[The author’s household includes herself, her older children’s father, and her seven children ranging from four year-olds to nineteen.]

1. HOUSEHOLD SUPPORT

Interviewer: Okay, so the first section is about household support. How do you maintain your household on a day-to-day basis? What kind of resources do you use to get food, to pay your bills, to pay your rent?

Author: We receive food stamps in the household. My benefits are for one child only and myself, so we have a minimum amount of food stamps. I have tried to use food banks in the past but I don’t get there very often because of the hours that the food banks run and the amount of time of standing in line and that doesn’t work; it doesn’t really coincide with working hours or whatever I’m doing: job hunting, school or something. It’s usually 10:00 to 4:00 is the hours, so I do, when I work at my mother’s house, I go back and forth there some weekends. My mother usually goes to food banks in Seattle and she stocks up food, so we do that. But on a day-to-day basis, I just use the food stamps until they run out and then I use my income and WIC [Women, Infants and Children]. We use WIC also for one child, so that helps some.

Interviewer: So you use your income from your job to pay for the rent and for utilities and things like that?

Author: Right. Well, right now my housing is staying with somebody. I’m allowed to stay at this place until I’ve found housing, which has been kind of difficult with my low income. Because again, I receive benefits for only one child and myself, so for me to get into housing for as many children as I have, I can’t afford it.

Interviewer: So right now you’re lucky because you get to stay with somebody?

Author: Well, it’s not a good situation, so I am looking and I’m trying to find housing, trying to work full-time so I can afford it.

Interviewer: So, how much time would you say do you have to supervise your children at home?

Author: Well, my younger ones are—my younger kids are in daycare about eight to 10 hours a day, so I really only have a few hours in the evening. I pick them up about 6:00, right before daycare closes, and there’s only a couple of hours between getting home and getting to bed, so we don’t have much time and during that time I’m cooking dinner, covering homework, laundry, preparation for the next day, getting everybody to bed. So there isn’t much time. As far as supervising my children, I have a few kids that are—that get out of school early and so that they are unsupervised which is a problem. My 11 year-old has ADHD and has always been supervised and needs to be supervised or he gets into trouble. He gets out of school at 2:00, so he’s at home unsupervised for about four hours and that’s been a problem. Sometimes he doesn’t get on the bus and I find out at 6:00 when it’s already dark and he’s been on the loose for four hours that he never came home and we live—where we’re staying is so far out of town that he can’t walk. He just walks to the children’s daycare and I’ll find him. With the ADHD that the daycare services for an 11 year-old, it’s very difficult. The only thing that I can find for him is in-home daycare and that is with children of all ages, which is—he doesn’t fit in with them. Because of the ADHD, he’s really impulsive behavior and so he is— he gets into too much trouble and it’s not good to be around, especially small children. So for me to set him up with that kind of daycare is kind of defeating. It’s really bad for his self-esteem to be in trouble all the time and to not be able to make it. To be kicked out of program after program after program so mostly he’s left unsupervised. Or, he’s at home with the little boys, which isn’t great either (laughs).

Interviewer: So are there any other resources that you’ve used in parenting and supervising your kids, any other resources you can fall on?

Author: Um, no. I’ve been through the—I had that one boy, the one I was talking about, the 11 year-old, Ben, in the ARIS [At-Risk Intervention Specialist] program.

Interviewer: What’s that?

Author: At-Risk-Intervention-Specialist.

Interviewer: Okay.

Author: Here in town. Two of my son’s were involved in that program which was good except for the counseling. They were there and seeing counselors, but the counselors that they had available were not—they just didn’t—my children didn’t do well with them. With a counselor, they just need to fit in with them or be able to relate to them so they just didn’t have a good relationship with them. They weren’t open with them. They couldn’t even tell them when they didn’t get along with them very well that they just weren’t relating to them. They offer other services, but I’ve never really gotten anywhere with it. That was here in Mt. Vernon. I have my ADHD boy set-up with them, trying to get him some counseling about his diagnosis, ADHD, so that he could understand the impulsive behavior and hopefully be able to learn to control it, to not be in trouble all the time. By speaking with someone that was knowledgeable about it so that he could—I felt that if he learned about it that he would be able to live with it and not let it get him into trouble all the time, which is where he has been going every year in school. He’s just in more and more trouble. But it hasn’t worked out. Also, I wondered about medications. It’s just been ongoing and ongoing and never getting anywhere with it. So just a few months ago, he asked me to just discontinue the counseling, that he just didn’t like the guy. So he’s back to nothing again, and I’ve gone through several mental health places around and what’s available to us with the medical coupons, there just isn’t anything for him. So he’s still unmedicated, and I don’t know, I’m not really thinking that he has to have medications, but I know that he needs something and if medication would help him to not be in trouble all the time and to be able to slow down and think about what he is doing, I’m willing to try it.

