The Future Looms Bright : Hope and Perseverance Give Santa Ana Woman a New Luster, and Things Are Looking Up

The lowest point, Sandra Morisette says, was three years ago.

Unmarried and six months’ pregnant, she was fired from her job as a waitress in a Huntington Beach Mexican restaurant. And a month after her daughter, Courtney, was born, she split up with the boyfriend she was living with. He’s not the father of her child, she says, “but that’s another story.”

At 30, Morisette was on her own and on welfare for the first time.

But this isn’t the stereotypical tale of a welfare mom. This is the story of a young woman who was determined to get off public assistance, to go back to school and to make a future for herself and her daughter.

After attending night school for three years, Morisette is only one class away from receiving her AA degree from Coastline Community College. And in early December, she was hired as a receptionist at a new wireless cable TV investment firm in Irvine, her first non-waitress job since graduating from high school.

Orange County’s sluggish economic recovery from what some consider the worst recession since the Great Depression continues to take a toll on the lives of many residents, and the latest economic forecast predicts more of the same for 1994.

But it’s not all doom and gloom.

From Orange County firms helping out-of-work executives find jobs to the approximately 20,000 residents who were placed in jobs by Orange County’s five Employment Development Department offices last year, individual success stories abound.

Indeed, for those such as Morisette, the new year looms bright.

“If nobody believes in prayer or God, do so,” she says, “because I’ve prayed for him to help me since Day One--to lead me into some direction, and he has. I can’t go wrong. It’s a brand-new year for me and my daughter. I’m not looking back.”

The turnaround in her life began in mid-1990, a few weeks after she and her infant daughter moved in with Morisette’s widowed father, a 74-year-old retired painting contractor who lives in a mobile home park in Santa Ana.

After splitting up with her boyfriend six months earlier, she rented a room in Huntington Beach, paying $350 a month in rent plus utilities. That left only about $50 a month from her AFDC check, and sometimes she even had to borrow money to buy diapers and other necessities for her baby. Many nights she’d stay up worrying.

“It was scary,” she recalls. “I just couldn’t make it.”

Two weeks after she and her daughter moved in with her father, Morisette had something of a revelation.

“I sat here and thought, ‘What am I doing?’ I didn’t want to be on welfare any more. I was basically looking for security for my daughter. I knew I had this little baby that was depending solely on me to make our lives better.”

She’s not, Morisette says, the same person she was before becoming a mother.

“I was a partyer,” she says. “I really had no responsibilities. As long as I had money to go out, I was fine. The minute my daughter was born, that all changed.”

Morisette says she frequently drove by Coastline Community College in Fountain Valley “and one day I decided to turn in.” A girlfriend had put herself through X-ray technician school, and Morisette figured if her friend could do it, she could too.

It wasn’t easy. While attending night school over the past three years, Morisette used money she could have used to buy new clothes and other things to pay for her schoolbooks.

When she started at Coastline, she didn’t even know how to type.

But, she says, “I had all my teachers behind me. They were really rooting for me.”

Her typing teacher, she says, even helped her write her resume.

In November--with a spate of computer and clerical classes behind her--Morisette signed up for Greater Avenues for Independence (GAIN), a state Employment Development Department self-help program geared to helping AFDC recipients become self-sufficient and reduce their dependence on welfare.

In addition to workshops on job interviewing and job-finding techniques, the program provides a phone bank for clients to set up interviews with prospective employers. GAIN specialists, meanwhile, do job searches and job developments, contacting employers to interest them in their clients’ abilities.

GAIN even paid to buy outfits for Morisette to wear on job interviews because, she says, “I didn’t have any clothes.”

A week after she enrolled with the program, Morisette began going on as many as three job interviews a day.

“I was in tears after the second week because I kept getting shut out,” she says. “I didn’t have the professional experience. I had the know-how, but I needed somebody to give me a break.”

Says GAIN specialist Pat Wright, who encouraged Morisette after two promised jobs fell through at the last minute: “When she came to GAIN, she was fearful of remaining unemployed. But she showed a lot of motivation and initiative. I don’t want to say more so than our other clients, but she was one of the ones that stood out as the more motivated one.”

During the first week in December--after 18 job interviews--Wright called Morisette and said, “I’ve got something for you.”

The interview was for a receptionist job at Continental Wireless Cable Television Inc. in Irvine. Despite having “the worst cold,” Morisette went on the interview in which the office manager asked her why she would come out with such a bad cold.

“Because,” she said in a congested voice, “I really need a job.”

The office manager told Morisette she liked how she presented herself, telling her “it shows a lot for you to come out like that.”

When told she had the job, Morisette says, “I started crying.”

Recalling that moment causes her to choke up. “I feel like I’ve kind of grabbed onto the end of the ladder where you keep pulling up,” she says. “I always thought of myself as such a loser.”

Landing the job, she says, was the answer to her prayers.

“We pray every night,” she says. “My daughter would say, ‘Please, God, help my mommy find a job.’ And then when I did and told her, she just hugged me and said, ‘I love you’ and said how proud she is. For being a 3-year-old, she really has supported me. Every day she’d say, ‘Did you find a job? Don’t worry.’ ”

At the end of Morisette’s first day of work in December, the office manager told her she had had “an excellent first day.”

“When I walked out of there I felt like somebody,” Morisette says. “I felt like I belong somewhere. I can honestly see a little future ahead of me. For the longest time I didn’t.”

She began to cry again. “I’m sorry,” she says between sniffles. “I just get very upset, because it was a long road.”

Morisette’s new job pays $8 an hour, more than she made as a waitress. She plans to continue living with her father. She takes care of the mobile home, cooks for him and pays half the rent--$350 a month--and utilities.

Her father depends on her now, she says, and “I don’t want to leave him, and he doesn’t want me to leave him.” Besides, she says, “it’s good for my daughter to have her grandpa around.”

Courtney, now nearly 4, is in preschool. For the next year, Morisette will receive help in paying for child care through a government Transitional Child Care program.

These days, Morisette makes breakfast for her father and daughter and makes their lunches before taking Courtney to preschool in Costa Mesa at 9 a.m. and reporting for work at 10:30 a.m. She spends her 2:30 lunch hour picking up her daughter at preschool and dropping her off at the nearby home of her sister, who does not drive. But “that’s OK,” she says, “I just eat my lunch on the road.”

Her sister watches Courtney until Morisette gets off work at 7:30 p.m. Back home, she cooks dinner for her father or has their dinner simmering in a crock pot. “I have a long, busy day now, but it’s a good, fulfilling day,” she says.

“I just thank God every day that there’s things like GAIN and welfare that help people. . . . People don’t realize that you just have to reach out. There’s a hand that will grab you and pull you up and take you. I started late, but I can see myself moving ahead. I don’t ever see me going back because I know now, well, I’m worth it, and I can go out there and get a job.

“I’m not looking back any more. I think ’94 is going to be the best year yet.”