Top 60 Stephanie Land Quotes

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 believe in the right to choose. I have chosen to end a pregnancy before.

I’d worn the same Carhartts and hoodies for years, and only bought clothes when the ones I had tore too many holes.

If every parent knew that the best way to prevent lice from spreading is by looking for them, cases decrease dramatically.

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.

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

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

Dating as a single parent is tricky. My kids are usually seen less as a ‘bonus’ and more as a ‘situation.’

My mom grew up in extreme poverty, and always spoke of it with a look of disgust. She felt pressured to fit in, and felt shame about her house, clothes, and general appearance.

As a mom raising two kids on my own, my life requires a certain kind of constant juggling that is hard to keep on track.

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.

Keeping the magic alive can be as simple as going to the mall to sit on Santa’s lap or reading special stories on Christmas Eve.

Single parents do not have the luxury of purchasing an abundance of healthy foods for their kids to try. I know this. As a single mom, I’ve been there.

I’ve seen, and experienced, the anxiety of not being able to find work for months on end.

I think there’s a huge gap between no longer qualifying for benefits and being able to afford a life without benefits. When I went off government assistance – six months before I got the book deal – there were some months that were lean, I mean literally lean, like I lost a lot of weight. I could barely afford food.

As a single mother for 10 years, I brought in around $12,000 annually.

I have had PTSD since I was in a car accident when I was 16.

I graduated with a bachelor’s degree, $60,000 in debt, and due to have a baby in a month.

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.

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

I am, by default, a healthy eater. I limit processed food, eat fresh ingredients, all of that.

I worked part-time cleaning houses, and went to school full-time.

I don’t think there is a true cure for PTSD.

While I’d been in school, I had a nagging thought that it’d be so much easier to quit all this higher education nonsense and get a full-time job at wages low enough to still qualify for government assistance.

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

I graduated from college in 2014 and started freelance writing. I’d write anything that paid, including filling local events calendars for hourly rates.

I expect to work for as long as I can. I can’t imagine retirement.

If we can somehow start to remove shame from struggle, if we can truly see people and care for them as our fellow human beings, we’ll start to see how many of us are also fighting in our own way.

If we can at least make sure that our children are taken care of, that will ease the minds of their parents who are trying to work.

Dating means hope.

Sometimes you do not see white faces when you think of poverty. That leads to lots of stigmas, systemic racism and all that.

There’s a thing called a ‘welfare cliff,’ and what happens is you get up to a threshold – which is a very firm line – and if you jump over it, then you lose all of your benefits.

As a poor person and someone who now writes extensively about social and economic justice, I’ve often noticed a lack of a focus on poverty appearing in news cycles or in debates among White House contenders.

We don’t like to listen to people who are still angry, who are still in poverty, especially people of color.

As a single mom, I barely had time to get to know and date one person.

As a single mother, I qualified for Pell Grants, and received a scholarship from a small organization for domestic violence survivors.

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.

Our main purpose of writing is so we don’t feel alone and that others don’t feel alone.

If parents know how many times others are finding lice on their kids’ heads, maybe other parents will not hide their own discoveries in shame.

There is no planning in a life of fighting to keep a roof over your head. It’s pure survival.

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.

Shortly after my first daughter was born in 2007, we had to move into a homeless shelter.

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

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.

It shouldn’t take a pandemic for us to take notice that millions of people can’t afford a single sick day.

Remember The Nothing? It was a gigantic, black storm from ‘The Neverending Story’ that fed on fear and doubt and sadness and hate and uncertainty and didn’t stop until everything was gone. That is what Trump feels like to me.

Public speaking is not something my mind and body are able to do easily. I sweat profusely with shaky hands to match a voice that sometimes cracks. I wake up in the middle of the night obsessing over what I said and if it sounded weird or if I shouldn’t have said that.

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.

Employers don’t want to hire single moms with kids, because if the kid’s sick then they can’t work, and it goes on and on and on. It’s really incredibly difficult to find a job in that situation.

When people think of chronic fatigue syndrome, they imagine someone simply sleeping a lot or who’s always tired. The stigma from that name, and the name itself, desperately needs to change. In reality, sleeping doesn’t mean rest at all, and it’s never enough.

I have a lot in common with most Trump supporters. I’m white, I live in a rural area that is predominantly white where many people struggle to find a job.

I don’t believe life begins at conception.

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

I go through phases where all I want to eat are mashed potato patties with fried eggs, or pasta with meat sauce.

I have what’s known as a ‘spirited’ child. Mia has run me ragged since she knew how to walk. She’d run across soccer fields as a toddler, never once looking back. I have learned how to navigate her strong nature while nurturing it as well. I raised her to think for herself. I raised her to question.

During my last year of college, I maxed out what small available credit I had after declaring bankruptcy in my mid-20s to pay medical bills.

As a low-income worker, my take-home pay, at best, was about $200 a week.

As a parent you know you want to provide safe, healthy environments for your children.

In the world of Tinder and Bumble, where people keep up the appearance that they are low-key, lacking in any drama and partaking in an Instagram-worthy activity during every free moment between trips overseas, admitting you work from home and have small children orbiting you full-time feels like a drag.

Americans, if anything, do not like to be told to cut back.