Mother With AIDS Braces for Welfare Cuts

Everything about Mary Cross’ future is steeped in uncertainty.

Can she maintain the precarious existence she has eked out on public assistance? Will she be able to keep the three young sons whom she adores--despite increasing signs that authorities think they might be better off elsewhere? How long will she survive as she battles the scourge of AIDS?

Cross’ doubts and hopes about the future are irrevocably linked to another uncertainty--the impact on her family of federal welfare changes that will take effect over the next few months. The signs of dislocation are already apparent.

Cross, a 47-year-old Hollywood resident, has been told by welfare administrators that, despite her physical frailties, she may have to enter the work force to continue receiving benefits from Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the nation’s main welfare program.

She has also been notified that because of restrictions in the new law, a son with cerebral palsy and another with learning impairments may no longer qualify for federal disability payments.

Meanwhile, cuts in AFDC grants enacted this year by California lawmakers have already reduced Cross’ monthly check by $23.

“When I look at what they’re trying to do, it’s a little overwhelming,” Cross says. “How are we supposed to live?”

It is a question faced by millions of welfare recipients. The new laws signed by President Clinton in August incorporate sweeping changes in public assistance programs enacted more than 60 years ago, ending guaranteed cash assistance to the poor and transferring most authority for running welfare programs to the states.

Proponents of the welfare overhaul suggest that it is necessary because the system of public aid has dissolved into an archaic body of rules that discourages work and encourages dependency. Critics, countering that the treatment may prove worse than the disease, predict rampant homelessness and misery.

For welfare recipients like Cross, who long ago learned to survive where poverty and public aid merge into a murky subculture, it all means a seismic shift in expectations.

A recent visit to the Los Angeles County welfare office left her both bemused and frustrated at the suggestion that she should find employment in the Greater Avenues to Independence (or GAIN) program, which was designed to help welfare mothers find work.

“The GAIN person determined that AIDS is not a debilitating situation,” Cross recalled. “She said, ‘You’re going to be fine.’ And I said, ‘No, if things don’t work out, I’m going to die.’ ”

*

Cross, who admits she has led a tumultuous and often self-destructive life, looks worn and gaunt. She has lost more than 100 pounds. Wispy strands of blond hair ring her pale face.

Home is a sparely furnished, two-bedroom, $500-a-month apartment in a grungy building near Hollywood Boulevard. Her sons--Robby, 11, and 9-year-old twins Keith and Dennis--seem happy and oblivious to the roaches that scuttle up kitchen walls.

The living room is furnished with a small couch, wood table and blanket-covered bed but is dominated by a television that pulses with wildly colorful gyrations from the latest Super Nintendo game.

Cross says the dozens of video games are virtually the only luxury in which she indulges. With her health a constant concern, she says, she cannot chase after the boys, and they do not range far from home.

On the bed in front of the TV, Dennis and a visiting friend are in an animated tug of war with video monsters, while Robby and Keith demonstrate something called the figure-4 leg lock, a wrestling move they have perfected from repeated viewings of WrestleMania.

It’s Easter vacation, and Cross scans the newspaper for a suitable movie for the boys. She is too fatigued to take them on an outing to the park as they had planned. Robby, Keith and their friend will walk to the boulevard to see a matinee. She and Dennis, who has cerebral palsy, will stay home.

The split agenda seems to trouble Robby, a fiercely intelligent, gregarious, robust charmer who looks more like 14 than 11. For the briefest moment, a look of consternation flickers across his brow.

“But we’re running out of time,” he murmurs. His mother’s look seems to suggest she understands.

*

The children present Cross with her biggest dilemma--how best to provide for them now and as the deadly disease runs its course.

The new welfare law mandates sweeping changes in the nation’s key childhood disability program. Most children will have to meet tougher criteria to qualify for Supplemental Security Income. Those with diseases such as cerebral palsy will almost surely remain eligible, but many with behavioral problems and learning disabilities are due to lose their cash assistance beginning in July.

The loss of aid to even one of Cross’ children would bite deeply into the family’s income.

They mostly live on Keith and Dennis’ combined $1,300 monthly SSI payments. Cross also receives $456 monthly in AFDC payments for herself and Robby, plus food stamps worth $190--support she could lose if she were ordered into a work program but refused.

By comparison, a family of four on AFDC alone receives $673 a month.

In addition, the county pays $1,100 monthly to an attendant who provides in-home care for Keith, who has been diagnosed with attention deficit and mood disorders. The attendant, Jimmy Phillips, is Cross’ former boyfriend and lives in a separate apartment in the building, helping tend to the family’s needs.

Phillips says he fathered the boys, but that legal paternity has never been established. The new welfare laws strengthen child support enforcement and require recipients to cooperate in establishing paternity to qualify for aid.

Cross and Phillips are unsure how this aspect of the new law will affect the family’s finances.

As with most welfare recipients, Cross depends on a delicate network of government and charitable services to keep afloat. Here, too, she recently learned that a local AIDS service group will no longer be able to help fund the services of a second in-home attendant, who comes every day to help care for her and Dennis.

Chief among the confusing welter of issues is the constant question of her health and how it affects the children.

Cross is being urged by family counselors to find a legal guardian, to shore up all of the details ahead of time. She is aware of the dangers of inaction.

“I don’t want them to be wards of the court,” she says. “Robby can charm his way out of anything, but I really worry about Dennis and Keith. I read about kids being killed in foster care.”

To think of giving them up, she says, is to imagine the loss of her most important reason for struggling on.

*

Mary Cross is the oldest of seven children, born into an upper-middle-class life in the San Fernando Valley filled with the sophisticated patter and camaraderie of the entertainment folk who were her parents’ friends. Her father, Dennis Cross, a veteran stage and film actor who died six years ago, doted on her but also held her to high expectations.

