A 'Trailer Park' Mom Gets Insulted About Her Home While Showing Off The Christmas Gifts She Bought Her Kids — 'Some Of Us Grew Up With Nothing'
Showing off an $8 Christmas gift led to a chorus of snobbish mockery, and she had the perfect response.
Pro Creators, anilakkus, lillisphotography, nomadsoulphotos / Canva Showing off Christmas shopping "hauls" on social media has become a yearly tradition in recent years, so Patience, a Mississippi TikToker known as @trailerparkpretti on the app, was probably not expecting much blowback when she showed off what she picked up on a recent shopping trip.
Instead, she was hit with criticism from people who assumed she's poor and careless, simply because she lives in a trailer.
The 'trailer park' mom got viciously insulted after showing the Christmas gifts she bought for her kids.
Patience's "haul" consisted of clothes for her family for upcoming photos and a couple of Christmas gifts she picked up in advance to beat the holiday rush. "I feel like a lot of people are doing some real early-on Christmas shopping," she shared. "The toys, the clothes, everything is going so fast."
Nothing she bought was extravagant or high-priced, and everything she bought was from affordable stores like Target and Marshall's. That didn't stop people from making wild assumptions, and using them as a basis to criticize her.
People responded by insulting and mocking her trailer home and claiming she's poor because she shops too much.
"Did you ever think that if you would stop shopping so much you could afford a real home," one vicious comment read. The comment was instantly criticized by other users, as it should have been — aside from being cruel, it also traffics in the same brain-dead idiocy underpinning claims that Millennials' buying avocado toast is why they can't afford houses.
What economy do people like this think we're all living in that spending $12 on a pair of boots and $8 on a toy sushi set for a kid's Christmas gift is what's sinking someone into intractable poverty? The median home price in America right now is $416,000 for God's sake. An $8 play set makes no difference, and the insistence that poor kids don't deserve to have a Christmas is outright sadistic.
But in Patience's case, the criticism doesn't even make sense in the first place. She, her husband, and her children live a simple life, but they are from living in squalor. Their trailer and the other areas of their home they've built on their land are nicer and more spacious than every apartment I've ever lived in, in some of the fanciest cities in the world!
And as Patience pointed out in her eloquent and insightful response to the insults, the criticisms of her and her home say far more about the people making them than they do about her and other people who have worked hard to create a comfortable, stable life in a country and economy where doing so is increasingly impossible for all too many people.
Patience responded by schooling people about classism and how hard it is to get by when you 'came up with nothing.'
"Yeah, because where I live just isn't acceptable in this judgmental world, right?" she said in onscreen text in response to the comment about her being unable to afford a "real home" because she bought her kids Christmas gifts. She went on to point out that people are "automatically looked down on" if they don't live in "a big fancy house with a white picket fence."
Patience also shared how she grew up — having "spent many nights wondering where I'd sleep," which has made her "beyond thankful" for her trailer home because of the hardships she survived. "Realize that some of us came up with NOTHING," she went on to say, "no support, no guidance and no inheritance. Just out here doing it all on our own."
In another video, in which she rightly questioned what the phrase "a real home" even means, she shared that she spent part of her childhood living in campgrounds, pay-by-the-week motels, and on the couch of her sister's boyfriend's parents. But none of those difficulties compared to the life she lived in a nice three-bedroom, two-bath house with her abusive ex.
And no strangers' criticisms, like another commenter who called her trailer home "junky," seem to dull the shine of all she's survived and accomplished in order to create the comfortable home she's now made for her two daughters, even if it is a trailer.
"Y'all have no idea what people go through or what type of homes that they live in," she went on to say in one of her videos. "And I wish people would think about that before they spewed off their awful comments." Especially since most of those commenters probably couldn't make it a week going through what Patience has had to triumph over in her life.
And, as several commenters pointed out, it's the love and warmth that makes a house "a real home" anyway, not the materials it's constructed from.
As Patience put it, "one person's junk is another person's treasure," and her girls are going to grow up knowing they're safe and loved. There isn't a big house with a picket fence in the world that can do all that.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.