But anyway, I haven’t been able to find anything. So that was something that I did try, was the ARIS program, but I haven’t really—I’m not using it right now. Right now, I’m not using anything, other support groups. I just don’t have the time to seek more stuff. The housing thing is something that I’ve been doing constantly and I go from one thing to the next, to the next, and try everything that can I hear about, even subsidized, what is it called? Housing Authorities? Those kind of things. None of those things are available to me because Ben, Alice and Vernon, those three children were born at home, and those three births were unattended and we never filed for birth certificates for them, so I’ve been going through—for over three years now. My one son is four, so it’s probably been about four years trying to get birth certificates for them and it’s going nowhere.

Interviewer: And you need those in order to get subsidized housing?

Author: Right. And that’s what also stops me from getting the benefits—is the cash benefits, the food stamps. I do get medical for them. I’m not sure how that works, that I’m able to get medical for them but can’t get anything else. But I haven’t messed with it because I really need the medical. So, that’s probably the beginning of—. There’s all these different things in my story that have caused me so much trouble and keep me from moving forward and that is one thing, the birth certificates, I haven’t been able to get those. The process is to file for a delayed birth filing and that costs $48 a birth certificate and you have to come up with all of this documentation, but I’m not able to do that. They want school records, but my kids were home-schooled. Immunization records, and they did not have immunizations. We did not live around people so much and several of my older kids had reactions from immunizations when they were little, so I stopped giving all the kids the immunizations. One of the, the first one, the oldest one was hospitalized with convulsions and the second oldest was also sick from them and after that I thought that maybe if I waited until the children were older rather than give them immunizations at three months old that maybe they would better tolerate the poison or whatever [laughs] and not be so sick from it. So, I just stopped giving it to them. So the school records, immunizations, baptismal—they weren’t baptized. I did have prenatal care and I have some records of that but the doctor went out of state so he sent his records to a hospital. They gave me copies, but they were not on a letterhead, so I can’t prove that they are actual copies from a doctor’s records and as far as people, we really weren’t around a lot of people that can say that they knew of the births and they knew of the children and the housing and the family and all that information that I need. I need so many pieces of documentation, which I can’t come up with enough of it. So I’ve been denied the birth certificates for that reason, lack of documentation. And after so long of trying to figure out how to obtain the birth certificates, they’ve said that I need to have them court appointed and lawyers are expensive and also I’ve never heard of such a procedure and really don’t want to take it on, nor do I have the money to pay a lawyer. I’ve been quoted $900 to $1500 and I have three children to do one in Washington State and two in Oregon.

Interviewer: So do you have to the court appointed thing in Oregon for those two?

Author: In Oregon, I have to do those two and Washington is one that I’ve begun with. I’ve gone through lots of different legal places. Northwest Justice Project helped me and referred me but I’ve had the worst luck with lawyers. I’ve had them string me along for eight months, nine months at a time, always saying just the right things to me to make me believe that they were working on my case but never—finding out later on that they really did nothing and all this. Not having the birth certificates has kept us way below poverty and made it impossible for me to obtain housing not to mention the struggle with food, and for a long time, I had no medical benefits, even for the children. So I’ve been on the welfare for about, I don’t know, probably four years or so. We’ve struggled for all that time. Sometimes I’ve lived in a motor home in a RV park, which is expensive also. I’ve put it on—taken care-taking positions and put it on people’s properties. I’ve lived in the woods with it just to try to keep them, because at times, when I was first on the welfare I was pregnant and I had nine children. I raised my daughter’s two children until they were older and my four younger ones, their father went to prison and kind of left us homeless and I was pregnant. That’s when I first got on the welfare program and we just had to kind of struggle along. Again the medical benefits made everything very limited as far as counseling. The kid’s father went to prison for child rape. He had molested a lot of the children in my home and I needed to find counseling for them and the counseling services were ridiculous. They wanted to put all of the children in group counseling which doesn’t make sense when I have a range of age like that and some of the children were the victims of his and some of the children were his children that couldn’t understand him being gone and what happened and I wasn’t comfortable with—. I felt that it was just because we were low income that they wanted to put—that it was a cheaper way to do counseling. I think it was for five kids. Instead of doing individual counseling, they were just going to put them all together in one room, which was—it didn’t make any sense to me. Anyway, I feel like I’m jumping all around in different ways here.

Interviewer: I’ll touch back on the last part of this. You mentioned that some of your younger kids are in daycare right now. Do you receive any subsidy or any help from friends?

Author: They’re on Working Connections Childcare so it’s a DSHS [Department of Social and Health Services] provided childcare plan for them.

Interviewer: So those two kids?

Author: Right. They are on that. And it’s available to the older kids, my nine year-old and my eleven year-old and I probably will use it. Right now, I’ve got my nine year-old going to Boys and Girls Club after school and she does that sometimes, but not all the time. But I feel that it’s better than being at home, unsupervised. So I do use that also.

Interviewer: I just wanted to—I was afraid that the microphone shut off. Okay, so just the last part of this section. Compared to two years ago, how would you say supporting your household is, which one of these would you say?

