A Single Mother Longs for Work--and Her Self-Esteem

It was early on a gray, sullen Monday morning, and I was standing next to the welfare office at the corner of Veteran and Pico in West Los Angeles.

The building and its surrounding sidewalks are a small, overcrowded island of desperation in the warm sea of comfort that stretches from Beverly Hills to the Pacific. To its concrete shores come the sick and the troubled and the weary and the unlucky--people too young, too fragile, too uncertain or battered to navigate the swift, unforgiving currents of commerce that swirl all around.

Inside the building--past the guards and through the metal detectors--the real work of the crushingly understaffed and underfunded county Department of Human Services proceeded as best it could. Too few people with too little to give were doing what could be done for too many people whose real needs never really would be met.

Outside, under the leaden sky, a crush of hard-eyed, long-haired young men in jeans and dirty jackets exchanged insults and pulls of cheap wine from bottles buried in brown paper bags. A stubble-cheeked, middle-aged man in a frayed shirt and dirty tie squatted on the sidewalk, scanning the Racing Form.

A few feet away, a young girl in black boots and torn leather with the soft, round face of a Renaissance painting gazed unblinking from beneath stereo headphones--a biker Botticelli, wired for sound.

Nearby, in pastel jogging suit and white Reeboks, thirtysomething Lisa--at once friendly yet clearly ill at ease--stood out like a freshly minted coin. She had come with an older friend, she said. The friend was inside “straightening out” her Medi-Cal “problem,” leaving Lisa outside to chew anxiously at her lower lip and walk off her nervous energy.

She grew up, she told, me in the Valley, the daughter of comfortably middle-class parents. She attended Cal State Fullerton, where she studied communications and found a husband. He went to work as a salesman for an up-and-coming computer company; she found a job as a technical writer with a large aerospace firm. The 1980s were very good to them. They had a son and bought a condo in Culver City.

Then, things began to sour: He lost his job and their marriage fell apart--”partly from the stress of that whole thing, partly because we were immature, I guess.” There was a divorce and they sold the condo. He moved to Oregon; Lisa and their son found an apartment in Mar Vista.

“It was really hard,” she said. “I love my son. He’s a great kid, but being a single mother is really, really hard. You are totally on your own and it’s really scary.”

Thirteen months ago, Lisa was laid off. She looked for work and began to collect unemployment insurance. She needs a salary that will cover not only her living expenses but also decent child care for her boy. She hasn’t been able to find one.

“I guess, I’d have to say that my self-esteem is really, really low at this point,” she said. “You know, you always want to think of yourself as your own person, as a self-starter, as somebody who can cope. What you don’t think about is how much of your feelings about yourself are sort of wrapped up in all these other things--in being somebody’s wife, in being the person who has that job.

“Until you lose it, you don’t have any idea how much you need to hear: ‘Thanks for handling that, Lisa. Good job, Lisa. Great work, Lisa.’ When you don’t hear those things for long time, you don’t just wonder whether you’ll ever hear them again. You begin to doubt you ever did.

“The worst thing about it,” Lisa said, “is that it makes you feel like you don’t even have a right to make plans.

“I don’t think I’ve ever needed a plan more in my life--a real plan on where to go from here. But to make a plan you have to have confidence, and that’s the first thing being out of work takes away from you. Later, you may have to give up your credit cards and your house and all that stuff. But your confidence in yourself goes right away.”

Three months ago, Lisa’s unemployment ran out. Since then, she and her son have been living on the small savings she managed to put aside from the sale of the condo. It’s nearly gone. This month, she had to borrow from her mother to pay the premiums on her health and auto insurance.

That memory is embarrassing, and Lisa looks away, through the crowd of milling men toward the door of the welfare office. From her expression, you might guess that what she saw was the portal to another world. The next time, it said, she would be among those on the inside.

But she will not be alone. County officials say the recession has plunged Los Angeles into a “social emergency” of historic dimensions. A record 1,335,847 people, 14.8% of the county’s population, receive some form of public assistance. Like Lisa, more than 400,000 of these people have exhausted their unemployment benefits within the past year.

“We have people coming in here with college degrees,” a welfare department eligibility worker told Times reporter Hector Tobar recently. “Their unemployment benefits run out, and they have no other place to go but the welfare office. Even though the benefits are low, it’s the only way they can feed their families.”

If it comes to that, Lisa will be among them. “I know I shouldn’t be ashamed,” she said, “but I am. But I shouldn’t be. No one would think you didn’t deserve help if you’d been in a car wreck. That’s sort of what happened to me. That’s sort of what happened to a lot of people here.”