Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

confession

Confessions of a Food Stamp mom

I purposely did not call myself a “welfare” mom because, let’s be honest, if I did you would have made some sort of judgment about me based on that word. It’s OK. I’ve done it, too. Everyone on welfare is a single mom who just keeps having kids to get more welfare benefits, right? That’s what I believed when I was growing up.

Now, I am one. And I need to confess. Because it seems that Food Stamps is becoming one of those issues, or maybe it always has been and I’m just noticing it more, that people are extremely opinionated about.

Recently, after a report that Food Stamp use is on the rise, I heard a few minutes of talk radio about the subject, and the host was appalled that people might use their food stamp benefits to buy crab legs or some such seafood luxury.

Confession No. 1: I have used Food Stamps to purchase swordfish steaks at our discount grocery store.

Confession No. 2: I also sometimes buy cake, ice cream, cookies, soda and other “luxury” treats using Food Stamps.

Also, on Facebook, you can “like” this statement: If you can afford alcohol and cigarettes, then you don’t need Foodstamps. (Their spelling; not mine.)

This bothers me. I neither smoke nor drink alcohol but I have other vices. Like shopping. And eating. And watching movies.

Confession No. 3: My family sometimes eats out. And we buy clothes or shoes when we or the kids need them. And we have a Netflix account.

We have been receiving Food Stamps for about a year and a half. My husband works two part-time jobs and goes to graduate school. I stay home with the kids and do a little bit of freelance writing when I can. We’re halfway through his graduate program. We don’t plan to be on Food Stamps forever. We look forward to the day when we can be off the program.

In the meantime, though, I’ve learned to accept this help at this stage of our lives. Even though we sometimes spend our money on other things, being on Food Stamps means that I don’t have to worry about how I’m going to feed my kids or if I have to choose between food and rent this month. It means that I know we’ll have grocery money, even if I can’t always see where the money to pay the rest of the bills is going to come from. And it means that occasionally we can do other things that families who aren’t poor get to do. Like go to the movies. Or eat at a restaurant. Or spend a day at the zoo. To say that we’re not allowed to do any of those things because we’re on Food Stamps is like saying we should be punished for being poor. To me, that’s the thought pattern behind the alcohol-and-cigarettes statement.

I know that people abuse the system. My mother-in-law worked in that sector her entire adult career and could tell stories. You can write us off as the exception, but I’m sure there are more “exceptions” out there. I’m just asking you not to judge me because I use a Food Stamp card. (Especially not if you notice the highlights in my hair or the new clothes I’m wearing. Confession No. 4: My mom paid for both for my birthday.)

If you pay taxes, then I’m grateful that some of your tax money can help feed my family for a time.

One final confession? Most of the time, I hate being on Food Stamps, but I love not having to worry about how to feed my two kids while I worry about how to pay the other bills. And, sometimes, I’m glad for the experience, if only to have walked a mile in another mom’s shoes.

Bad potatoes

A sticky, smelly goo pooled on the floor of the kitchen just underneath the stove.

“Has that been there long?” I asked my husband, somewhat rhetorically. He didn’t think so. We examined the goo, but because we were already running late for church, we ignored it till later.

“Is it getting worse?” I asked, later.

“Only one way to find out,” he said, wiping the goo from the floor.

Hours later, the goo was back. Thus began the search for the source of the goo. While I was in the living room putting our son to sleep, my husband, flashlight in hand, was in the kitchen trying to determine if the goo was oozing from underneath the stove or elsewhere.

Back in the living room with an upturned nose and a grimace on his face, he announced, “The potatoes.”

Ah, the potatoes. In an effort to find a dark place to keep them, off of the floor, out of reach of the toddler and baby, I had forgotten to take into account the warmth of our kitchen over multiple 90-degree days.

I realized that I had been smelling these rotten potatoes for a few days now, but given that not all of the dishes in the kitchen are clean, I thought I was smelling the griddle on which we had recently cooked salmon burgers. Even after the griddle was clean, I couldn’t pinpoint the smell, nor did I try to discover its source.

I offered to clean the mess up.

“It’s really gross,” my husband said. He bagged the potatoes and took them straight to the garbage. (Praise the Lord for the discovery of bad potatoes on garbage night!) I never saw the potatoes, only the residue they left.

The clean-up was gross, but nothing a little Fantastik with Oxy Clean and a Swiffer Wet Jet couldn’t handle.

I was a little annoyed at myself for not investigating the stench earlier. And I thought about how these bad potatoes are like the bad things in our lives. Attitudes, behaviors — sins, the Bible calls them — that we try to hide in the dark parts of our lives, hoping no one will discover them.

But eventually, we start to rot. And we stink, so to speak. And we ooze these hidden parts of our lives until we’re dripping with goo and can no longer hide the rottenness.

Maybe people turn up their noses at us, or hold us at arm’s length so as not to dirty themselves with us. Maybe they avoid us so they don’t have to come into contact with our stench.

And maybe there’s Someone willing to clean us up. To take out the trash and give us a good cleaning. And maybe He wants us to keep looking into the hidden parts of our lives to find more rotten stuff and get rid of it until we can’t find anymore rotten stuff.

Maybe His name is Jesus.