"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.

When Ken called me two weeks ago and told me he had lost his job--where he had worked for over 12 years as our family's sole breadwinner--there was a split second when I saw our family's lives flash before my eyes. Okay, maybe it was more like a good 30 minutes, from the time I got the news, called my mom and cried and panicked, to when I gathered the kids to go and pick up Ken. Either way, it was the longest split second of my life. In it, I saw us losing everything. I saw us standing in lines at soup kitchens and food pantries. I saw us huddling in our house without electricity, burning our eviction notice for warmth. I saw us throwing all of our earthly belongings into the trunk of our car (after selling everything we could for hard cash) and striking out for the great unknown like a couple of nomads in some romantic modern-day Hollywood remake of The Grapes of Wrath.

There is no feeling quite so terrifying (for someone like me, anyway) as drifting without an anchor, especially when you have kids to feed. But once the initial shell-shock began to pass, and once we had our night of just being together as a family and reaffirming our dedication to one another, we stepped back from the giant crater that Ken's former employer left in our lives and assessed our options, and we realized that we not only had a shot at avoiding the soup kitchens, but we also had a chance to do something better and climb even higher. In the quest to extricate myself from the sinkhole of hopelessness that threatened to swallow me, I decided to view this not as a setback, but as a catalyst to spur us in the direction we'd always dreamed we'd go but never did because we were too afraid to give up the devil we knew--the job that was just barely keeping us out of dire straits while slowly sucking the life out of my otherwise very happy and lively husband.
 
It's a scary world out there for sure, and I admit that in recent years I had been isolated from it. Times have always been tight for us. The idea of a cushion seemed a fantasy as we worked to spread our tiny pat of butter over the giant slice of bread we've cut out for ourselves, but we were just thankful that Ken's steady job kept us afloat enough to stay out of too much trouble while I waited until our kids (ages 6 and 8) were in school all day so I could have the option of returning to work. I had also been working as a freelance editor to the tune of a not-quite-steady paycheck as well as working on a novel and trying to sell short stories in order to advance my own writing career with the hopes that my big break would be the answer for us all. But with these new challenges, I too have been forced to throw my hat into the workforce and see who is willing to hire a displaced homemaker/starving artist. I'll keep writing, of course. Hell, there is nothing like a whole boatload of strife to fertilize the creative growing space for someone like me.

In the last two weeks, we have seen a lot and the journey, I'm sure, is far from over. There are a lot of unemployed people out there, and not enough jobs for all of them, so the competition is going to be fierce. In the meantime, we'll be leaning heavily on family and tapping whatever resources--government or otherwise--we have available to us in order to make sure that we are at least able to maintain the very lean lifestyle we had before this even happened. I look forward to writing the post that tells the world that one of us has found a new job. I also look forward to offering my own insights to those who are going through the same struggle and sharing the resources I have found and the things I learn along the way.

I know there are a lot of you out there. I am at least heartened that we are not alone.

I started the week by filing my unemployment claim for the day I went unpaid.  I read afterward that I can only claim whole weeks at a time.  Oh well.  I noted in the claim that I had been paid for 4 days of the week.  I think I'm good.

After getting a few hot tips from some fellow ex-employees of Intel (also ex-military), I registered and submitted a few applications for civilian IT jobs posted for Fort Lewis. They looked to be right up my alley. I'm pretty sure that if I can get anything, it will probably have to be IT-related, even though my talents stray quite far from there.  There just isn't too much else to be found around the Olympia area for me right now.  I'm okay with that.

Allison suggested that I purchase my own domain and start some sort of  Geek-for-Hire website.  I've got it parked and ready for content at www.techbyken.com.  Part of the idea of this website is to be able to express my enthusiasm and knowledge of topics that might not make it onto my resume.  I need to work on that some more. 

Wednesday, October 15th: