getting the basics: a WIC mother goes shopping
by naomi hughes

On the 28th day of every month, my WIC vouchers take effect. I borrow my mother’s car to drive to the neighborhood grocery. I leave the baby with her. Lately, I’ve developed an acute fear of being killed backing out of our driveway and so I kiss my son’s bald head a number of times and simultaneously remind my mother that I’ve stockpiled formula in a corner of the basement with the rest of my disaster-readiness gear. In the event that neither I nor my breasts return, at least he will not starve to death.

Going out without my baby, I’m overwhelmed with the sensation that I’ve forgotten something very important. We’ve become so symbiotic these past few months; it’s like leaving the house without my talisman. I feel ripe for a freak accident. And there’s only one weather forecast for the 28th day of the month, no matter the season: sleet gradually turning to snow, black ice.

I will admit, it speeds things up—no hassling with the car seat, no danger of a public howling jag. But by this point, those are things I’m accustomed to, things I can handle. I desert my son for this unpleasant errand in particular for one reason only: to avoid drawing attention to myself. At four months, he’s an incorrigible Casanova and can always be counted on to flirt strangers away from their conscientious label-reading and over to my basket in droves. This then gives them plenty of time to do a once-over of the contents and from there, well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how poor we are. Four cans tuna, one pound dry black beans, two pounds carrots, 48 ounces Juicy Juice, two gallons reduced fat milk, one pound cheese, one dozen extra large brown eggs: yep, that’s a WIC basket.

Before I had a child, I thought it was to my advantage to have a face ten years behind my age. I’ve since decided that looking sixteen when you have a baby carrier in your shopping cart and the unmistakable WIC folder in your hand (it’s a shade of orange regularly donned by deer hunters to avoid accidental shootings) is only one of many hexes that have been put upon my head in the post-collegiate years, either by a vindictive former roommate or perhaps a debt collection agency. Once, when my mother was down with a migraine, I had no choice but to bring my son along and I tried to whiz through the aisles so that we were nothing but a blur to the other shoppers. I stopped in the dairy corner to do a quick inventory, making sure I had everything listed on my voucher in the appropriate mathematical quantities, (i.e. 12 ounce box of cereal plus 24 ounce box of cereal equals 36 ounces of cereal). When I looked up, my son was reeling in a woman with a bob. She had a designer handbag slung over her shoulder and a hands-free set clipped to her lapel. Her cart was a smorgasbord of chic fare: table wafers, fresh mozzarella, paper bundles from the butcher, low-carb foccaccia. Maybe it’s just an innate flaw in my character, but I have a tendency to go on the defensive when a person with a designer handbag blunders into my dance space.

It’s a ruse, this wanton flirtation with my son. What she’s really doing is letting me know that she’s seen us, that we’re busted—the gig is up. Out of the corner of one Estee Laudered eye, she’s forming her opinion of me. Not just her, even her damn handbag seems to be looking my cheap vinyl diaper bag up and down. I’m not fooled. To her I’m just another sixteen-year-old drop-out. I probably don’t even know who the father is, she’s tsk-tsking in her mind, even as she compliments me on the blush of his baby cheeks. I find I can almost hear a snippet of the diatribe she’ll deliver later on at home to her own teenage children on the perils of premarital sex: “Why just today I saw a girl in the store, couldn’t have been any older than your sister, and you could tell by looking at her that her life was just a mess.” (Okay, granted, my hair doesn’t perform well under winter storm advisories, but—)

“She had one of those paper coupon things you get from the government. You know, that’s the problem with the world today. These young girls go out and get themselves pregnant and think, ‘No big deal, I’ll just get on welfare’. Most of them don’t even bother to finish high school…”

All the while, my son is cooing his poor little head off at this Designer Handbag and she’s ga-ga-ga right back at him and they go ahead and have a regular peek-a-boo fest right there in front of the shredded cheese.

She says, “What a charmer! And he certainly is holding his head up well!”
To my hypersensitive ears, this smacks of condescension. As though judging from the looks of the mother, one would expect nothing more than a comatose blob congealing in a onesie.

With reluctance, I agree that he’s strong.

“And I guess he should be, if he’s the one drinking all that milk!” And with a seemingly innocuous comment, she’s dealt me the death blow. I shudder. Even the diaper bag shudders. Of course he isn’t going to drink the milk—he’s barely four months old. She’s just letting me know that she’s seen and that she knows and that’s where she’s going to leave me, clinging hopelessly to my wad of vouchers as she smiles and promenades away in the direction of the section marked Spirits.

As if I didn’t have enough to look out for with botoxic women prowling the neighborhood grocery, there is always a chance that while WIC shopping I will have a brush with a beautiful girl, four, perhaps five years younger than myself. In many ways, this is infinitely worse than a run-in with a Designer Handbag. She will most likely be wearing a crocheted toboggan in pale pink or with Gap-retro stripes and if I don’t bump into her while making my mad dash through the produce, she will probably bump into me (a girl in a crocheted hat is generally too busy, beautiful, and contemplative to concern herself with the finer points of grocery store navigation). She’ll accidentally catch the fringe of her matching scarf under the wheel of my cart and in an airy voice, she’ll say:

“Um. Sorry.”

Because she never pushes a cart of her own—she doesn’t need to—she’s still ignorant of the physics of this caliber of shopping. She doesn’t yet know how a grocery cart becomes an extension of you, how as a “real” grocery shopper, with several gallons of milk to lug to your thirsty minions back at home, you require adequate spatial recompense. The handbasket dangling in the crook of her thin elbow says: “It’s my night to cook back at the dorm,” or “I met a new guy and tonight I’m going to surprise him with this recipe for Vodka Penne I found on the Internet.”

