When I was 13 years old my mom lost her job and could no longer make the mortgage payments on our house in Tennessee.

Part of the reason my single mom lost her job was she’d had a disagreement with her employer over an injury she sustained at work. She had fallen after slipping on the highly polished floors in the building where she worked. This resulted in a fractured vertebra, chronic pain and the need for a neck brace.

There were some ensuing conflicts over her absences due to the injury, and the issue eventually led to her being terminated. Apparently the newspaper owner did not want to believe she was still in pain.

Although my mom received small workmen’s compensation checks, they were not enough to pay the bills, so we lost the house and the car, too

My mother’s sister offered to let us live with her in West Virginia until my mom could find a job. To get to my aunt’s house, we took a 20-hour bus up through the Appalachian Mountains; the trip required an eight-hour stopover in a hardscrabble mining town in West Virginia.

The residents had gaunt faces and their clothes were ragged and patched. No one smiled. By five o’clock, the pale winter sun was gone behind a mountain.

My mom still wore the neck brace and there were deep lines etched in her face.

While we waited in the bus station, I held her head in my lap, wanting so much to ease her pain. She had always been the strong center of my world and I was stunned by her frailty and by the dramatic change in our fortunes.

My brother had already gone to live with another of my mom’s sisters. I did not know when I would see him again or if my mom would ever be able to work again.

I recently recalled this fractured time in my childhood when I heard a presidential contender refer to families on food stamps in a contemptuous tone — as if they were less valuable as humans due to their need.

Food stamp recipients would like to see their critics “spend some time in their shoes,” according to AP writer, Jesse Washington.

After interviewing food stamp recipients across the country, Washington concluded, “Most said they never expected to need food stamps, but the Great Recession, which wiped out millions of jobs, left them no choice. Some struggled with the idea of taking a handout; others saw it as their due, earned through years of working steady jobs. They yearn to get back to receiving a paycheck that will make food stamps unnecessary.”

Although there are abuses in the overall program, nearly half of the recipients of food stamp aid are children. And of the adults,” some have advanced degrees and remember middle-class lives,” Washington wrote. “They are white, black and Hispanic, young and old, homeowners and homeless.”

In short, there but for the grace of God go you or I.

Or the men of privilege and power who are now condemning them.