San Diego — Lillian's small house sits tucked between two dun stucco apartment rectangles in Normal Heights. Unlike most of the residences on her block, she has a front yard, and the walk leading to the tiny, ivy-covered porch is lined with flowers. Shrubs front the house, giving it a cozy cottage feel.

Lillian, a stout woman in her early 40s with thick, gray-streaked, chin-length hair and an expression that suggests thoughtfulness, is a welfare mother, but she is careful to avoid what she sees as the welfare mother stereotype. "I don't come from a long line of poor people," she explains. "I don't have a jillion kids and grandkids. I don't have a big extended family. I grew up pretty ordinary. My dad was a navy man for 20 years." When he retired, he worked as a surveyor for the county for another 10. Her mother was "a homemaker mom. We didn't get along real well, but one thing she managed to impart to me is there's nothing to be ashamed of in being a housewife."

This old-fashioned refrain has become something of a first principle for Lillian, an activist who believes "motherhood is the most honorable job anyone can do" and feels "sympathy for women who have bought into this work [career] ethic to the detriment of their own families. I think they've been conditioned against their better judgment." In the case of single mothers such as her, she thinks it "terribly wrong for our society to expect the most vulnerable and disadvantaged to work a 12-hour day and run the daycare treadmill nightmare."

Lillian has not always been a single mom. In 1976, at age 22, she got married. In 1978, she took "a job, a full-paying job with benefits" as a typist with the county. Two years later, she and her husband, who was graduating from National University with a degree in business, decided to have a baby. "I was working near home, he was going to school, perfect situation," she comments. Then, when she was about eight months pregnant, "the black day came when I was told my job was no longer going to be there for me after my maternity leave. I was ambivalent about going back to work, but I guess the decision was made for me."

The thunderbolt came when her husband picked her up from work. "We pulled away, he turns to me and says, 'Well, guess what, I got laid off too.' He was working temp jobs, mostly light industrial work, so it was iffy anyway, but that happening the same day was pretty much like somebody pulling the rug out from under your feet. I actually thought to myself, my hands resting on my stomach, 'God, can I return this baby for just a few months, then come and get him when everything's okay?' "

God didn't take the baby, and there wasn't much help from her family, either. "You hear about the oriental families, the Mexican families, they all pitch in to help somebody who's got a problem. It just didn't exist [for me]. We don't all have chicken-soup grandmas." The couple turned to welfare, and after the odd experience of getting Lillian's pregnancy verified ("I looked like a basketball! Hello!"), they got it, $450 a month.

To supplement the government aid, "I tried to work. I was a teacher's aide for a while at city schools, and [my husband] still had his little temporary jobs. We were pretty much in a holding pattern at that point; we struggled along for three or four years." But poor money management "and the lack of any money to manage" led to the loss of the house they were renting, and they faced homelessness. "I had to turn to churches. I had to say, 'Take me in, I have no place to go.' I have family that lives in this city, but they were not open nor equipped nor willing to take care of a family member who needed help." Over the next few years, they bounced from St. Vincent de Paul to the Salvation Army to other shelters, and in 1986, Lillian got pregnant again. "Pregnancy is an occupational hazard of marriage," she says.

When she found out, "I thought to myself, 'Well, there are certainly enough ways to go out and have an abortion. I certainly have good enough reason to, if I were to apply that to it. But what if I want to keep the baby? The situation I'm in right now, it's already a living death. Do I want to add another death to that? No, I don't think so.' I knew that I was probably going to be by myself, on a tougher road, but it was a blessing." Lillian was still married, but things were deteriorating, and in 1989, she and her husband divorced.

"[I did it] for me and my sanity," she explains. Before the final split, she went to therapy, did "lots of soul-searching," attended support groups and attempted a reconciliation, but "to no avail. Finances were a primary issue. The cause would probably be lack of family support and my husband's inability to get a foothold on a career."

