SNAP Saved My Family

Or: You might not want the social safety net, until you do.

I am a lot of things. I was raised in a middle-class home with few adverse childhood experiences. I graduated with distinction from a top-level public university. I had a career in print journalism, which I shelved to be a stay-at-home mom.

And, once upon a time, the social safety net kept our family afloat.

In August of 2008, astute and/or older readers will recall, the housing market imploded and took the stock market with it. The day after that happened, my husband lost his job.

We both scrambled to find any job we could. Unfortunately for us, during the sudden and dramatic recession, everyone was scrambling to find jobs. He applied to take photos for a car dealer’s website, and he was one of 500 applicants. I interviewed for a receptionist position at a chiropractor, which turned out to be a group interview with 30 other people. I was two minutes late, so I already knew I didn’t have it, but I stayed anyway because it felt weird to walk out. It was obvious who would get the job: a woman who was not afraid to say things that put the other applicants on the back foot. The interviewers smiled and nodded every time she spoke.

Why was I not applying for journalism jobs, you may ask? Well, you might have noticed that print journalism is not what it used to be. One of our town’s two daily papers folded in 2009, and both papers had been hemorrhaging staff. There was a glut of journalists with more current experience, and not enough jobs for them. There was no longer a place in journalism for me.

So, I made food and household cleaners from scratch and told myself I loved living like a pioneer woman because what else was I supposed to do? We had ample savings, which we lived off of for months. I clipped every coupon and obsessed over sale papers. We engaged in creative horse-trading through Craigslist so we could provide a Christmas for our kids. (We started with a single Nintendo game and ended up with ten games and a Wii!) We made a few hundred bucks selling all our DVDs and CDs. We both took occasional odd jobs.

Ten months of this bred desperation. When spring of 2009 came around and my husband got a job offer in a distant city, we couldn’t pass it up. We packed our four kids into the moving van and our minivan and, for the second time in four years, moved across the country. We had little choice.

And, not much changed. The area had been hit hard by the Great Recession. My husband’s commission-based job, more often than not, paid the minimum because customers weren’t coming in. I was looking for a job but, having been out of work for seven years by that time, it was hard. There was the daunting conundrum of finding affordable childcare for our neurodivergent toddler. I looked for night work, or overnight work. I applied to stock shelves, wait tables, whatever I could find. I applied to a video store (remember those?) and thought the interview went well. The interviewer looked at my application and said, “You have a Bachelor’s? That looks good.” I didn’t get the job, so I assume they found someone with a Master’s degree. To cash people out at a video store.

By the following year, we were several months behind on rent and in danger of being evicted. My father, a most excellent human being, bailed us out. Asking him for money was one of the hardest things I—a strong-willed, fiercely independent, grown-ass mother of four—had had to do. Our mental health was faltering.

My husband’s place of work was also struggling. In the peak of the summer of 2010, the day before his fortieth birthday, he lost his job again.

He had been working on the side as a consultant, so the good news was that he had a fall-back. The bad news with consulting is that you only get paid when you, you know, consult. That requires building a clientele, which doesn’t happen in a day.

In short, even though he had a job, we were still screwed.

I started looking for Section 8 housing in the city. I sent a friend of mine, a long-time city resident, multiple listings and asked him about neighborhoods. Every single one of them, he said: “I’m not letting you live there.”

During a cold spell, our gas got cut off. Our electricity got cut off at one point. Every day, I spent a few minutes sitting in our minivan, which was literally held together with duct tape, screaming so the kids wouldn’t hear me.

And then I—still a strong-willed, fiercely independent, grown-ass mother of four—threw three Hail Marys that saved our family, and two of them were harder than asking my father for money.

The first, not-so-hard one was getting the kids on state-sponsored health insurance. They needed school physicals and dental appointments. One of our children got pneumonia and constant infections for months afterward. It didn’t matter that the only doctor in town who took our insurance was the hospital emergency room. You do what you have to do, even if you know you’re wasting the ER’s time.

It was harder to show up at our children’s well-heeled schools and apply for free school lunches. The free-lunch rate in our school district was 4 percent. The applications had to be done in person so, with a toddler on my hip, I went to the school offices and whisper-asked snippy school secretaries whether other kids would know they were on free lunch. They looked me up and down as if I looked and smelled like I lived in a Dumpster and refused to give me a straight answer. (The answer was that there was, blessedly, no stigma.)

The hardest one was applying for the Supplemental Nutritional Assurance Program, also known as SNAP or, if you’re old like me, “food stamps.”

For one, there was the dreaded red tape. I downloaded at least ten forms and filled them out. I collected documentation: pay stubs, tax records, bank statements, Social Security cards, birth certificates, probably other things I’ve forgotten. I put my forms and the documentation together with a binder clip, drove thirty miles, and stood in line for hours at an office that looked like a wood-paneled DMV. The office was dark and filled with angry people who yelled when their benefits got denied. My salty social worker didn’t smile, barked questions at me, and did not move when I burst into tears in front of her and everybody in line.

The process was emotionally taxing. See “crying in line,” above. I never thought I would be dependent on the social safety net. Even though I worried about the stigma my kids would face at school over free lunch, I had a preconception of what a “poor person” was. And it was not me.

Through those few months, I had come to see myself for who I was: a desperate mother who loved her children enough to swallow her last tatters of pride and make sure they were fed and could see the doctor when they needed to. Those tatters tasted like vinegar but dammit, I swallowed them.

When the salty social worker at the SNAP office approved my application, I had never been—have never been—so grateful for the forethought that Franklin Delano Roosevelt put into the New Deal and the generations of taxpayers who funded it.

SNAP was not a ticket to Easy Street. For a family of six, we got a little over $400 a month. I had learned how to stretch a buck, so we more or less lived off that and even ate healthily. I continued to make everything from scratch, peruse sale papers, and clip coupons. What SNAP did, and what the kids’ health insurance and free lunches did, was make it so we could stand on our own feet and pay our rent and our bills. We didn’t get a ton of money, and I can’t say we were thriving, but we were surviving. That’s all we needed to do.

After a while, things turned around. I got a part-time job. My husband’s consulting business grew. We had to renew health insurance monthly, and SNAP every six months, which we did. After a year of using those services, we no longer needed them, and we let them lapse.

I’ll bet you know why I’m telling this story now.

It is, of course, because of the budget bill that your House representatives are voting on very soon. The version that passed the Senate features Draconian cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP.

Millions of people will lose healthcare, or see their benefits slashed. If I, under the same circumstances, applied for SNAP under this bill, we might not get it. That would have been a tragedy for our children. As it stands, it will be a tragedy for millions of children, millions of elderly people, millions of people. I hope it’s never me again, and I hope it’s never you. But if you ever find yourself a victim of circumstance, scrapping to stay alive, I hope you’re able to depend on this lifeline. I will forever be grateful that it was there for us.