Author: Two years ago, well, I have gone to school and I’m working now, so I must say that it’s a little bit easier than it was. And over time, considering all the problems that I’ve been through, I’m better. But it’s still, we’re still not able to afford housing and we’re still not making it. Everything is still really a big struggle and so I would say it’s somewhere between unchanged and easier.

Interviewer: Okay.

Author: Because it is—going over a long period of time, of time of struggle and difficulty, now I’m having problems with anxiety and now on medication and that kind of thing which I’ve never had trouble with. I’ve always been able to deal with everything, you know, no matter how hard, I’ve always been prettys strong. But somehow, over a long period of time of just constant, just one thing after the next, it’s just kind of broken me down a little bit. So, I don’t know, I’d have to say somewhere between—it’s changed, but it’s still, I don’t know that it’s easier or better.

Interviewer: Okay. You can write a place in-between there.

Author: Okay.

Interviewer: That would be great.

Author. Somewhere in there. Definitely in two years things have changed.

Interviewer: So now we’ll move onto the next section.

Compared to two years ago, how would you say supporting your household is somewhere between unchanged and easier.

Interviewer: And all these sections are kind of overlapping so we might be going over some stuff we already talked about again.

Author: That’s okay.

Interviewer: Just in case there’s anything else you’d like to add, this section is Child Well-Being. So how would you say your children are doing in terms of their physical health?

Author: Their physical health, probably pertaining to medical care and what’s available to us, right?

Interviewer: Yes, just how they are doing overall, physically.

Author: Um—well, we’ve had our medical things going on but they’re not, they’ve been able to get medical help. I think a lot of it has to do with—we’ve had a lot of medical help all winter but I think it has to do with the viruses and things that are going along. All in all, their physical health is pretty good. It is pretty good.

Interviewer: How about their safety?

Author: Their safety. I’d have to say their safety—I’d wouldn’t say is very good because they are unsupervised and I don’t really see much that I can do about that. The younger ones, they are in daycare and I feel pretty confident about how they’re doing. But the older ones, there’s nobody there for them, you know, and I have to work and I don’t know. My one son has a lot of anxiety about his safety—the one with ADHD, the eleven year-old. He goes through a lot of—he worries a lot if he’s okay because nobody’s at home and he has trouble at night-time, too, you know.

Interviewer: Sleeping and—?

Author: Uh huh. Because he thinks that he’s not okay. He thinks that he’s not safe; he’s worried about how he’s doing. But [when] nobody’s at home is when it’s worse for him. And my daughter too, I go to work and she’s still at home. She takes the bus last, so she worries about being at home by herself too. So their safety, I don’t know. Nobody’s been hurt or anything like that, but it is a concern to all of us—to me, to them—their safety is. Their father that went to prison is out of prison and that’s another thing that they worry about. They don’t know, nobody knows, because we don’t have contact with him, what to expect from him. Or if he would come around or what would you do if he was around. So, safety is kind of an issue.

Interviewer: So, how about their performance or their well-being at school?

