Viral Post Nails Why You Should Never Judge A Mom Using Food Stamps
This is why you never, ever judge a mom who uses food stamps to feed her family
“We aren’t all born at the top.”
One mom’s recent Facebook post about what it’s like to be a mom who uses food stamps to pay for her family’s groceries is now going viral. And it’s a lesson everyone could benefit from learning, so listen up.
Nicole Marso shared a recent encounter she had with a mother of three at her local grocery store. Her Facebook post shows Marso posing with her own EBT card along with a heartfelt message on why judging moms who use food stamps is a garbage thing to do.
“Today I was at a local grocery store in the self-checkout and a mom with 3 youngins was in front of me,” she begins. “She was doing her best to try to keep 3 littles calm while she checked out.” All of a sudden, a woman standing in line behind Marso, a woman with “her nice LV purse, iPhone X in hand, big rocks on her fingers and wrists, nice shoes” decided to humiliate the young mother.
“‘Of course she’s paying with food stamps,'” the woman said. Marso says the mom was completely embarrassed and made eye contact with her. “I responded ‘do you boo, your kids are adorable.'”
What a completely awful, privileged, cruel thing to do, right? You bet it is. And here’s why Marso says she was so deeply impacted by this encounter. “I was that mom,” she writes. “I went to self-checkout in hopes no one would see me paying with an EBT card, I avoided checkout lines because what would the cashier think.”
It may seem strange that Marso still holds on to her card — but she values it as a reminder of where she came from. “When I stopped using food stamps I was so proud, I kept saying throw that thing out but I never did,” she says. “And today, I know why.”
If you’ve ever been poor — and I’m not talking about struggling to make ends meet after college, or “oh I’ve only got a hundred bucks until I get paid.” I’m talking genuinely, deeply poor with no support system and no way to keep yourself financially afloat. Please don’t conflate “broke” and “poor.” I have been poor; I have seen poor. And the humiliation, despair, and stigma is enough to kill you. When you’ve faced that kind of reality, no amount of stability or “success” will ever be enough to erase what that feels like.
If you’ve never been there, struggling just to make it another day — don’t you dare judge a mother who’s right there in the thick of it, trying to feed her family. “Instead of judging a mom with a food stamps card, remember we aren’t all born at the top, some of us have to build that way,” Marso writes. “We’re all moms out here doing the best we can.”
Marso tells Scary Mommy she’s received countless messages of support — and even a few messages from people who vow not to judge situations like this anymore. “I have massive amounts of faith in humanity and there is still a whole lotta love left in this world,” she says. “I know kindness still present in this world because I’ve witnessed it firsthand.”
