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Target air hockey table3/15/2023 When she makes money, she does three things in specific order. A clean-cut boy in his stripes and pose is beneath her finger. She thumbs through it, points to a photo encompassing the bottom quarter of a page. She pulls a glossed flier from one of her jumbo bags of assorted things, a paper folded in quarters and ripped in the middle. Tonight she hopes to earn enough to buy her son an air hockey table for $60 at Target. The madam gets three quarters of Rosie's profits: a driver fee, an agency fee. When she steals phone numbers away from her madam, a Queens-based woman, she makes more money and smokes it. Her madam doesn't like her doing crack, likes coke instead. She's smoked enough crack to hold a smile about this. Sometimes her boots go off the concrete and the snow she steps in wets and seeps through. This night she hops, small bounces inches off the sidewalk, for warmth. Most of the calls to the escort service out of which she works are from the Islands: Staten, Long, Roosevelt. And only for a few days, since she's been out of jail. She only comes there at night, to spend the darkness with two homeless people in a van. The women were silent about how race, gender, or class arrangements affected their lives their stories, however, showed active avoidance and manipulation of the contemporary ideology of mothering. Although the women in this study described how their substance-abusing lifestyle had a negative impact on their children, they also detailed practices that illustrated that they felt capable as parents. Using in-depth semistructured interviews and observations of treatment groups, the participants' cultural knowledge about mothering is explored. This article examines 17 substance-abusing women's perceptions of their mothering practices in the context of a residential substance-abuse treatment program for women with children and pregnant women. This post is part of a collaborative narrative series composed of my writing and Chris Arnade's photos exploring issues of addiction, poverty, prostitution and urban anthropology in Hunts Point, Bronx.
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