Government Assistance

My husband and I are blessed to be on government assistance. It was really hard for me to accept that we were in a low enough income bracket to accept this assistance. Jon and I work very hard and stay within our means. We're in a surprisingly low amount of debt considering I have my bachelors degree and he has an associates and is working on a bachelor's degree. When I found out I was pregnant with Zoey, a friend told me to try to get on WIC because it would help us to live within our means. At first I thought I could never do that. I decided to use WIC because I knew it would help our family stay within our budget.

As I use WIC, I always try to be considerate of those around me and to buy the proper items so that there aren't any hold ups. I try to buy things on sale to "spread the benefits", as they encourage at the WIC offices.

Since we've been walking to the store to save on gas I had an extra large amount of WIC purchases I needed to get today. (If you know nothing about WIC, some coupons have more items on them and are hard to carry back from the store i.e. 2 gallons of milk). I was very efficient and got all of my things in order on the belt. It takes a lot of effort to be efficient and I had to let my baby cry for a minute while I did this. As soon as I was done putting everything on the belt, I picked her up and comforted her. As I was almost done with my order, I discovered that I got the wrong tuna. Tuna is the bane of my existence. I always seem to get it wrong and its very unclear which tuna is the proper tuna. The woman who was bagging went to get more and also could not find the proper tuna. Eventually, the woman checking me out discovered I had gotten one tuna right. The pile must have been messed up and I got the right one on top and I didn't double check all of the rest. A man behind me became very impatient (which I completely understand. This is a long, painstaking, humbling experience to be on WIC). He said "are you just going to stand there?!?" as I was moving out of the way and kept swearing at me. He left behind all of his groceries that he'd been waiting to check out. The cashier gave me her sympathy but I just couldn't help but feel awful.

I wish people would understand government assistance better. I think it would make Americans more humble. It is there to help people and today it helped someone who is very grateful and who plans to give back double what she received.