Cross mentions this when explaining her life after graduation from Reseda High School. She spent a few months at UC Berkeley in 1967 but dropped out after meeting her future husband, whom she called a “card-carrying Trotskyite.” It was the apex of the counterculture era, and Cross was soon immersed in a lifestyle that included “demonstrations, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.”

She became something of a groupie to the bands emerging on the San Francisco rock scene and toured with the likes of musician Edgar Winter, she says. Cross eventually married, tried to settle down and took up cosmetology (“I figured whatever happens in the world, people will always want to look good.”)

But she also got hooked on heroin and was an addict until the birth of her first child.

Somewhere along the way, Cross contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. She was diagnosed six years ago and about that time became estranged from her parents and siblings. So far, her sons have tested negative for the virus.

“It hurts,” Cross says of the estrangement. “I know I was the source of a lot of aggravation. My parents and their friends fixated on me a lot--I could write and draw, was in the drama club--so they could never understand why I messed up.”

On a recent afternoon the family, which has no car, bundled into a van operated by a local AIDS group to be taken to a counseling session.

From the beginning, Cross has been candid with the children about her condition, but the virtue of such honesty is bittersweet. All three of the boys suffer from varying degrees of separation anxiety.

Dennis, dark-haired, with sweet, smoky eyes, doesn’t like to leave his mother’s side. Keith, sandy-haired and a size larger than his twin, is a friendly child with a ready smile, but his learning disability seems to be exacerbated by anxiety about his mother--he frequently acts out angrily at school and at home. Even Robby, who has assumed a quasi-parental role in the family, is unsettled.

“Robby puts on a good show, but he’s told me that when he grows up, he wants to become a research doctor so he can find a cure for AIDS,” Cross says. “He’s told me that he wants to make me better.”

That is not unusual, said Maria Garay, a family and child mental health specialist, after chatting with the family for about an hour.

“When a child sees a mother or daddy sick, they think they are responsible and blame themselves,” she said. “They also fear to leave the parent alone. What happens if they leave the parent alone is that they might die, so there is a lot of clinging behavior and a lot of acting out behavior, especially with boys--kicking, fighting. Ultimately, their fear is being left alone.”

*

Cross recently learned that she is in the beginning stages of dementia.

“Sometimes I talk to people and I don’t remember anything about it,” she says. “Shirley [the attendant paid by the government and the AIDS service group] says to write everything down, but sometimes I fall right to sleep. That’s why I depend on Robby so much.”

Besides tiring easily, Cross is susceptible to infections that can lay her low for weeks.

She developed a toxicity to the drug AZT and almost died. She has tried at least three of the new AIDS cocktails--combinations of drugs called protease inhibitors--that seem to hold promise, but she has suffered terrible allergic reactions to most of the medications.

She fishes out a passport, and the picture reveals a heavyset woman with thick dark hair and a wan smile.

“I didn’t begin to look [sick] until about two years ago,” she says. “Now I can’t forget because I’m reminded every time I look into the mirror.”

Despite her health, Cross may have to go to work to continue to receive her benefits, unless she falls into a category exempted under the law. However, it is unclear at this point who will qualify and under what criteria.

Simply having AIDS would not automatically exempt someone from work requirements, according to Raul Ramirez, a GAIN administrator for the county Department of Public Social Services.

“The fact that she has AIDS is unfortunate, but that is itself not the issue,” said Ramirez, who would only speak in general terms about the county’s policy regarding AIDS patients.

“We have had people who have full-blown AIDS working in our offices.”

However, someone deemed by a doctor to be too incapacitated would not have to participate, he added.

Cross is now trying to secure the required documentation from her physician. Refusal to participate could jeopardize the family’s Medi-Cal coverage, which pays for Cross’ AIDS medications and the children’s medical needs. Cross also fears that the work requirement would mean huge child care bills that she would be hard pressed to meet.

While one part of the welfare system views Cross as possibly fit enough to work, another part--children’s services authorities--wants to assess whether she is well enough to continue caring for the boys.

Keith was recently removed from the home after an angry outburst directed at his mother and brothers; he spent nearly two weeks in MacLaren Hall, the county facility for abused and neglected children. Cross says she is unsure whether the case is still open.

Officials with the county Department of Children and Family Services, citing confidentiality, would not comment directly on the case. But a spokeswoman acknowledged that such cases would be assessed to determine how fit the parent is and whether conditions in the home pose a threat to the children’s well-being. Authorities would most likely try to place the children with relatives before considering foster care or adoption, she added.

As a way out of the dilemma, she and Phillips are thinking of marrying.

“The only person I know they would be comfortable with is Jimmy,” Cross says quietly.

“I know he can’t support them very easily because we support him. There are so many convoluted rules, and I don’t know what they mean. I gotta figure out something. And I gotta do it soon.”

About This Series

As changes in the federal welfare system play out, The Times will take an up-close look at how several families and individuals cope. The sweeping overhaul signed into law in August affects poor people, disabled children and legal immigrants who receive cash assistance, food stamps or health benefits.

The law abolishes entitlement to welfare under the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program and gives states new authority to devise their own assistance programs. Adults will be required to get a job within two years, and the lifetime limit on benefits for most recipients will be five years. Each state will decide on exemptions for physical disabilities or other problems that make recipients difficult to employ.

The new welfare law also tightens eligibility for the federal Supplemental Security Income program, which provides cash assistance to the elderly, blind and disabled. Most legal immigrants and some disabled children will lose SSI coverage. Legal immigrants will lose their food stamps, as will single adults who do not find work.