Welfare, Part 2

The other night, I discovered that Nicole, the daughter of my cousin Christina, not only cannot get her kids back until she has a permanent residence, but is in danger of losing them permanently. The judge so benevolently granted her an extra six months to obtain a residence. Nicole told me that right now, she is sleeping on her cousin’s couch and waiting for a spot to open up at the homeless shelter. This is in Southern California, near the coast, where her father’s extended family lives, where she has lived for years, and where her kids are in foster-care now. Her job does not pay well. Sometimes I hear people blame those who live in areas that have become expensive for not moving away, but I don’t think they understand how it is when a place is your home – when your whole life is there – and you don’t know how to just pick up and go somewhere else with no money and no job.

Chris and Nicole lived with me twice when Nicole was a baby / toddler and Chris was 17 and then 18. She had left her husband because he was hitting her. Chris was on welfare then. California paid $450 per month then for a parent with one child; it now pays $345 for a parent with one child. Yes, more than twenty years later, it pays less in actual dollars.  Chris received about $150 in food stamps.  Determining how much someone with one child would receive in food stamps in California is not easy, but the average per person is $149, so this might mean a total of $300 in food stamps for a mother with one child, meaning that there would be an extra $45 a month in total benefit, all of these years later. The waiting list for a low-income apartment then was a few months; now, in Lancaster at least, it is eight years.

This is the war that has been waged on low-income families over the years.  A big blow came in the 1990s, when the Clinton administration passed welfare reform laws that made a lifetime limit of five years for a parent to collect welfare in connection with their children.  The idea was that by then, surely a parent would be able to get a job.

My oldest son was a baby, too, when Chris and Nicole lived with us.  The first time, I had an apartment in Redlands and drove an hour and a half each way to work and back in Orange County.  The apartments were too expensive for me in Orange County, and the jobs paid too low in Redlands. I worked at a telemarketing job, trying to get people to buy cellular phone service. I got up at 5 am, left the apartment by 6, and got home about 7 pm by the time I’d picked up Justin from the home daycare provider. Luckily, I found a woman who was easy-going about having him there so long and only charged me $50 per week. She watched five other kids, but she had five kids of her own who were school age, and they seemed to adore Justin. I would find them talking and singing to him when I arrived in the evenings. But I missed him over the course of the long day, and had little time with him before he went to sleep at night.

I was always afraid to apply for welfare, having seen the difficulties people I knew had with it, sitting for hours and hours at the welfare office, having benefits cut sometimes. And I’d absorbed some of the dominant ideas about welfare from my society – feeling that there was some kind of stigma attached to it.  Fine for others, I thought – I don’t judge them, I thought – but I don’t want it.  I did get Medi-Cal when I finally went to a doctor at 7 ½ months pregnant, and that paid for the rest of my pregnancy and delivery medical care and Justin’s initial pediatric care. But I wanted to keep my distance from social services, and didn’t apply for anything else.

Justin’s dad, who was just finishing his last semester of college up in Santa Barbara when I gave birth in Redlands, began to send $110 a month a couple of months later, then sent me a check for $120 ten months later with a note saying he’d sent extra because it was the last one he’d be sending. He said that he just couldn’t afford the expense anymore.  I’d been raised to not believe in abortion, so for me, when I found myself pregnant, it wasn’t an option I felt I could consider. A few of my friends had by then had abortions, and I sympathized with their situations, but this was my body and I had to be responsible for the decision. My boyfriend knew my beliefs about abortion when it came to me and knew the form of birth control being used, so after I found out I was pregnant, we went round and round in arguments that could not be resolved. He wanted me to have an abortion; I said he knew that I was the one who had to live with the decision and simply could not; he said then he was not responsible; I said he knew the whole situation before as much as I did…  I could never figure out how to fairly resolve this in my mind, so when he cut off the money he was sending, I just accepted it. I figured I had to bear the responsibility on my own. He was a social liberal and an Ayn Rand fan – something I understand much better now than I did then. Well, then I hardly understood it at all, and I didn’t know what I was in terms of any political categories. So I tried to do it all myself, pay my way, not give people more reasons to put me down as a single parent. I worked full-time up to the day of my due date and returned to full-time work three weeks after Justin was born.

For these reasons and many more, I deeply empathize with the struggles of low-income parents. It is so easy to fall through the cracks in this society.  The powers that be and their dominant ideology, which far too many of us have made our own to various extents, make poor people believe that it’s their fault if they’re poor, that they have no right to have children, and that they deserve little protection in their society, but lots of control and punishment.

I would like to say that if I had it to do over, I would have proudly been the full-time caregiver of my oldest son and applied for any welfare benefits I could get. Maybe this is true. I know it would have been far more important work than the work I did, trying to get people to buy cellular phone service. But I was afraid of social services then, and I remain afraid of them now, because of the way welfare is doled out, as if a person is suspicious or almost criminal to even be receiving it. Why is it instead not a social benefit along the lines of social security that retirees receive? 

Meanwhile, Nicole remains at risk for losing her kids. I have written back asking how much she would need to get into a place, wondering if all of us in our large extended family could pitch in to help her. I would like to think that people would help me if I were in such a desperate situation. I don’t know if she will want the help. Her mom and dad don’t speak to her anymore, and Nicole may feel that it is embarrassing to have this collection taken up on her behalf. But she should not have to be in this position. And what will her kids be like if they grow up in the foster care system without their mother and without their network of family and friends? When will this society end the war on poor people of all ages, and how many of us -- adults and children -- will be terribly hurt in the meantime?