Author: Well, once again, because I have so many of them, I have all these different things. Paul, whose seventeen, quit the high school this year and he is going to an alternative school. And I don’t know exactly what that was about, but he’s wasn’t comfortable in the high school. He has never been through public school like that. He was home-schooled most of his life and then he went to a private school for several years and we couldn’t afford that and we still owe a lot of money to that school, so he went to the public school this year and he worked hard at it and was getting good grades but he wasn’t—something was there and he wasn’t able to talk to me about it, so I don’t really know. I don’t really know what happened, but he wasn’t able to continue anyway, so he kind of found out about this other school and did some research on it so he’s on a contract program where he goes to meet with his teacher once a week and does his school work at home. He’s doing better with that; he’s doing fine. He’s looking to start the Running-Start program at Skagit Valley Community College, so hopefully it’s going to be something better for him. He feels better about it. So, academically, he’s okay. Everything looks okay right now, but there is that potential that he will fall through the cracks if things don’t work out for him to get to the college. And, also he has the transportation thing going to the college. He needs to do driver’s-ed or something like that and get himself transportation to get there, because if I’m working full-time, he can’t count on me taking him to school. So, that’s kind of a little bit shakey right now, but right now, looking at him, he’s doing okay. I’m just worried about the next couple of months, about whether he’s going to make it or not. The next son is Eric, and he’s just turned fifteen and he’s had some mental health problems and he’s been out of school because of the mental health problems. He’s supposed to be starting back up this past week. I signed papers at the middle-school to get him set-up with a bring home work, but then he had this appendicitus and emergency surgery, so he’s going to begin, hopefully this week, maybe tomorrow or Friday he’ll meet with his teacher and start bringing work home, so he’s not doing well and he’s been in a special education class so it’s not doing well for him. He needs a lot of special care in school to keep him going. And what the special education needs—he needs home-school is what he needs and I’m not able to do it for him or with him and I’ve gone through the school district, many meetings with them trying to find what’s available to him and there just isn’t anything available. All the programs that they have are for kids that are much worse than him and putting him in a program with kids that are real trouble-makers or have real severe mental disorders will just make him feel worse about himself. I mean they’re just not ideal for him with his specific mental health issues. I’m not able to be at home with him to do his school work. I don’t think that he is able to take initiative to do it himself. He’s not disciplined enough, you know he’ll probably sleep all day, you know what I mean, he’ll just fall again if I was to set it up for him by himself. He needs some kind of a special program and I’m not sure what to do about that. He has mental health issues, that he needs for us to move because the household that we’re living in is his father’s house and his father, he treats him really bad and he’s not able to get help from his counselor or move forward in order to go beyond his—. The mental health problems that he’s having right now are worsening because of the living situation. So, anyway, academically he’s not doing well and I really don’t know which way to go in order to help him. The next child down is Ben and he’s the eleven year-old with ADHD. He’s doing a lot better in school this year. He’s changed from one school to the next and his teachers are working with him and he has a much better teacher this year. He hasn’t been in as much trouble as he was in last year. He’s doing better academically, but the behavior—the ADHD behavior—is worse and so that’s another medical thing, I think. I think the medication may be what he needs to help him just to calm down a little bit. I’m not sure, but I think that goes back to the medical. But academically, he’s doing super. He’s been special ed for many years. He has some learning disabilities, but he’s gotten out of the special education reading. He’s still in for written expression, things like that. He’s learning disabilities are hand-to-eye…[unintelligble] writing, things like that are a lot of his troubles, so they’ve reduced his school work to 50% of what the rest of the class does so that he can feel that he’s accomplishing something and then we’re going to it build it back up to 100% of the school work, but for him to keep up is really hard because he has to write and writing is a real strain to him and frustrating and we tried the computer but that something he can’t—he just can’t seem to attain. With the ADHD, I guess that’s the reason why he went through a year of keyboarding and at the end of the year was able to type one word a minute. So that wasn’t working [laughter], but it was a hope anyway because writing—he presses really hards and he prints everything backwards, from the bottom up, so if you look in the mirror and it comes out okay, it looks right. He’s real smart and he’s able to figure out how to make everything come out. But he does things the long, hard way and it’s really difficult for him. So anyway, academically for him, he’s doing better. This other school that’s he’s going to has helped him and he’s getting all the services that he needs and behavior in school is a little better for him. And the next child down is Erin, and she does really well with all of her school. She has no trouble with school at all. The other ones, the youngest one is in kindergarten and he has—he’s doing well in school but a lot of anxiety kind of things he has trouble with. He worries about everything all the time, and he’s the one that kind of went through all the transitions in our life where dad left and the older girls moved and so he has a lot of worry about stability in the home—if he’s okay, that kind of thing, just because he was at that age where he kind of saw all that and he feels that people kind of come and go in your life, so he’s a worrier. But the youngest one, he’s not in school, he’s in daycare. But he does well. He’s part of a Head-Start program and so his development is monitored. He may be ADHD as well. He had some behavior issues but he’s doing okay. Takes forever to go through all the kids, huh? [Laughter] The oldest one, I didn’t talk about her. She’s been going to college and she’s taking a couple of quarters off and hopefully she’ll start up again. She’s—I’m going to meet her this afternoon and we’re working on getting her a job and writing up a resume at the college this afternoon.

Interviewer: This college?

Author: Uh huh. Well I don’t think, she’s been going through Northwest Indian College. But I know some people up here without driving all the way to there, it’s kind of hard to get everything done there so we kind of use both of them. So she’s doing OK.

Interviewer: You’ve been a busy woman.

Author: What a bunch of kids, huh?

Interviewer: So, at the end of this section, I ask, compared to two years ago, the general well-being of your children is—how would you complete that?

Author: The general well-being—I don’t know if it’s changed, really. Umm, it’s kind of hard to say. There’s definitely been changes, but I don’t know, I’m not sure that things are better. I don’t know. Right now, it’s kind of hard to say. I’m hoping that everybody’s going to do well. But we’re kind of at a point where it could go either way. So maybe I will say, maybe I’ll make a line here between "unchanged" and "better" again because I’ll think positive and think that things are going to get better even though they could go either way. But things have changed. We’ll just look at the potentials that there are, because there are some—Ben has done better and the other ones not being in a full-time school program—it’s a little bit worrisome. But I think that a lot of that has to do with mental health kind of things, you know, that the stress and stuff at home is affecting their academically—their life academically. So I’ll have to say, well—just because we can see what’s going on with them, maybe we can steer them in the right direction and keep them going—so I’ll say they’re a little bit better. [Laughter]

Interviewer: Good. I’d rather it be as accurate as possible. We’ll move onto the next section which is basic needs.

Compared to two years ago, the general well-being of my children is better.

Interviewer: So how well is your family meeting its basic needs? Kind of things like we’ve talked about before, like food, clothing, housing?

