Joanna and I sit at a brown picnic table. Her two-year-old daughter, Stephanie, plays in the sand box with a green bucket and shovel. We are in the yard of their apartment complex. “For as long as I can remember my mother worked. She was always working as a house-cleaner or waitress even though she was getting aid,” Joanna tells me. “She always made sure holidays and birthdays were taken care of. She was a good mother that way, but I always felt poor and ashamed. I think because we always had trashy clothes and beat-up cars, very old cars — whatever my older brother could put together from a junkyard — it was always a junker and very embarrassing. We would never let our mother drop us off in front of the school.”

     Joanna stops talking for a moment and stares at Stephanie as if she were just born. She walks over to Stephanie and brushes the sand grains out of the two-year-old’s blond pony tail with its fuchsia bow. “You know when you’re a child and you’re poor, it shows,” Joanna says with a sigh. “That’s what I remember the most, always living in an old rented house and never having what the other kids had, always having to share rooms. There were four of us to a bedroom. We never had pretty things. That’s what I remember being ashamed of.”    

      Stephanie follows Joanna back to the picnic table and tugs on her navy blue sweatshirt, asks for her sandwich. Joanna opens the Ziploc bag and pulls out the peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich. It oozes over the sides of the white bread.    

       Joanna begins to shake her head. “I swore I would never be on welfare. But then my marriage ended and for about three years after the divorce I went on a mission to hell. I became addicted to cocaine and crank. I put myself through a recovery program. Then I had Stephanie.”  

      It was at the recovery home where Joanna realized she needed aid. “I was going to give her up for adoption, you know. I was only going to be on assistance long enough to take care of my pregnancy. But the minute she was born, I decided to keep her. The way I felt was...it’s hard to explain. I could have never lived with myself had I given her up. And I made a vow when I decided to keep her. Actually, it was before they put me under. They had to do an emergency C-section. I prayed to God that if everything was OK and she were healthy, I would be the best mother,” Joanna says. She wipes the purple jelly off Stephanie’s face and hands with a paper towel.   

     “At the time, I didn’t know what it was that I wanted, but I knew an education would help me and my daughter’s future,” Joanna says. “Recruits from MPC’s EOP office came to the recovery center and spoke about the programs which could help students with school expenses.     

     “I wanted to take slow small steps to get there, but now I have to hurry because I have until January 2000 to be done with school and assistance...I don’t plan on making welfare a career, I’m doing everything I can to get off it.”

-Amy Manfre

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