By Colbert I. King
Saturday, May 12, 2007
This Mother's Day column is about a mom in the Marshall Heights section of Southeast Washington. My intent was to highlight the affordable-housing crisis in the nation's capital and to take a poke at plans in the D.C. Council to cut taxes mainly for high-income households. The housing crisis is real indeed, and the tax cuts are premature.
But the centerpiece of today's column is the mom herself. Her tale mirrors the lives of so many District women for whom tomorrow will come and go without any of the special tributes that mothers across the country will receive from grateful children.
She is identified by her initials, C.C., because of her vulnerable circumstances. (Her identity has been disclosed to The Post.) The interview also was conducted in the presence of Jamila Larson, a social worker at a Southeast elementary school.
C.C.'s wants for Mother's Day are few: just a permanent roof over the heads of her children, a yard where they can play safely and enough to eat.
Facing yards-long waiting lists for subsidized housing, C.C. might as well as seek an invitation to the next White House state dinner.
In this inn called the District of Columbia there is no room, at least not for a single mother of six whose only means of support are food stamps and a welfare check.
Which explains why C.C., Larson and I were meeting in a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a three-story building with a boarded-up, burned-out apartment on the top floor.
C.C.'s apartment is in the name of an aunt who turned the place over to her niece and the children when she found out that they had nowhere else to live. C.C. and her children have been in this dwelling for a year, but she's scared to death that the owner might discover they are occupying the apartment and kick them out.
Her other worry is how she can make it on a $744 monthly welfare payment when her rent -- which, above all else, must be paid -- is $722.
Still, C.C. said proudly that her children never leave for school without breakfast, and she has always managed to put food on the table for dinner. The school lunch program takes care of the midday meal.
C.C. frequently sells her food stamps for money to buy other household essentials. She knows that's wrong but said it's the only illegal thing she does.
She doesn't have a telephone -- can't afford one -- but a nearby elementary school will allow her to make calls when she has to. She does have a cellphone, which she uses whenever she can scrape together enough money to buy minutes.
It's the tenuous housing situation that's beating C.C. down. Rent is only part of the problem for this family of four girls, ages 16, 8, 7 and 6 months, and two boys, ages 11 and 3.
Lions at the National Zoo have more space.
Our meeting was conducted in a small living room where three well-worn sofas were arranged in a semicircle.
C.C. and the baby occupy one of the two bedrooms; the 16-year-old daughter has the other. The living room functions as a bedroom at night.
Four children sleep there: three on the sofas; the fourth child's bed consists of sofa pillows lined up on the floor.
The 7-year-old and the 8-year-old aren't doing well in school, said C.C., who dropped out of a D.C. public high school in 10th grade.
The 3-year-old, who was present during the interview, recently received a diagnosis of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). As of the time of our meeting, he had received neither behavioral therapy nor medication.
I can hear some of you readers now: "What about the father?"
Make that fathers.
The father of the 16-year-old and the 11-year-old is in jail. So is the father of the 7- and 8-year-olds. The 3-year-old's father is an illegal immigrant from Africa, and the 6-month-old's father, age 24, is out of the picture, C.C. said.
C.C. will be 38 next week.
She now proudly wears an engagement ring given to her by another 24-year-old man, "who is not the father of any of my children," she bragged. He got a job last week, and he is good to her kids, reading to them and treating them like his own, she said.
C.C. now wears a birth control patch and says she hopes to study for her GED and get a job, as soon as she finds child care. "I want to get off welfare and not look back," she declared.
Affordable housing? Tax cuts? Get real.
This is a story about the fabric of our city unraveling before our eyes.
Happy Mother's Day.
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