Author: Well, how well are we meeting our basic needs. The only reason we’ve been doing okay is that I don’t have any expenses, you know, because I’ve had to buy beds for the kids and I’ve had to use my income to pay for everything rather than being able to save it or better my income in order to get housing or something. We’re just making it, really. All the clothing needs for the family has been pretty difficult. And all the school stuff that they have to have, it just eats up the money is what it is, so are we meeting our needs? We’re just making it and that’s because I don’t have to pay rent or anything, [like] utilities, like I would, to heat the house. He pays for his house payment and the utilities and I pay for everything else—all the food and all the non-food items, plus the car. We have a car that we have to have to get around. And the clothes for everybody. How well is the household meeting its basic needs? I mean, we’re making it, we’re skimming by. I spent many years living on a very small amount of money, so I can really take money and go a long way with it. So people that know us can’t believe that we manage, really, because I can feed everybody on a little bit of money and stretch food a long ways, especially having nine kids. And we always lived on low income before because the kids were home-schooled and we did things with the kids every day. The kids’ dad, when he was still with us, he worked five hours a day by choice, and we spent the rest of the time doing stuff with the kids, you know, out in the woods. Besides we had to pack wood and haul water and stuff like that, so I’m able to manage on a little bit of money or make it stretch. But now that we’re not in the woods and in the city and the kids go to public school and there’s a lot of things that they have to measure up with the other kids, they have to clothes. They don’t have a lot of clothes. We pretty much wash the night before what they have to wear the next day. They have a change of clothes so that they don’t wear the same thing every day, but they get hassled a lot because they don’t have all the expensive stuff that the other kids do. That might have had a lot to do with my one son quitting school because it was too much, you know, and it is a big thing for them and I can’t just go out and buy them something. If I bring home something that looks real good to me they go, ‘Oh my gosh—I could never wear that to school, do you know what they’ll do to me?’ They tease them really bad and they pick on them, you know, they do, so it’s really hard to come up with the clothing and the shoes. My one son always tells me about—they have a big thing anymore in his school about the shoes and the ones the kids can wear are really expensive. I could never afford to pay for them, there’s just no way. I can’t even see it anyways because my kids are really tough on—because we’ve always been around the woods and they climb trees and chains and you know—they’re really tough on clothes and the yard’s really muddy and shoes don’t last long so there’s no way that I could ever—. But I try to buy cheap things that look like the expensive ones so that they kind of make it, so I don’t know. We manage right now, but because I don’t have all the living expenses, that’s how I manage.

Interviewer: How about—? We talked a little bit before about things that interfere with your—I think you mentioned not having all this documentation, that it’s been hard for you. Are there any other things that have made it hard?

Author: Because I—without the birth certificates— it’s all pretty much—the birth certificates you have to have to get the social security numbers. So, umm, it does go back to that because all these things are federal programs. The food stamps and all that, you have to have a social security number. What else makes everything difficult, that’s what you were saying?

Interviewer: What makes it hard to make ends meet?

Author: I don’t know. I got kind of—the birth certificates make it hard for me to—. They’ve made it hard for me to—it’s like from where I was coming from I was left with a bunch of young kids with problems, you know, and then we we’re homeless and I was pregnant so I needed help to get on my feet. I needed to be able to get into housing so we would have a place to stay. I couldn’t fall back on my family. My mother was horrified at the though of me having all those children in her house with the water Eric and the heating and the food and all that stuff. My family pretty much did that going well like, ‘You can’t stay here because we can’t afford it.’ I wasn’t able to work and my children needed me to be there for them. So what I was saying was without the birth certificates, I was not able to get help from the state in order to obtain housing or medical to help my kids or the food, so instead of me being able to go the stepping stones to being okay, we’ve had to do everything—. It’s taken me so much longer to get there because I had to take care of this and this and this and even when my son was born, he was born with some medical problem so he was sick all the time. And then I went through, I don’t know how long—six months, eight months of sanctioning because of the WorkFirst program. I was not able to just go and put him in daycare and go to work or go to school. Once he was bigger and I was able to set the kids up in situations so that I could go to school, then I tried to get—. I went through the GED and worked my way through but in order to try to get that education—especially in my situation, I had a lot of children, I had a lot of small kids that needed to be in daycare—. The amount of money that I was going to need to make in order to support my family, I needed to get education which was not offered to me at all. They kind of rushed me through everything and wanted me to go to work rather than a little bit more schooling that’s going to get me that job that I have to have in order to make it. I can’t just do some little job that doesn’t pay enough. I will always be struggling and my kids will always be unsupervised and, you know, so it’s kind of—. I don’t know, it’s like I felt I need to do all these steps and one of them is the birth certificates. So I’ve been working at it for so long and, it’s just, I don’t know, the way I look at it, I just had to—.

[tape ends and is flipped over]

Author: And the housing, if I don’t have housing for them, I just can’t go onto the next step if my kids don’t have a safe place to be and adequate housing. Or I felt that we were living in the motor home, that we were always at-risk of maybe having the children taken from me because there’s not enough space or inadequate living conditions. People were always complaining that I had a whole bunch of kids living in RV parks, so we had to move from place to place and staying one step ahead of trouble. Because I did the best that I could to supply housing for the kids and give them everything they needed. It was not an abusive home or anything, it was just the best that I could do. So I don’t know. I’m back at the same question trying to answer how well, huh?

