My Mom and Financial Precarity

My mom, Sue Reeves, was a formidable human. She was born into a lower-middle class family in Edgewater, Alabama. Her father was a steel worker and her mother was a homemaker. Mom married young. With a heart full of hope and a son on her hip, she was making her own way. Her first marriage ended in divorce — but she soon married my dad and had three more children. I’m the youngest.

My mom was a serial entrepreneur. The first thing I remember her doing is producing craft shows in our basement featuring her own work. She sent out invitations at our school and posted signs at church and on grocery store bulletin boards. When we were a little older, she started a cleaning business called Sue Reeves Domestic Engineering. She also made cookies and cakes for events and private clients through her company, Mom’s Cookies. But the thing she enjoyed most was cooking Wednesday night suppers at North Highlands Baptist Church. Hundreds of people paid $5.50 each for a meat and three — what, in the South, we called a plate with a serving of meat, three servings of vegetables, bread, dessert, and as much sweet tea as you could possibly drink. After decades of that kind of work, she put herself through school — not once, but twice. For the last 15 years of her career, she worked as a registered nurse.

Mom’s story is all too common. The doctors gave her two years to live and a laundry list of potential treatments, all of them which seemed to inevitably lead to end of life care. 

Through it all, my mom has worked harder than anyone I know. Even so, financial precarity has always been an obstacle. There is a treatment called TIL — a form of advanced immunotherapy — that they believed would have made a difference. But at more than $1 million, access to treatments like TIL were cost prohibitive for her. After years of doctor visits, the mounting medical bills were almost too much to manage. After years of cancer, my mom passed away December 2025. Financial precarity is about more than politics. It’s personal.

Let me back up for a minute.

I didn’t know I was poor. Hanging in the bedroom I shared with my older brother was a needlepoint my mom made which read, “Richer than me, no man can be. I had a mother who read to me.”

As a kid, I was enveloped in love.

There were times when my parents felt it, but my brothers and I were shielded from their financial precarity. When the power was turned off, we’d have candlelight dinners and campouts in the den. When we couldn’t afford a trip to the amusement park, we’d create obstacle courses in our backyard. We didn't go on fancy vacations, but we had our bikes and the great outdoors. Who could want more?

Truly, my childhood was rich in so many ways.

That’s part of the United States’ magic. It has this ability to make you feel rich in spirit. But the darker side is that it can also keep you poor in fact.

One day, a classmate who was one of the bullies that always made school a challenge for me, said plainly, “You’re poor.” I suppose he thought that would resonate with me, inflaming some sort of shame about my family’s economic reality. My mom drove an old 15-seater van — a gray Dodge Ram with two rows of naugahyde seats and enough storage for the equipment she used to clean houses. I loved that van, but my bully noticed the dented front door, the growls and screeches, and the crack in the windshield, and he couldn’t help but point out what I had never realized.

We were, in fact, poor.

That’s when the bullying really took off. I was made fun of for the clothes I wore and the apparent lack of money my family had. It was an easy entrance into other vulnerable parts of me, like my effeminate mannerisms.

In her song, Coat of Many Colors, Dolly Parton says, “I couldn't understand it, for I felt that I was rich. And I told 'em of the love my momma sewed in every stitch. And I told 'em all the story Momma told me while she sewed, and how my coat of many colors was worth more than all their clothes.”

When I was a kid, my mom made me a gray sweatsuit with royal blue bands around the neck, wrists, and ankles. When I was about ten, she made me a pair of pajamas that I still wear to this day. I loved everything my mom made for me.

In her song, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Loretta Lynn said, “We were poor but we had love. That's the one thing that daddy made sure of. He shoveled coal to make a poor man's dollar.” My dad was an insurance adjuster. He worked a stable job, foregoing his dreams of law school so that he could provide for our family. I have endless admiration for my dad. I’m so grateful for what he did for us.

Despite my mom’s domestic prowess and my dad’s work ethic, we were still poor.

Financial precarity, unjust systems, the chains on our ankles, and the boot on our necks — this is what keeps me up at night. Over the last 250 years, common people have led rebellions that have almost always included economic security as a central demand. 

It’s about what happens when the rich are made richer and the poor are left behind.

Too many of us are being left behind.

This idea isn’t abstract. You or someone you know has felt it. It’s living paycheck-to-paycheck. It’s choosing which bill to pay. It’s millions of families rationing insulin or juggling rent or choosing to drive without car insurance. And it’s the throughline that connects our history, from the Declaration of Independence to the Progressive Era to right now.

My mom’s life is proof that the fight never ended. She worked hard her whole life and could barely afford her healthcare at the end. Her story is a continuation of the movement as we now understand it. Indebted to those that may save her life.

In many ways she’s like so many of us — the so-called “average” U.S. citizen. Except there’s nothing average about her. That’s the point. We can’t reduce this story to averages or broad strokes. Inequality isn’t a chart or a statistic. You see how it’s lived in real bodies and empty bank accounts, in families and their uncertain futures. My mom is one example. You probably have your own. As I bring her into this story, I hope you’ll remember “the common people” in your life who carry the weight of economic inequality, too.

My mom is also an inspiration. Despite the systems that made it nearly impossible, she continued to find ways to live life to the fullest. As we unveil the rebels that fought for structural change, we will also see people just like my mom who lived a simple life. She worked hard, went to church, and spoiled her grandkids as much as she could.

I hope you'll dream with me about the future we want. Here's to everyone feeling like a kid on a particularly abundant Christmas morning — but with the real stability of financial freedom.