The first time I heard the iconic line from the late hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur, “Trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents,” from his song Keep Ya Head Up in the early 90s, you couldn’t have convinced me he wasn’t talking about my mother. As a group family child care provider, her entire business model revolved around stretching every dollar — not just to support the families in her care, but to survive, feed her own family, and keep the lights on, building a child care system.

I was 12 years old, sent on an errand to the corner store with a colorful book of food stamps: payment my mother received from one of her families who didn’t have any other means. But there was a problem — one of the items on the list was diapers. Hoping to avoid the embarrassment of my friends seeing me with food stamps, I pushed back, reminding my mother that we couldn’t buy diapers with them. But she didn’t let me off the hook. She gave me strict instructions and told me I could keep the change from the diapers.

When I got to the store, I paid a few extra dollars — the hood tax, a familiar term used to describe the extra expense that often comes with shady transactions, and in this case, the cost of buying diapers with food stamps — just as my mother had instructed. Then I used the change for a red freezy and a bag of chips. As the owner counted the stamps, he mouthed the lyrics to Keep Ya Head Up, which was playing in the background: “Trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents.” As I ripped open the ice-cold treat, he sang the second part of the song, almost as if he was singing it directly to me, justifying our not-so-legal transaction: “It’s hard to be legit and still pay the rent.”

On my way out of the store, trying to reckon with my feelings of embarrassment and guilt, I realized just how deep the hustle had to go for families like mine to get by.

Read the full article about building a better child care system by Melodie Baker at The 74.