Interviewer: Yeah, we’re back at compared to two years ago, your family’s ability to meet its basic needs? How would you categorize that?

Author: I’ll say just a little bit better than unchanged. Again, I guess because I’m still there struggling, trying to—. I am able to work though—. And I do have daycare for everybody. For the younger kids. That’s the most important thing. I’m just trying to teach the older ones to be more independent and responsible, [to do] what they’re able to do. I feel like things are going to be okay. It’s just time—I can almost see where we’re going to be okay, but we’re not really there yet, you know, and I just have to get down the way and around the corner or something. So I’ll say that things are a little bit better than they were two years ago because I’m able to work and make a wage and afford housing and that’s what I’m working on right now. I’m not positive I can do that but that’s what I’m trying to do.

Interviewer: So things are a little bit better than "unchanged" but not quite?

Author: "Better." Right. I’ll say that. I’ve been trying to figure out my income and living expenses and I’m not quite sure, especially with renting. For me to rent a three- or four-bedroom house it’s going to be $900 to $1,000 a month. I can’t get into a place and say that I’ve got—say, six kids because my seventh one is over eighteen. If I move into a rental with six children, most people that own the property will hesitate to rent me a place with minimum space because, you know, most people don’t want—hey’re going to be afraid to rent a place with that many kids anyway. ‘Oh no, this isn’t what you need.’ [Laughter] They’re going to be afraid we’re going to destroy it or something. So, anyway, my monthly expenses are going to be kind of expensive. I don’t know, with the utilities and everything, I really don’t know that I’ll be able to afford it. But I’m trying to figure it out anyway. I keep calling it the gamble. I’m going to just have to get this place and see what I can do and no matter what, I have to be able to—I have to move from where I am. I just have to move, so no matter what I have to do in order to do it, I have to do it. So that’s kind of where I am.

Interviewer: What we’re just talking about now leads to the next section: housing

Compared to two years ago, your family’s ability to meet its basic needs is better.

Author: Housing! How well is your housing meeting your family’s needs? No, my housing is not, actually. Well we’re staying at somebody’s house who is, umm, he’s actually my older kid’s dad. So considering relationships, our youngest son is fifteen. If we split up fifteen years ago, I don’t think we should be living in the same house together. It’s probably not an ideal situation and most people couldn’t do it. But somehow we manage and try to keep peace in the home, but space is not good but I’ve been lucky to have the place to stay. I am thankful for that.

Interviewer: How about the physical condition?

Author: Meaning what?

Interviewer: Meaning, are the structures sound, are things falling apart?

Author: It’s had a lot of plumbing problems, the toilet breaks down a lot, and I have the motor home on the property and so that’s what we do when the toilet breaks or something. Because I’ve lived in the woods a lot, I can manage. I mean if the bathtub—we have one bathroom and seven kids. He’s in and out. He works out of town a lot, like he’s in Seattle on a five-week run right now. So, he’s not there all the time but when plumbing breaks down, the toilet and the shower, everything, stops. So I manage by—. I heat water and put buckets of water in the shower and then we scoop it out again. I mean, we just manage so it’s okay, and then I have the motor home so people go out there and use the bathroom so it’s okay. So, we manage but the house, as far as conditions—. He just put a roof on it but we went through most of the winter with it leaking in all the bedrooms, and I just kept moving the furniture around to keep the water off the beds and one other room has a lot of mold on the ceiling and the walls. Another room has some mold, but it’s not really bad but it started to leak in there but it didn’t leak as bad as the one bedroom. The bedroom that four kids—the four younger ones and I sleep in one bedroom, and we kind of have—. I bought the bunkbeds to try to separate everybody because we had mattresses going across the room and it’s not ideal for us to sleep that way, but it’s also kind of humiliating to the older—one is eleven and one is nine—for them to sleep elbow-to-elbow with mom and siblings, that’s kind of—. I didn’t feel that was okay for them, for their friends to know—kind of humiliating for them to say to anybody. So I watched the papers and picked up bunkbeds when I found them for inexpensive and then I had to do mattresses and all that stuff too, but so I put bunkbeds in there, but we still have them, all the beds. And because the room is small and we still have the beds so that they are all touching, and the younger [children] pretty much sleep with me because one of the windows is broken in the room, and you know, the bunkbed is next to it, the top bunk. So it’s not great And the rug in the room is musty and smells bad and makes me feel like the air quality is pretty bad in there. I try to vacuum it and move the furniture around to try to keep it drying or circulating or something but it’s, physical condition of the house is not really great. All in all—. We have a wood stove to warm it. As long as I am there to keep the fire going, it’s warm but other than that, the front door is broken. It doesn’t latch unless you lock it, so if somebody goes out and they need to come back in, it stays open. So there’s, you know—. And it never closes all the way. The wind blows it, blows into the house with the door closed even. There’s a big space under the front door where mice come running through and they’re little teeny shrews. I can’t get them to eat the poison. So they drive everybody bananas, but it’s recreation. The kids like to try to hit them with a shoe or something. [Laughter] They haven’t always been a problem, but I think it’s just the cold, with everything freezing, they keep running in and out and I’m afraid to put mousetraps out because I’m afraid the children will get hurt on them so I put poison where the children won’t get to but do they eat it? No.

