The Poverty of Love: What I Didn't Know About Partnership Until I Found It
I grew up losing people. My mother at 16. My brother at 18. I didn't know what it felt like for love to stay. Then I drove to Golden, BC — and found Tony in a kitchen.
I grew up losing people. My mother died of cancer when I was sixteen. My brother died by suicide when I was eighteen. Before I was old enough to vote, I had lost two of the people I loved most in the world.
That teaches you something. Or un-teaches you something. It makes love feel like a temporary state — vivid and real until it isn't. You learn to hold people loosely. Or not at all. You learn that the cost of loving someone completely is that eventually you'll be standing in the quiet of their absence, trying to figure out how to keep going.
Running toward something
After I was attacked at work and my boss blamed me, I quit. I packed my car and drove from Calgary to Golden, British Columbia — a small mountain town, tucked into the mountains. I wasn't entirely running away. I was also running toward something, though I couldn't have told you what.
Out of boredom more than anything, I got a job at a restaurant. And there, in the kitchen, was Tony. He was different from the type of guy I had dated before — but he had a heart of gold, and still does. And he completely stole my heart.
“He had the biggest heart of anyone I had ever met. He was adventurous, spontaneous, and he made me feel alive in a way I hadn't in a long time.”
What equal actually looks like
We've been together eight years. Married four. And the thing about Tony that I could not have imagined before I found it: he shows up. Not in grand gestures — in the daily, unglamorous way. With Toby. With the house. In our marriage when it got hard, and it did get hard.
We split things based on who has the physical and emotional capacity that day. Not as a fixed rule. As a real, living negotiation between two people who are paying attention to each other. I have never once had to manage our household alone. That sounds like a low bar. In my experience, for most mothers, it is not.
Why this is a poverty issue
The poverty of love is not only romantic. It's the absence of anyone — a partner, a community, a village — who truly chooses you. Women in poverty often have the least access to supportive relationships: because stress fractures community, because housing instability uproots networks, because the shame of struggling keeps people at arm's length.
Momera is, at its root, a love project. It's about building the kind of community where mothers are chosen and shown up for — where no one has to white-knuckle their way through impossible situations completely alone.
Becky Tsadilas
Founder, Momera — Movement of Mothers Ending Poverty. Based in Cochrane, Alberta. hello@momera.ca