Class Action March 2006 Book of the Month! 

Mary Childers

Welfare Brat: A Memoir

(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005)

Review by Corinna Yazbek, with a special contribution from her mother, Cindy Grace.

As I cautiously turned each page of Welfare Brat, I felt as if I were reading my own childhood story: a single mother, children by different fathers, the blessings and burdens of welfare, and the desperate desire to get the hell out. I dared not let myself emotionally identify with author Mary Childers for the first couple chapters. Was I afraid to re-experience the trauma of growing up in poverty? Has it taken me so much time, energy, and geographic distance to forgive my mother that I was scared this would bring up everything for me again?

Welfare Brat is a memoir that focuses on Childers’ life from childhood until college. She and her six siblings live in cramped, roach-infested apartments just beyond the “good” part of New York City in still–segregated neighborhoods with their single mother, Sandy. Childers sets out in search of her mother at night, drags her home from bars, and helps keep an eye on her younger sisters and brother until the next one is old enough to take over. Then she sets out to make her own money to buy nice sweaters for school, a bus pass, and food for herself. She is forced to grow up and overcome neglect, addiction, violence, and the economic barriers her family faces. She is painfully aware of class and race differences at a very young age and has her sights set on one thing: going to college.

Childers develops her mother, Sandy, with complexity and compassion while never betraying her own experiences of frustration, disappointment, jealousy, and anger. I could identify with the neglect longed-after by other girls at school. Though, probably like Childers, all I wanted was for my mom to sit down with me while I did my homework and show interest in my after-school activities. She encouraged my over-achievement because she knew it was my ticket out. Maybe, like Sandy, she weaned me from her time and attention because she didn’t have it to give or maybe because it was too painful for her to know that my ambition came from my worst fear: ending up like her.

In order to live with myself after leaving home, I’d conveniently forgotten that when my mom told me she was pregnant with my youngest brother I tried to pressure her into getting an abortion until I read Childers’ dread each time her mother accidentally got pregnant. The miracle of conception was not joy, free and clear, but anxiety about yet another mouth to feed, diaper to change, and someone else’s cries to soothe.

I think I wanted to read Welfare Brat to have my personal experience validated. Recently my 16 year-old sister dropped out of high school to work to support my mom and youngest brother. This brought everything flooding back to me, including my powerlessness to save my mother or prevent any more children from living with the consequences of her addiction and depression.

Recent family events also framed the way my mother read Welfare Brat for her part of this review. I wanted her voice—the mother of welfare brats—to be included here. When I asked her how she felt while reading it, she simply said, “Guilty.” Here’s what she thought after she got past the guilt:

I was drawn into Welfare Brat and related to much of what Mary Childers knew growing up in poverty. Having grown up upper-middle class, I unknowingly raised my children in true poverty. I guess I turned a blind eye to their every-day struggles until reading Welfare Brat.

Many of Mary’s struggles of blending in, wanting to be like everyone else, yet hiding the need and wants of any “normal” teen hit home.

I was surprised to find myself defending her mother and some of the choices she made (for example, to keep each one of her children—it grates on my nerves to call them unwanted pregnancies). Maybe to Sandy, having her children was the highlight of her life—she wanted that for her daughters. She didn’t know how to encourage her kids to advance up the socio-economic ladder, she hadn’t had the experience of another class so it seemed like moving up was a bad thing. She was pretty ignorant about education because she was scared it would take her daughters away. I remember you came to me in 7th grade with a math problem, it was so far beyond my education I realized that you were already moving away from me, ahead of me. I knew I wanted you to go further than I did in school, but the prospect was scary. When you left for Mt. Holyoke I knew it would change you in ways that I’d never fully understand.

This book not only opened my eyes to the plight of others in poverty but to my own children’s experiences. Thank you, Mary, for having summed up your life and put into words what not only I needed to see, but what all of America needs to see: Welfare brats are human too. They have the abilities and the rights to become caring, giving, and insightful adults, capable of anything any other socio-economic level children are able to accomplish.

My hope is that people from across the class spectrum will read this book in order to develop more complicated ideas of families living in poverty (they’re white and each child has a powerfully different personality and future ahead of them). My fear is that it will simply reinforce the bootstrap myth. My hope for reading it and writing a review with my mother was to have both of us hear each other’s perspectives. We’re both recovering from the trauma of poverty…and our wounds are still inflicted every day. Like Childers, I love my family because they made me who I am today, a “welfare brat.”

View previous Class Action Book of the Month selections...

February Book of the Month: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

January Book of the Month: Invisible Privilege: A Memoir about Race, Class, and Gender by Paula Rothenberg

View last year's Book of the Month selections...

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