off my grocery bill, which was whittling down my remaining savings.

I also, however, wanted to do some research. The pantry’s policy was to ask people needing assistance to bring proof of residence and identity — a utility bill, along with a driver’s license and Social Security card — to receive goods.

On the surface their policy seemed to make sense, though I wondered whether they’d turn away an unhoused and/or undocumented person, or how far away was too far given the church wasn’t on the county bus route.

After all, I can’t imagine that five loaves and two fishes discriminated much between the haves and have-nots of Jesus’ time. There were a lot of people, and He fed them. But I digress.

Mainly, I wanted to learn what I could about why church volunteers needed to retain the information, what they did with it, and most of all, how they secured it.

A week or so previously, I’d tried to ask about this over the phone. But the brief conversation I had with one of the volunteers hadn’t instilled confidence in me. Nor had his refusal to connect me with the church’s information technology coordinator.

Now I was left with seeing if a different volunteer would confirm the details.

When I arrived, a friendly woman giving out fresh vegetables advised me to check in first. She pointed me to a wooden ramp leading to the door of a small house, used as an administrative building.

The front office was more crowded than I’d thought, going by the number of cars in the lot. Most of the people inside were Hispanic. That made sense. Catholicism is still the dominant religion in Latin America.

Two older white women sat at a table with a laptop, apparently doing intake. How long the wait was, wasn’t clear. They didn’t have any kind of ticketing system, so there was no way to tell how many people were in front of me, nor how long the actual intake process would last.

That was Strike Two: the assumption that we all must be so desperate, we didn’t have any better way to spend the morning. Like a job, or our kids’ routines, even an appointment.

At the intersection of rooms in the center of the little house stood a tall, older white man, who inexplicably wore sunglasses. The only man in a room full of women, he surveyed everyone who entered, sat, and waited.

The sunglasses gave him the vibe of a traffic cop waiting for infractions. His stance also gave me the sense of a rooster guarding the henhouse.

I sat on a chair, putting my bag and phone on the chair beside me. No one in the room was masked, and the pandemic wasn’t far enough behind for me to want to sit beside anyone else.

I also felt the need for space to get my bearings. I don’t like crowded spaces to begin with, unexpected ones even less so.

I watched the two ladies doing intake, asking another mother questions about the children who lived with her. I mentally ran through my own questions: in particular, whether I could simply show them my ID without allowing them to retain my personal information.

Then more people entered the house. The man took a step towards me. “Ma’am, please move your phone from that chair,” he told me.

It was an order, not a request. I obeyed without thinking, my hand moving automatically to pick up my phone.

Then, without thinking about it, I stood and left. Out the door, down the ramp, away to my car. I wouldn’t realize until later that his order — what my amygdala interpreted as Strike Three — had activated my “flight” response.

Asking for help is conflated with taking advantage

Isn’t that the thing about triggers? You encounter someone who gives you the kind of vibe you remember from your younger years, back when someone similar told you that you were disobedient and needed to be kept in line.

Of course, why a room full of women — mothers trying to secure sustenance for their families — should have needed to be kept in line wasn’t clear.

All I could come up with was my “rooster guarding the henhouse” perception:this old white guy was there as a result of some belief that without his presence, the women would overrun “his” women and take as much as they could.

(You know. Like at the border.)

Thus access to assistance for my family would be predicated on being a good girl. On not asking questions. On not challenging his or anyone else’s authority.

But I’ve been told all my life that I’m not obedient enough. In fact, trying to be more obedient has never delivered either respect or support, in spite of promises made. Often, quite the opposite.

Of course, perhaps my “flight” was nothing more than rank privilege. Likely, at least some of the people in that room had been subjected to so many similar indignities — and worse — on their way from Latin America north.

They probably felt this one was a miniscule price to pay for food for their families. That the Church could be trusted to know what it was doing.

To me, decades of abuse coverups demonstrate otherwise.