Interviewer: How about the safety of the neighborhood?

Author: Safety of the neighborhood? Well it’s on a corner with—the house is on a corner with a lot of traffic, so the kids—the people—the adults stop at the stop sign. At night they turn their lights off; they turn the lights off to see if oncoming traffic is coming and if they don’t see any other headlights at the four-way they just keep going. So it’s a lot of high speed and that’s a concern with safety. My kids recently had a problem with a neighbor where a man grabbed one of the teeenage kids and pulled him up in the air, just being irrational. There is a guy that’s living down the street that has some mental problems, that really bothers me, and I don’t feel very safe around him. I don’t feel that my children are safe around him. We don’t have a fenced yard or anything like that. So the safety of the neighborhood, I’m not sure about. I’ve had lots of trouble with the dogs in the neighborhood and because we’re not in city limits, nobody can do anything about it. I’ve had my kids chased down by dogs and across the street there’s a guy [who] owns a dog that has bit my kids before and the dog’s now in a dog run because he’s on a list of dangerous animals or something—he’s not allowed to be out. But the guy takes the guy out and lets him go to the bathroom across the road which is part of this property that we live on. He does that regularly, and so I don’t know, it’s not really great for safety, no. It’s not. The kids have a boundary, but it’s a five acre piece of property. The neighbor dogs, they come over, they’ve killed all the kids’ animals—their rabbits, the chickens, the animals that we’ve had around have been attacked by the neighbor’s dogs, and we can’t get the neighbors to be responsible for them, so I just quit having animals. But all-around safety of the neighborhood is not great, but I keep the kids close to home and I have a boundary that they’re allowed to be in, which is in my sight even thought the property is five acres. They’re not allowed to just run around on the property because it’s wooded and I worry about the neighbors.

Interviewer: How about in terms of the location, is it convenient for the kids to go to school or for you to find work close to home?

Author: No, we’re not in town. The school bus picks the kids up right there and drops them off right there at the house, so that’s good. There’s no transit buses for the older kids to find work so they have to have a ride. Even to ride a bike or something to the bus line is—it’s too far. It’s more than a mile. It’s probably two miles or so from the bus line, and then it would be uphill a long ways on the way home. And there’s no sidewalks or anything, it’s all—Highway 9 in Sedro Wooley, so there’s 50 mile an hour speed limit and big ditches on the side. So as far as for the older children to work or [to] take transit to the college or anything like that, it’s really hard. And for me to work now—I’ve been working in Mt. Vernon.

Interviewer: How long does it take you?

Author: It takes me about a half an hour.

Interviewer: So again—

Author: So that adds to daycare, travel time back and forth, besides the concern for car breaking down, something like that, you know?

Interviewer: So compared to two years ago, housing is—?

Author: My housing is better, but it’s still inadequate. I’m not in the motor home anymore, so it’s better, but it’s still inadequate.

Interviewer: So again, it’s somewhere between "unchanged" and "better"?

Author: That’s right.

Compared to two years ago, my housing situation is between unchanged and better.

Interviewer: So the next section is emotional well-being. So, what kinds of feelings have you been feeling most lately? What kind of emotions have you been experiencing?

Author: A lot of stress because I’ve been looking for the housing, trying to get housing. And now, my job ended March 1^st so I’m doing [a] job search again. I’m worrying about the kids and where I’m going to move to—. I have to find something on the bus line or move the kids from one school to another, so there’s a lot of concerns in that. I’ve been really, really stressed lately. Like I said before, I’ve been taking medications for anxiety now which I’ve never had to do before, so I’m going through the medication thing where I’m not sure about taking medication and side effects and all this stuff.

Interviewer: How has the stress and all the anxiety—how has that affected your parenting? How have you seen it affect your parenting?

Author: Umm, stress makes me more irritable and impatient. It does. It’s been terrible the last couple of weeks. I’ve just had a real hard time with it all and I have some pretty trying children. I do. I have some that really are pretty demanding and take a lot of patience, especially my ADHD kid because with ADHD he tries to stir up people because somehow it’s a chemical that makes him feel better when he is around turmoil. So it’s kind of—a lot of people don’t know that about ADHD, but that is what they do and prisons are full of people with ADHD and they just go out and it’s some kind of a stimuli that they crave. And so, he just does things. It’s kind of like being around a practical joker all the time—somebody that’s always looking for this reaction out of you. So, it takes a lot of patience to deal with him because if I react all the time to everything he does, then he does it more, so no matter what he does he pulls these things all the time. He’s always saying things to try to stir me up and if I react then he’ll keep going, it kind of fulfills that—. But if I don’t—if I just stay calm no matter what he says to me, that’s what I need to do to be a good parent to him. That’s what I need to do is to stay calm and to talk to him about what he’s doing and to have him look at what he’s saying and what it means and what the end result is and blah, blah, blah, and you know, so, stress and impatience doesn’t work well. It causes a chain reaction in the household.

