The cannot deal properly with their own feelings because they have been taught to deny those feelings. they can't value their needs realistically because their needs have always come second to the needs of the family, which were to stop anything from changing in order to ward off abandonment. In The Color of Water the stepfather dies creating an unhealthy and new environment for the family. As the mother is now forced to raise her twelve children alone, she is forced to take on even more responsibility. Rachel Shilsky never before had a job. She was struggling to make ends meet. Playing games with her children to determine who was going to eat dinner and breakfast that day. The winners would eat and the losers would suffer because the family was living in poverty, not to say that poverty is a dysfunction, but the dysfunction develops as a reaction to the consequences that the family has to face. Many wealthy people can become dysfunctional. Rachel places five children in two beds. Most of the time the kids were so uncomfortable that they chose to rather sleep on the cold cement floor of their Red Hook, Brooklyn housing project. The kids never realized that they were living a different life than other kids until they are sent to school and James, the youngest of twelve children asks his mother why she doesn't look like the other children's mom's. Not only are they living in different atmospheres enduring situations that most kids didn't have to endure, but their mother was white, the kids were mixed and the people in their neighborhood were all black. Their family were outcasts. James and his siblings learned to deal with the color of their skin, the death of loved ones, the poverty and the fact that they didn't know where they came from. The children often thought about where their mother was from. " We traded information on Mommy the way people traded baseball cards at trade shows, offering bits and pieces of information fraught with gossip, nonsense, wisdom and sometimes just plain foolishness".
