"The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps."
--Marcellus Wallace, Pulp Fiction (1994)

That quote was going through my head the morning I applied for government food and cash assistance two weeks ago.

We were sitting on a cool $350 in the bank with our $1200/mo rent coming due in few days when we learned that Ken's unemployment benefits weren't going to be a quick and simple online application followed by a weekly drop in the bank. In fact, it would be 6-8 weeks before we could expect to see a dime of that money, and in the meantime, our income and savings was a deluge of nothing. However, if utter terror, shame, and anger were currency, we'd likely be sitting on the next Forbes list of billionaires.

Still, we had to act in some way. While my parents (bless them) have been able to offer us a great deal of help making sure our landlord gets paid, it would be asking too much for them to finance our entire way of life for up to two months. Therefore, we had to take the only other feasible option left.

So, on my 30th birthday, I logged onto the Department of Social and Health Services website and filled out an application for cash, food, and medical assistance. And the whole time I was doing so, I kept the face of my kids planted firmly in the forefront of my mind in order to silence the jeering voices insisting that applying for welfare was basically like giving up and joining the world of loserdom. We had weathered so many bad storms over the years, but had never gotten to the point where we could actually qualify for such help. The fact that we had officially fallen below the poverty line was both depressing (simply because it was happening) and a relief because finally we were on somebody's radar. What a strange dichotomy.

I have never done any of this before, and honestly I never envisioned a day when I would be trudging into the welfare office with an armload of paperwork to hang out with the rest of the community's broke and downtrodden, but you really don't ever expect such things. When we got there, I scanned the room for people who had a certain look on their face--one that matched mine that said, "I've never done this before. This is only temporary. We only need a little help to get us through the next month until we have income again so that we can pay our electric bill and buy gas and groceries."

I felt utterly alone in that regard. Most of the people there seemed well-practiced with the whole thing and it showed in their expressions, their wardrobes, the pallor of their complexions, the casual way in which they greeted the social workers. Many of them had become part of an endless cycle of resignation and dependency. There may have been a time when they tried hard, but they eventually just gave up. It's not that all of these people were willfully "addicted to living for free." It's that all of the fight had been sucked out of them. The system that was designed to help them bridge a temporary gap had eventually extinguished their fire for self-improvement. Observing all of this, I had to fight the urge to get up and run out of there, but I had our kids to think about. And Marcellus Wallace spoke up again and reminded me that it was just pride fuckin with me. I also reminded myself of my indomintable spirit in the face of so many setbacks, and that this was going to be no different.

Eventually, our name was called and we were taken into another room that was much quieter and less depressing than the waiting area, and that's where we met the gentleman who was going to process our paperwork and see what, if anything, we could qualify for. Having done my homework ahead of time, I was pretty sure we'd qualify for everything: cash, food, medical, daycare, and even housing if we needed it. When you got no money coming in, it leaves the door wide open.

And I was right. After answering a series of relatively non-invasive questions, and after the social worker crunched all of the numbers, we learned that as a family of four with no income, we qualified for $600 a month in cash assistance and $600 a month in food. Medical would start in a few weeks. We didn't worry about housing because it is still our hope we won't need to worry about it after this month.

Of course, TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) isn't exactly free money. It's a pittance, and it's heavy on the "T" part. They require that you be working (or looking for work) no later than when you receive your first payment. The law requires you have to join the WorkFirst program. I was told I needed to find daycare by the 16th of this month (which will be subsidized) and that I needed to attend a WorkFirst orientation by the 23rd, otherwise we'd have our benefits sanctioned. They also gave us each a $25 gas voucher to make sure we could get to the orientation (something I hadn't expected, but hell, I'll take free gas), and they said they'd also finance things like work interview clothes and other special licenses or tools should we need them.

In the meantime, we will keep looking for work as we have been. Once we start getting unemployment, the TANF money will stop, but we can keep the food benefits for another 5 months, whether we've found jobs or not. We got a little plastic card and were told that we would have the money on it by midnight tonight and that it would deposit on the 3rd of every month.

And that was pretty much it.

During the process, which took a few hours from start to finish, I had to hold back tears no less than a dozen times for myriad reasons, but namely relief that the social safety net, which is so maligned by so many because of its abusers, was there to catch us during a time when we might have lost everything otherwise.

In the last three weeks of this whole mess, I have learned a lot of lessons. I've learned that one should never take their places in life for granted. No matter how strong a fortress you think you have, there is always a big enough bomb to blow everything apart, and it often falls out of a clear blue sky. I've learned that when such a thing does happen, there is no such thing as pride when you have your own survival to consider, and I'd much rather that people faced with such dire circumstances come into the welfare office than hold people at gunpoint.

Since all this began, I've seen how much of our tax dollars work up close and personal, in ways I never imagined I would, and I have learned that although it isn't always easy or pretty, and that there are always people who will try to get more than they're owed, I am so grateful that these services are there to help people like us.

With any hardship I encounter in my life, I always ask myself how I can better use the information I've gathered to make myself a better person so that I may help improve the world. Today, I walked out of there feeling far more enlightened than I did walking in, and I will look back on this time of my life not with shame, but with a sense of deep gratitude that we had somewhere to turn in a time of desperation.

My Thanksgiving will be extra special this year. In fact, it started early.