When my son was a toddler, I was in college and on welfare. I did that for three years or so, not quite long enough to get a degree, but close. We lived in subsidized housing -- basically the project. My rent was $67 a month for a not particularly glamorous apartment with no carpet and all the roaches I could want. My welfare check was for $300 month, and I got $90 a month in food stamps. The spare $200 plus a month went for gasoline, diapers, art supplies, clothes for a growing baby, soap, toilet paper, stamps, and whatever other household goods I couldn't buy with food stamps. On the rare occasions that I went out for fun, my friends paid my way. I had no telephone, no cable tv. On the upside, no utility bill, no medical expenses, and no car payment (my grandmother bought the car for me). I don't know how I would have managed if I'd had a car payment to make. I couldn't afford car insurance either, so I just didn't carry it.

I did this (this being the welfare/school thing) because I wanted to do something with my life. I wanted to take care of my son. I was a single parent and it seemed a reasonable thing to do. My family had been paying taxes for years, it seemed fair to take some back long enough to get through school.

The bad thing though is that people have a real bias against the poor, especially the poor who are on welfare. Everybody gets lumped in with the generational abusers of the systems that we've all heard about. I wish I could remember the exact statistic, or find some current ones, but I remember reading back then that over 80% of welfare recipients were single mothers, and the vast majority of them were on welfare for two years or so -- just long enough to get on their feet and find a good job and child care after having a baby. There's this idea that everyone on welfare is living high on the hog. Unless the benefit systems were vastly different elsewhere from where I lived, in Ohio, I don't see how that's possible. Even with lots of kids, you weren't going to be living like Donald Trump. I told you how much I was getting and what I was spending it on...you do the math.

I experienced first hand some of the resentment and bias that people on welfare run into. When my son was an infant, before I lived in the housing project, I rented the basement in a house owned by a young preacher and his family. They lived upstairs. I was paying them $375 a month rent to live in a basement and had to go upstairs to use the bathroom because they never put one in, although they'd agreed to do so. I was able to afford to live in this palatial splendor because my father was sending me a couple hundred dollars a month at the time -- which I appreciated and which he did not continue to do. The preacher's wife, who had three kids of her own, had to get up before dawn every morning and go to work. She confronted me after I'd lived there a few weeks to tell me that as she walked to her car in the mornings, she could see a small light shining in my bedroom and that she deeply resented that I, who was on welfare, felt entitled to have a light on in my room when she, who had to work for a living, was paying the electric bill.

I was going to school full time at the time. My son was only a few months old and very tiny (he was a preemie and didn't even weigh six pounds when I moved into the basement). He slept in a crib in my bedroom. I left a small lamp on at night so that when he cried, I could see him immediately and make sure he was alright. The preacher's wife did work for a living, but she also had a husband to help her, and her husband's family and the church secretary to watch her kids while she worked. And I had assumed that by paying rent, I was contributing to the electric bill. She hated that her taxes were going to to me. It seemed a terribly unfair and pretty direct kind of deal to her. She worked, I didn't, I got her money.

I've had cashiers in grocery stores take books of food stamps out of my hands and count them for me because they apparently assumed I was too stupid to know how to do that for myself. I've been talked to like I was very, very slow witted by social workers who I know were not as smart as me. And then there were the mandatory six month reviews. Every six months, I'd have to get all my paperwork together and go sit in the welfare office for several hours until my social worker was available to review my case. I found these reviews to be horribly demoralizing.

Finally, I couldn't make myself go to another one. I was a year short of graduating from college. I dropped out and got a job at Dominos delivering pizza. Since I wasn't on welfare anymore, my rent shot up to nearly $400 a month -- retroactively for three months. I had to move in with my grandmother for a while.

My self respect was in better shape after I got off welfare, but I still look back and think my timing sucked. I wish I'd stuck it out for another year. I've never seemed to be able to get the logistics in order to go back and finish my degree, but I still think about it.