Do you have a job? How many children do you have? How many will live in the household?
As you sit in the small cubicle space at the benefits office, you listen to all the questions that you must answer to bring you closer to the help you need. They aren’t necessarily questions you want to answer, or even have the right answers to, nor do you know if these answers will be stitched to your biography for the rest of your life. You don’t know if it will harm or help you. But you answer them, because you are at this point desperate for the help you think the agency can give.
As a recipient of state assistance, I can tell you that applying for benefits can be a brutal process. From the application, to the intake, and then the approval, is two to three months long.
At the time I applied, I had gone back to a job I really didn’t like, working at a restaurant as a server, where the tip is what really makes up the paycheck. It wasn’t just to keep a roof over me and my children’s heads, but also to keep the lights on and bills paid. That was my first job while getting state assistance.
Then I moved on to other jobs that would pay a bit more and have some flexibility as my kids went to school. I also worked as a cashier at supermarkets and then eventually ended up with a part-time job as a home health aide with my CNA credentials.
These jobs don’t usually come with benefits such as personal time, sick pay, and healthcare. The hours are never really guaranteed — especially as a home health aide. Though the hours were per diem and there was no healthcare, sick day or personal time whatsoever, it gave me flexibility as a single mother so I could be available to take my daughters to school, pick them up, and get their report cards when those times came around. And believe me, making the time work for three children, when you’re just one person, was never easy.
The lack of empathy from the people handing you that benefit application is one thing in itself to deal with. The lack of dignity, when you find yourself in a public space, filled with folks that somehow ended up in that same place that you are, is a whole other level. Whatever had led to this point may have been detrimental for each person. Either way, there you all are, looking for help in the best way you can, hoping to not be denied. It is a very uncertain feeling that never stops.
There is a process that you have to go through to renew these benefits after you get them, in order to continue to receive them. That process tends to feel just as harsh as it did the first time. It gives me anxiety, and getting the paperwork done can be nerve-wrecking. I wouldn’t be surprised if this isn’t one of the main reasons I have high blood pressure at such a young age. Ironically, one of the best parts of the benefits I receive is healthcare, but at what cost?
As my children became school-aged and when the two oldest got as far as sixth and eighth grade I had already been through some of what I thought was the worst experiences of being a benefits recipient, only to find out that it wasn’t so.
I then gained more experience first-hand of the ridicule and lack of knowledge of what a benefits recipient really does receive. There was a small church school that my daughters attended from third to eighth grade that required monthly payments. Somehow I barely made it with the payments for the both of them as I did odd jobs to keep my bills at bay. The school offered a scholarship that offset the payments somewhat.
I remember being in a conversation with the principal who not only thought my younger daughter was very smart and should go to a great high school, but, to be exact, she should attend a college prep school. As my mind continued to rest on the cost, I brought up how the scholarship had helped tremendously. The principal, knowing I was a benefits recipient, wondered why I was having such a hard time, saying, “Doesn’t the state pay for your rent and everything?”
Imagine the shock on both of our faces. First, when I realized the misconception this person had of me, and her face when she heard the explanation of what benefits I actually received. What I had to explain to her, and others thereafter, is that state assistance doesn’t automatically pay for all your expenses. Most of us work, and we are always going to pay a portion of whatever income we make in rent. And no matter what that amount is, if we are unable to keep up with the payments, we get an eviction notice just like anyone else.
Fast forward to that same daughter’s college years as she graduated high school and headed off to a college I thought suited her for the smarts that she had. I then had to do another redetermination of the benefits in order to still receive them. This time not only had they reduced the amount in my benefits from previous times, but this was to be the absolute one that had me almost in tears.
I’m not new at the process, so I had already sent in my paperwork, but there also had to be a verification process over the phone. When we started talking about the number of people in the household, they really wanted me to tell them one of my daughters had now left for college and she is what they are now considering no longer living at home. The question they asked to verify that is, was she dorming on campus? Yes she was, because we didn’t really have reliable transportation and I really wanted her to have the experience of somewhere better, outside of her community, and this was one way for her to get it.
I didn’t even get to say all of that, because this person on the other end of the phone verifying my information for the agency was too happy to tell me that I am now feeding someone that does not live in my household and that this was in violation of me maintaining my benefits. I couldn’t understand why this was such a problem. Why couldn’t I feed my child? She wasn’t on the meal plan for the school.
Telling me this made me feel that I would definitely lose my benefits That is what I got from what and how it was said. I was so upset that I could feel the heat of smoke coming out my ears. I definitely heard my heart beating faster, and wanted to tell him all of how I was feeling with all my upset emotions, but I just couldn’t.
It’s not easy being in such a vulnerable state in life. It isn’t easy having to ask for the help you need from someone who doesn’t understand, and has the ability to deny you that help.
Why is it that society demands that we should gain higher education, especially if we want to better ourselves — “pull ourselves up by the ‘bootstraps’ so to speak,– but yet when we dare to do so, we get penalized? Why don’t they have a step-down program to ease you off state assistance — something to bridge the gap as you move on to getting your education? Why isn’t there a provision for rerouting some of the funds received toward books for education, rather than just taking the majority of funds away with no safety net.
What if those folks who are involved in all the benefits processing, one way or the other, were to become participants for a few weeks to have the experience of living on state assistance in order to know how to approach the ones who do need it?
What if, God forbid, we use the people that are the recipients to become a part of the process, who are actively shaping, critiquing, tweaking, fine tuning, and improving the policies of the program until it becomes better for all involved?
Dione Dwyer is a member of the Connecticut Mirror’s Community Editorial Board.