Getting Off Food Stamps

It looks like I'm hitting one of my long term goals quite a bit sooner than anticipated: starting November 1, I'll be getting off food stamps.  Not because I am not in poverty anymore.  Nope, my family of five consisting of me and my four kids, only have a household income level of about $1000 a month, which not only is poverty, but is considered "extreme poverty" by the U.S. government, since it is less than half the poverty level.  Nope, it is because "you or a group member failed to participate in employment and/or self-sufficiency-related activities or you quit a job, were fired, or reduced your hours of employment without good cause."  Which is odd, because I submitted a half-inch stack of paperwork to them, something that took about five hours to assemble plus about 70 hours of panic and anxiety to a level that it made it difficult or impossible to do many of the things I need to do (yay for anxiety disorders!  Not), demonstrating my self-employment status, documenting how I spend my 20-50 hours a week I work (depending largely on how much time it takes to homeschool my four kids and what Zumba stuff I have booked for a particular week), what the detailed sources of income for that self-employment are, etc.

But the Department of Human Services of the state of Michigan did what they are so famous for:  They lost it.

So I give up. 

I could try to refile or ask for a hearing to appeal this, but as mentioned above, the process before, when it was fairly straightforward assembly of papers and calculations, nearly took me two weeks of work effort.  I can't afford that again.  Nor, now that I'm a single mom (of four...all of whom I homeschool.  Did I mention that giant additional time commitment?), can I afford to have that level of anxiety render me unable to take care of my kids.

So I quit.

I can do this.  This is part of my homecanned stash two years ago.

I'll find a different way to feed my family.  I've made do with extremely small food budgets before, whether it be $20 a week or $40 a week and that was when I was married to a fairly picky eater that wouldn't touch such things as beans and rice.  I can do it again.  I can step back up on the canning efforts I've been slacking on and the indoor gardening efforts I've failed at before as we move from fall to winter. 

I just can't deal with the stress and anxiety of the food stamp process.

It is so bad, that it is actually LESS stressful to constantly have to figure out and finagle where I can come up with that week's food than it is to deal with the incompetence, rudeness, and unreachability of DHS staff.  Yes, trying to make, find, or afford food on little to nothing is a constant source of stress, yet it is a lower cumulative effect than the stress of the application, the refiling of paperwork they always seem to not received, the not knowing whether or not their going to accept the documents you submit, the computer glitches like happened in 17 states yesterday that made SNAP cards useless, or the immature posturing of supposed-adults in Congress that jeopardize the food on the table of so many hard working families that just need some help to get by until they can work their way out of their situation.

Critics of the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) seem to think these ridiculous hoops and snafus are a necessary deterrent, to keep moochers off assistance, but that isn't how it works out here in the real world.  In the real world, the supposed welfare queens and people who buy steaks and lobster with their food stamps while talking on their new iPhones before getting into their Lexus car, if they even really exist, don't care what they have to do to get that "free" money.  That's their game and they're experts at it.  It is people like me, people that could use a hand up while working their butts off to lift their families out of poverty, that are hurt by it.  People like me--that maybe left an abusive husband or have a disability and are working through it anyway in the best way they can--these are the people that are hurt by the government shenanigans. 

It isn't right, it isn't fair, but that's the real world.  And that's my life today.

So the good news for this blog is, I should be stepping up my "real" posts (as opposed to the ebook posts)--posts that share my story, recipes, money saving tips and more--just as soon as I can find a way to get a camera again.

And I'm going to focus on that positive and the positive that I'm getting off food stamps several months before I'd figured, since I figured it would be in the spring, after I'd gotten far enough in my Zumba career that I should be out of poverty.  Because sometimes you have to focus on the positive so you don't curl up in a corner and cry until you die.