As it turned out, "Having my daughter set the ball rolling. Nothing was working. I was like a scientist in a laboratory, trying this, trying that. Then one day, there's an accident, and 'Oh my God!' " She began looking for one of the places that was "always proselytizing that 'We'll help you have your baby, we'll take you off the street.' " She found a church in Clairemont that offered to put her and her son up, "sort of a transitional situation, until I got back on my feet." She was lucky enough to get a Section 8 house, which costs her 30 percent of her income of $690 a month from afdc. Recently, she has also landed two part-time jobs, one with a real estate service and another with a social group. One pays minimum wage, the other $8 an hour, "but only for two and a half hours a day."

While afdc allows Lillian to "surfeit my family," she says that "the welfare is sort of incidental. That check doesn't read to my children; that check doesn't drive them to school. We're talking about an inanimate object here, and we need to be talking about real live people who have situations that need to be dealt with." And while she is glad for her jobs, she feels that employment should not be required of single mothers. "It only works for me at this present time because my kids are older. I don't need to shell out bucks for daycare. And I think that, had I been forced to be out in the work force since they were small, they would have been completely different kids."

By way of explanation, she talks about other kids in the neighborhood, kids who are "always left to their own devices, from day one. They're lonely; you can see they're very clingy. They come to my house, and they want to talk to me. They exhibit behaviors that make it look to me like someone's not attending their needs, and it's very sad. I think we all should be able to have a choice, raising our children. My kids are older, 10 and 16, but they still need supervision. When I come home from my night job, I still have to catch up and see who's doing what, when, and so forth. It's my attempt at normalcy. If I can't give them material things, I can give them stability, and that's a pretty precious gift."

Lillian's first job starts at noon and runs until 3:00. Her night job starts at 6:00 and lasts until 8:30. She does housework in the morning, along with writing for Welfare Mothers Voice, a newspaper "by, for, and about mothers in poverty" out of Milwaukee, writing letters, "networking," and collecting information about welfare issues. (During the interview, she expresses dissatisfaction with the disparity between welfare and Social Security benefits to widows, the government's failure to involve welfare recipients in local public welfare meetings, and the "double standard" to which single mothers and married mothers who choose to stay at home are held.)

Come mealtime, "I like to make things from scratch. I'm pretty good at a lot of basic stuff. I always have tomato sauce at home in quantity, garlic. I'm really good at cooking rice the old-fashioned way, in a pot of water - I perfected that years ago. I use a Crock-Pot sometimes, soak beans for 24 hours."

Clothes for herself and her daughter she gets at "thrift stores, yard sales, groups where people have a clothes exchange where they'll bring in bags of stuff. Women ditch their clothes faster than men do, so you'll find more women's and girls' things to swap around with. My son tends to wear the same kinds of clothes, so he gets newer things, but less often."

On weekends, Lillian and her daughter sometimes go to Summers Past Farms in El Cajon. "It's like a little sanctuary, a little retreat. [We] walk around the plants, little babbling brook. It's a nice place to get away. I try to make room in my life for things that give me comfort, and that's important; otherwise, you would have people having homicidal tendencies, or drug usage, for that matter."

Holidays also provide comfort. "Last Easter, I was working, so I was able to get the kids baskets. And I always like to have an Easter egg hunt in the yard, because I have the space here. The little girls from the neighborhood come over, and I'm always the Kool-Aid mom, sitting on my porch with my creeping vines. I sort of think of it as my little sanctuary - my yard. The kids like to be here. You just sense it.

"Christmas, I try to scrape together whatever money I can, try to work. Some years we've had better Christmases than others. Nothing ever extravagant - I try to put more into my decorations than in going out and buying a bunch of things. I really resent the conditioning that happens every year; you have to fight back rampant consumerism. It makes me mad. I try to take the kids to little parties. I think what's more important are not so much things but experiences. If you take them somewhere that's interesting to them, or even interesting to you, and impart to them some important part of culture, some part of life, it's going to stick with them longer than some toy will."