The author uses this autobiography as an opportunity to discuss some personal issues about coming to peace with her background, and her family.
She begins by explaining that although she was raised in extreme poverty in Kansas, she herself was able to achieve economic growth by avoiding having a baby. However, she does speak to her unborn baby, implying that she might have been pregnant at one time. She talks to the imaginary baby often in the autobiography.
Then she points out that in addition to not becoming a teenage parent like her mom and her mom before her, there is another serious reason that her family stayed so poor for so long; they constantly moved around. Her grandmother wasn't finished marrying until her seventh husband, and her mom moved almost 50 times before even starting high school. She remembers their home, a farmhouse on 160 acres of wheat.
Some of Smarsh's family handled poverty in stride, like her father, who never let a fun opportunity pass by. She remembers that he did always have a red Solo cup with liquor during those fun activities. Others in her family just stayed reserved, making the best of their bad situation in other ways.
Life in poverty is dangerous, Smarsh explains. She starts to tell stories about harm that befell her community, people dying in industrial farm equipment, her father's poisoning from his short employment transporting chemicals, and the worst part is that private health insurance wasn't an option for them. Smarsh says that white people with money tended to look down at them.
She ends her account with a defense of the welfare system, explaining that although more wealthy people can't imagine things correctly, the truth is that serious poverty is an extremely difficult problem to surmount, and she is thankful for the support of the government for those in her family who needed it.
