Shattered Dream : Mother Heads West With High Hopes, but Ends Up Struggling on Welfare

Three years ago, Irene Brennick packed up her two tiny daughters, took her sisters up on an offer to buy her a one-way airplane ticket, and left Florida for a new life in California.

Her hopes were high. She was leaving behind a threatening husband and a hand-to-mouth existence. In California there were prospects of jobs and with the help of her sisters a chance to carve out a less chaotic life with her children.

In a burst of enthusiasm, she remembers directing her sisters to “find us a nice little house we can rent somewhere in the Los Angeles area for $400 a month.”

“They laughed hysterically,” she recalled recently.

Lurking in the back of her mind, she said, was the thought that if things did not work out right away, perhaps in California she might be eligible for welfare. In Florida, the sporadic child support payments she received, although never big enough to live on, were enough to make her ineligible for public assistance. If worse came to worst, she thought, maybe in California welfare could tide her over for a few months until she got on her feet.

The airplane had barely touched down when Brennick went to work on her first priority: finding day care for her children. In the next three days she logged 200 phone calls, painstakingly writing down the name of each facility, the charges and the likelihood of an opening. But there were few openings for a baby in diapers and a toddler. What was available, she said, was too costly for a mother who would have to support herself and two children on near minimum wages.

“The whole thing was the child care,” she said recently. “If they were elementary school age I would probably have been able to make it but at their age I couldn’t find any child care I could afford.”

After several months of trying to find a job and child care, Brennick said she realized that she was not going to be able to work and she could not continue expecting her sister to support her family.

She applied for welfare.

In the last decade, Brennick and thousands of poor mothers like her have followed a similar trail, pulling up stakes and heading west for California only to find that their dreams for a better life have led them to the welfare rolls.

Now, as a recession takes a heavy toll on state tax revenues, Gov. Pete Wilson says poor families such as Brennick’s should not be encouraged by high welfare benefits to move to California. He says that those benefits--among the highest in the nation--have made California a “welfare magnet,” attracting the poor from elsewhere because they know they will receive higher payments here. With welfare costs eating a big chunk out of the budget, Wilson says the state cannot afford this expense.

As a remedy, Wilson proposes as part of a broad welfare “reform” initiative that newcomers receive no more here than they would have in their previous state of residence. The restriction would apply for the first year of residency in California.

When she came to California, Brennick said she had no idea what the welfare benefits were until she got her first check. Fearful that her husband would follow through on a threat to seize her children, Brennick said her move westward was prompted by advice from a mental health worker. “If you have any help anywhere, go,” she said the worker told her.

At the time, Brennick said she saw the move as a last hope, as a way to escape her husband and pull herself out of deep depression brought on by the failure of a marriage.

Working in her first years out of high school as a receptionist, Brennick had a variety of jobs and, at age 23, met and married a “perfect man.”

“He was clean-cut. Gorgeous. Mister Polite,” she recalled, showing wedding pictures of a handsome young man with a smiling face.

“I had never heard anybody say ‘yes sir’ and ‘yes ma’am’ all the time before. I thought: ‘Wow, he is so polite.’ I didn’t realize until later that everybody in the South sounded just like him.”

Four months after her marriage, Brennick became pregnant and a short time later her husband’s work took the family to Georgia. She remembered that he “made good money”--$40,000 a year--and insisted when daughter Mandy was born that Brennick stay home and be a full-time mother.

For two years, life fit a comfortable pattern. Then the couple decided it was time to have a second child.

But shortly after Brennick told her husband she was pregnant again, she said she began to notice changes. He came home irregularly and talked of quitting his job. As months passed, he became abusive, appearing one day with a gun.

Brennick was pregnant with her second daughter, Jenna, when she decided to leave and move back to Florida where an uncle had offered to let her live rent-free in a small house he owned. Her husband followed, she said, but instead of attempting a reconciliation, he found a girlfriend and moved in with her. Brennick said he would make occasional visits to the family, sometimes threatening to take her daughters.

“I knew I had to get away,” she said.

After moving west and applying for welfare in California, Brennick said she decided that a college education was her only hope of earning enough money to support her children. For a year, however, the lack of child care kept her at home. Then just before the opening of the fall semester, one of those early telephone calls paid off--her name had come up on a waiting list for subsidized child care.

For two years, Brennick has attended classes at Los Angeles Pierce Community College. Tacked to the wall in her small apartment in Reseda is a series of certificates attesting that she has made the dean’s list each school term. In the fall, she plans to attend Cal State Northridge.

Over the years, she said, her husband has lost all contact with the family and the district attorney’s office has not been able to locate him to collect child support. “He doesn’t owe me but I think he owes the state of California because the state has been supporting his children,” she said bitterly.

Brennick’s major is sociology and she said she plans to go into investigative social work when she graduates.

“Maybe to find fathers,” she said with a glint in her eye, “who don’t pay child support.”