Interviewer: So with your stress and your anxiety, you mentioned you just recently started taking medication. Have you sought any help, like aside from that?

Author: I started seeing a counselor also when I started—when I had the anxiety problems. It was probably in December, so it’s been several months now. Or November, it might have been. So, I did start seeing a counselor but I’ve been working full-time. When I’m in between jobs, doing the job search, that’s when I have time. I can spare an hour here, an hour there, and I felt that it was important because I—. First of all, [I] had never had any trouble with anxiety or panic attacks, [which] is what—. I was having panic attacks all the time and through the night I kept waking up and jumping up out of bed and my heart would be racing and I’d be on my feet and running out the door and I don’t even know why. Just terrible. And then you know, you go through your—. Besides the feeling at the time and the rest that you need in order to make it through the next day—[you] have to have so many hours of this stage three sleep or something and all this, so it just causes all these health problems anyway. I feel I’m still having trouble with sleeping. The medication has diminished those panic attacks where I don’t jump up like that all the time, but I do wake up in the night where I can’t go back to sleep. It’s kind of like when you first have a newborn baby and they wake you up all the time and you never get that sleep and you walk around kind of fuzzy headed and you feel kind of sick and tired all the time. It’s kind of like that. Concentration and patience, all that kind of stuff is really hard. So, that’s what I’m going through for a while. But, it’s better, I am better than I was. Medications are working and I’m going to start taking sleeping pills. I have a new prescription for them so I’m going to start doing that for a while and try to get with medication [to] get the rest that I need in order to get better and all that stuff, but—. I forgot what the last question was.

Interviewer: Well, the last question that we’re at—you answered the last question I had asked. But we’re back to, ‘Compared to two years ago, how is your emotional well-being?’

Author: I don’t know. It seems like I went from one problem to the next. Two years ago, I don’t know, after going through the break-up of the family and all of the molestation of the kids and all that, it took me a long time to really be okay. So, I slowly got better and better but I think what I’m going through now is a whole different thing. So it’s hard to say, ‘cause again I’m changed, but I don’t know if I’m better. So, I’ll probably have to make my line in the same place again, huh! I’m pretty consistent, aren’t I? [Laughter] I’ve changed though, so that’s better anyway. I’m having more of my own health problems now, but it’s not like I’m really horribly sick or anything. But my emotional well-being is—. I’ve been worried about staying stable in order to carry my family because that’s what I have to do and if I fall apart emotionally, I can’t go on. I just won’t be able to keep up with what I’m doing and there’s nobody else to do that. So, I don’t think that I’m better.

Compared to two years ago, my emotional well-being is [unclear from author’s response].

Interviewer: So this is the last question and it’s about employment. So, tell me about your last job.

Author: Well, I did a pre-employment training program through the college and that was—that was a—what I was doing there was brushing up on skills to be more employable. And at the end of that, we had all kinds of contracted employers that were guaranteeing us interviews which none of them came through. So we ended that and received a certificate for it in November or December, something like that. It was right before Christmas, a short time before Christmas. And after September 11^th—, and the jobs are real hard, plus that time of year—it was pretty hard to find something. But I was able to get a temporary job with an income tax place as a receptionist and so I took that job and it was until March 1^st, unless things were busy and then maybe until April. But as it turned out, the place was a new location and the job really died out. So then, one week, I didn’t even work the last two weeks, I worked about 11 hours because my little kids had the flu and I didn’t have any childcare for them when they’re sick. That’s a really tough thing for me because I need to be dependable for work and trying to find childcare for sick kids—. And they had a terrible flu, it wasn’t a 24-hour thing, it was terrible. I went to work twice. [I was] giving them Tylenol and then about four hours after the Tylenol wears off the fever goes up and they get a cold. So one week, I did that and the next week, my son had the appendicitis and went to emergency surgery clear in Seattle. He had to be taken by ambulance there, so I wasn’t even able to work the last two weeks and my job ends and now I’m looking for work again. So—.

Interviewer: How much were your wages?

Author: $7.50.

Interviewer: An hour? And because it was a temporary job, did they offer any benefits or anything like that?

Author: Mm-mm [indicated negative response]. No.

Interviewer: So, compared to two years ago, the wages and benefits of the last job you had, how would you categorize them?

Author: My wages were better, but I guess my last job before that was at a childcare place and I didn’t have any benefits there, either. So I guess I should say it is better, because my wages went up, whatever, $.40 an hour or something—$.38 an hour. [Laughter] So I’ll say better.

Interviewer: So that’s the end.

Compared to two years ago, the wages and benefits of the job I have now are [author’s response unclear].

Your community or neighborhood of residence: Sedro Woolley

Gender: Female

Last year of school completed: College

GED: Yes

Race:

Ethnicity: Native American

Does your partner, spouse or co-parent live in the household? No

Do you currently receive any cash public assistance (TANF)? No

Manner in which story was originally given: Tape recorded