Review of Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother, JMWW, Fal 2011

Originally appeared in the Fall 2011 edition of JMWW.
Source: http://jmww.150m.com/Morrisonrev.html

Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother
by B. Morrison
Apprentice House, 2011
ISBN-10 978-1934074657, 342 pp., $18.95 

What is the welfare stereotype, if there is one? Women with children, living off a generous state, unwilling to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and do what it takes to make it in this big bad world. Such stereotypes of course, never account for the ways in which such women become welfare recipients. Set in the 1970s, Barbara Morrison's Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother is a resounding salvo for welfare recipients whose struggles in and out of welfare dependency are overshadowed by the weight of such stereotypes.

Morrison is a young, fresh out-of-college woman taken in by the 1960s social movements. She marries a fellow hippie (Lewis, a tall, jack-of-all-trades, Mr. Fix it, with braided ponytails to boot), gets pregnant, and lives out of a bus. What follows in Innocent are Morrison's beautifully rendered chronicle of her decline into welfare dependency and slow climb out of it.

Morrison was born into a white middle-class family from Maryland. Her Father was a doctor from a working class background and her mother an authoritarian who forsook her chance at a career to raise six children. Growing up, Morrison stayed out of her parents' sights, away from her perpetually angry father and yard-stick yielding mother. She writes "I was amazed to learn later that it was normal for children to do things to attract parental attention. I wanted exactly the opposite." (Pg. 2).

Morrison attended college, often while having to work to make ends meet. Some of her older siblings benefitted from her parents largesse and attended Ivy League colleges, but not her. Marriage and children closely followed. While pregnant with her second child, she separated from her husband. Unable to find employment and unwilling to head back home to her parents, she decided to get on welfare. Welfare, as Morrison suggests, is not always the default option. As her friend Jill asks, "How bad do your choices have to be before welfare seems like your best choice?" Welfare or Federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC, a federal assistance program that ran from 1935 to 1996, replaced later by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the 1996 "welfare reform" enacted under President Clinton), contrary to popular notion, is a fairly convoluted process, Morrison soon learned. The eligibility criteria needed to be met (rent an apartment, raise a child), case workers needed to be appeased, followed by innumerable trips to the social welfare office to follow up on late checks, and wrongly written checks. While the young mother struggled through the early months of living off welfare, with a toddler, another in the way and brutal New England winters, she is comforted in warmth and security provided by her single mother friends, also on welfare.

Morrison, at several junctures, concedes that she as a white, well-educated woman of good health and strong middle-class background is probably better off than most other welfare recipients. And she is quick to acknowledge her early indiscretions and poor decisions that accelerated her fall into poverty. As a young mother of two now, Morrison is glad for the stability and security provided her stolid middle class family and authoritarian parents. But, the memoir is not so much about her decisions and relationship with her parents as it is about navigating the murky world of receiving welfare.

Morrison's writing accurately captures the young mother's vulnerability. Her vivid descriptions of the complexities of the welfare system and the struggles of fellow mothers in navigating the same add a certain depth to the memoir. Though Morrison's experiences are from several decades past, they still ring true. Health care costs are the prime driver of poverty, not just in the United States but around the worked.

The writing, well-paced, rich, and evocative has enough momentum to elevate it from a mere string of recollected memories to a novel. And throughout, the reader is left rooting for the young mother to overcome her misfortunes, a testimony again to the strength of her prose.Innocent challenges the welfare stereotype and in so doing, exposes readers to the stories, struggles, and small mercies of life as a welfare recipient.—Girija Sankar