That, in fact, was the whole point. The priests who took advantage of their parishioners’ children did so as a result of the outsized power they wielded. They exploited people’s spiritual neediness and dependence on their guidance.

But then again, I’m disobedient. After all, I buy into the notion that my therapist and countless others advise: I should know my worth and never settle for less than I deserve, and that to get it, I must ask.

And yet, so often it’s the asking that leads to the triggering.

Along my (admittedly short) road as a single mother, other men have also decided I must want to take advantage of their goodwill. They limited their support as if interacting with me needed to be nipped in the bud before I could take advantage.

There were the “good neighbors” who had offered to help with yardwork and rebuilding my old, falling-down fence, who were nowhere to be found once I disclosed my limited income meant creditors had to come before I could pay anyone else.

That my income was limited because I wanted to make my freelance writing business work was lost on these men, who undoubtedly expected me to “put my feelings aside” and take a survival job —even while celebrating other white men who “go the distance” in taking business risks.

There were the “good friends” who had pledged their support in the early days of separation, who were nowhere to be found once the heavy emotional dust settled and I sought their listening ears — in some cases, their experience — to help me process what had happened.

Then there were the men who assumed I would sleep with them, only to abandon me once they realized I had other priorities on my mind. Like ensuring my sons were fed and housed and secure in the aftermath of my divorce from their father, or growing my income so that I could pay the other men for their work on my fence.

Vulnerability is a double-edged sword

Yes, I understand that men aren’t good at vulnerability. That doesn’t make it hurt less, to see their backs turning and walking away; to see them set the kinds of boundaries that assume I intend to “move in” on them and/or their marriages now that singledom has presented me with the apple from the tree of knowledge.

To be vulnerable — to roll over and expose your soft underbelly — is to take the risk that the person you’re exposing yourself to won’t slash you open and rip your guts out, stab you through the heart for good measure and leave you bleeding on the floor.

I’m not sure that Brene Brown’s adherents understand what it’s actually like to experience that kind of pain, over and over, across years and relationships, especially when it’s disguised as “tough love” or “character building.”

Which are really just assumption, judgment, and the degradation of being boxed into limited choices that are convenient for the person holding the power.

Because too many people believe that while vulnerability is the price of relationship and even acceptance into community, they also came to see vulnerability as a sign of weakness and not strength; a means to gatekeep rather than to connect.

That’s why, in both boardrooms and bedrooms, the ability to negotiate — to talk someone else down from their position — is a point of pride.Often,when a woman is involved, men negotiate by displaying emotions. Sometimes they cry. Other times they beg and plead.

Thus it is impossible for many of us to tell the difference between an honestly vulnerable man, versus one who uses emotion to manipulate. Yet when we don’t respond as expected or demanded, we are frigid bitches, or too stubborn or prideful or aggressive.

Apparently, the “cheerful giving” supposedly so beloved by God is only supposed to go one way.

None of this will be news, incidentally, to Black women, the OG “welfare queens” assumed to want only to live off the backs of hardworking white taxpayers, promiscuously pumping out ever more babies in order to reap those benefits.

Or to the Latina women assumed to be crossing the border to “take our jobs” or transport drugs for sale or traffic our children (or those of other Latina women; which it is, isn’t quite clear).

Or to the daughters of well-off fathers whose largesse, in the aftermath of divorce or abuse or anything else, is dependent on the woman’s willingness to do as she is asked; to support her father in his old age, regardless of her mother’s capacity or availability.

I’m fortunate enough to live in a community where food assistance is available from other places that don’t engage in gatekeeping, and where I’m connected enough to be able to network towards finding meaningful, fulfilling work.

A lot of that is because I’ve done enough healing to believe I’m worth paying attention to my triggers rather than brushing them aside, or believing the situation causing the trigger is the best there is and I won’t find better.

But plenty of people are not in those positions. They’re limited by distance or time or means or disability. They have to take what they can get — even if it comes with subtle abuse.

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