What happened to the American dream?
Allyson Costello stared at the two lines on her pregnancy test and knew — immediately and beyond a shadow of a doubt — that she would get an abortion. She was 21 years old. She was on the pill, taking it religiously every morning. And it had been only a few months since she’d received a Facebook message from Andy, the first boyfriend she’d ever had, back in middle school, but now virtually a stranger. She learned that he was currently living way out in the country somewhere in Kentucky, that it was beautiful there, but also lonely. She had just gone through a breakup herself and could relate to the loneliness. They started writing, then they started talking. Eventually, he asked if she would fly up from Florida to visit.
At the time, Allyson wasn’t looking to change her life. She had an associate’s degree and was working on her bachelor’s. She and a roommate rented a small but well-kept apartment in downtown Orlando, walking distance to Allyson’s school and her job at Starbucks and any number of places to meet up with friends.
They’d bought nice furniture; they’d outfitted the kitchen. “It was so desirable,” she tells me. “Anybody would have wanted to live there.” At Starbucks, Allyson made around $9 an hour, plus her share of the tip jar. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was more than minimum wage, and with only herself to take care of, she could make it stretch pretty far. She even had savings, a small cushion to fall back on. She was proud of her grown-up way of life.
With her blue-collar background, she says, she’d long aspired to something more than the lifestyle provided by her mother’s bartending job and her father’s job in construction. “I didn’t want to live paycheck to paycheck and struggling,” she explains. “I wanted something better than that.” And she thought she knew how to get it. “I knew nothing would be given to me. I mean, when you come from a family that doesn’t have a whole lot of money and everyone you know comes from families who don’t have a lot of money and the area you live in is people who don’t have a lot of money, pretty much the only way you’re going to get out of that is if you get an education,” she says. She’d taken AP classes in high school and often held down two jobs — the one at Starbucks and another at a day care center — as she worked her way through college, studying early-childhood education and pediatric nutrition. She loved kids, but having one so young had not been part of the plan.
Yet there she was, in a bathroom in Andy’s house, staring at those two stark lines. It had been only a couple of months since that first visit to Kentucky, when he’d wooed her with mountain views and dinners out, and she had agreed to start dating him again. “I buried the pregnancy test under all the trash, freaked out, lost my mind for a bit in the bathroom, and then gathered myself up,” she says. After telling Andy that they were expecting, “I straight up was like, ‘I’m going to get an abortion. You gotta be cool with that. That’s gonna happen no matter what.’ ” The only two clinics in Kentucky that performed abortions had waitlists so long Allyson wasn’t sure she would make the cutoff, but she found a Planned Parenthood in Ohio that would take her in four weeks. By then, “He went from ‘I totally support your decision’ to ‘Well, we’ve got time, let’s just talk some options’ to ‘Hey, we would be a really great family, and we’re going to raise him this way and have a white picket fence and always love each other, and it’s going to be great.’ ”
And it worked: Allyson eventually came around to the idea of having a child. “Part of the reason why is that Andy and I talked and were like, ‘Well, we’re doing so much better than most people our age. We have savings. We own our house. We have two cars, we have college degrees. We live a good life.’ So it really did, at the time, seem like we had everything that we needed to be prepared and financially stable.” Plus, Allyson wanted to be a mom. She thought she’d make a good one. She had no way of knowing that from that exact moment, she’d begun her slow and steady descent into abject poverty.
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https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/american-middle-class-disappearing-754735/