Being on welfare is not always something to be ashamed of only if you don't try to get off of it and improve your life. Welfare is like a cycle you get caught up in and have to work very hard to get off of. I was never proud of being on welfare because people talk bad about you and think of you has a low life person when in fact your only trying to take care of your children. Having small children makes it very difficult to go to work and afford a babysitter. You need lots of support and help and motivation to turn your life around. Most of the time you have been in a bad relationship and you are hurt and angry and your mentality is very messed up and you don't know who to trust or which way to turn. You are about as low as you can get in life and you feel lonely and sad and worth nothing. I want to share my experiences with other women who maybe going through the same things that I have been through to let them know there is hope and they can turn their life around if they want to. Women have so much responsibility and so many people depend on them and that makes it very difficult for women to be allowed to make mistakes. I think that women are expected to be perfect and make no mistakes when in fact no one is perfect. By helping others it helps me heal and be able to move forward. I felt so good about myself when I finally got off of welfare and started taking care of my children of course I had someone special willing to help me. A man who ended up becoming my husband and soulmate. A man willing to help raise 4 children who were not his and that takes a very special person to do that. I believe that I was on welfare for so long because I was so rapped up in feeling sorry for myself for being left alone and cheated on and nothing else mattered to me at that time. I was not focusing on the important things in my life like my children. I look back and realize now that I was such a fool and did not have my priorities straight at that time in my life. I still can't explain why I did a lot of the things that I did at that time in my life but I know that I am not proud of the bad things that I did. I also realize that there are other women out there who have had it a lot worse than me. I am very thankful that my life was not worse than it was. Welfare can cause you to have very low self esteem about yourself and you begin to think that your at the end of your rope. Not to say it is not enough money to live on to start with and therefore you are not able to give your children what you would like to. This can have you feeling like your not being the parent you should. But you never stop loving your children or wanting to provide the best for them that you can. I remember being ashamed of spending food stamps to buy groceries to feed my family. People look at you like you are dirt and trash because you are on public assistance they look at you like something is wrong with you. They don't realize how bad you feel already about being on the assistance to start with. They judge you before they even know anything about you as a person and that can hurt really bad. It just adds to the hurt you are already experiencing in your life. Being on welfare drains you especially spending the whole day downtown at the welfare office and coming home tired and the children are tired and hungry and you just wish you could sit down and take a long rest. But of course you have to keep going until they are in bed for the night. By then you are so tired you go to bed yourself and get up the next day and do it again all over.