I find that there’s a particular timidity to the Crocheted Toboggan Girl, as though she’s slightly overwhelmed by the whole grocery store experience. Unlike the apprehensive new mother who can do a grocery store on autopilot, a girl in a crocheted tobo meanders, finds herself backtracking, becoming distracted by magazines.

“If I were a jar of pimentos, where would I be?” she muses. And stopping before the non-dairy creamer, she digs out her mobile phone.

“Hi, Mom. What the heck is cream of tartar?”
In the time it takes her to choose a bell pepper, I’ve checked off most everything on my list.

Perhaps in this case, it would actually be better to bring my son along to act as a crocheted toboggan repellent—the last thing she wants to think about tonight is babies. Then again, if she happened to glance into my basket, chances are she’d probably just assume I was doing a carb-free diet. She and her dorm mates may congratulate themselves on their Rosie-the-Riveter politics, but I’ll bet my food stamps she hasn’t the foggiest idea what constitutes a WIC ticket.

I’ll reach past her to retrieve my two pounds carrots and then shuffle on, thoroughly overlooked and suddenly, I’ll feel terribly fatalistic. Like one of those mommified women of an intermediary age who can’t look a girl in the eye without trying to communicate with her via telepathy. I’ll concentrate my energies and beam her this grim memo, now that I’m a member of womanhood’s middle management:

“I used to be like you.”

Once, an old woman driving a motorized shopping cart stopped me while I was piling tuna into my basket to tell me about her cat. Every time he heard the electric can opener, he came barreling into the kitchen expecting a tuna fish dinner, even if it was cream-style corn or candied yams that she was opening. That was before he died though—hit by a car—and she didn’t think she was going to get another cat because losing Sweet Pea was the saddest thing that had happened to her. Well, besides losing her husband, anyway. And besides watching her children move away one by one. I couldn’t help but wonder, as I skidded home through an unusually treacherous twilight, if between the lines of her curious double-speak, she was trying to send me a similar message.

WIC check-out is like knocking on Saint Peter’s door. If anyone in the store hasn’t yet identified me based on my purchases, they’ll find out when I head for the registers. Since I must do my shopping in the evening, there’s a disproportionate number of high-schoolers working the front of the store. If at all possible, I steer my basket clear of pubescent males. They will invariably forget to punch the WIC key on the register before beginning my transaction. It doesn’t mean a thing to a gangly teenage boy to bellow over the din of bleeps to the customer service booth:

“Hey! I need somebody to open my drawer! I forgot to ring this lady’s junk up as WIC!”
This leads to the classic visit from the Manager on Duty, who ambles over and scrawls his signature on the voided receipt. Everything must then come back out of the bags and be scanned again, just in case one person in the line didn’t see what I was buying the first time it went by on the belt.

I don’t hold it against this guy. Even if his own mother was ever a WIC recipient he probably doesn’t know it. It’s not the sort of nostalgic tidbit you imagine imparting to your boy in the midst of his teen years. Will I tell my son, I wonder?

“Well, when you were born we were so broke that Mom had to sign up for this thing where they would give you free milk and cheese and peanut butter to make sure you were getting enough vitamins and things in your diet.” Is that what I will say? Or perhaps I’ll borrow a baseball analogy from his father:

“Life’s going to throw you some unexpected curve-balls. Mom didn’t have her glove oiled as well as she should have when you came along and she got hit in the face with the ball.”

Most likely, I’ll take a pedagogical approach:

“WIC vouchers are issued in a cardboard folder in a shade of orange commonly donned by deer hunters to avoid accidental shootings. The cover reads, in bold type: Identification and Food Instruments, followed by a roll-call of the various state departments which officiate the WIC program. Recipients are generally low-income mothers (hence the acronym: Women, Infants and Children) like myself, who have established need of the dietary supplements provided by the program. We should not be ashamed. We should be thankful that valuable resources such as WIC exist for those of us who need them.”

While, in the grand scheme of things, it hardly matters if Designer Handbags think you’re a symptom of society’s ills, or if, because of one brush with you, a Crocheted Tobo Girl chooses the morning-after pill—you’ll do your damnedest to make sure your child doesn’t grow up forming a similar opinion.

I’ll admit, I scope the check-out lines and choose my cashier based upon which one looks like she could be a WIC mother herself. I’ll pick a girl with bags under her eyes, stickers on her nametag, maybe even a four or five-month bulge in her apron every time, even if she’s got the longest line. Usually, she’ll hardly bat an eye. WIC key. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Sign here. Do you want a receipt? And that’s it. I’m through, more or less painlessly. I can leave with my anonymity still intact. Make eye contact with people in the parking lot if I want to. After all, they don’t know what’s in these plastic bags and the tell-tale vouchers are stowed safely away under the cash drawer of register six.

Occasionally, however, my plan backfires. I’m never prepared for this. This is when I really kick myself for leaving my son at home. In times like this, he’s my big gun—nobody, not even the nicest check-out girl in the world wants to chat over the shrieks of a teething baby.

“So, how old is your baby?” she asks. (How does she know I have one? She deduced it when I handed her my vouchers. No way I volunteer that kind of information.)

“Is it a boy or a girl?”

“What’s his name?”

“Left him at home, huh?”

Suddenly, I’ve got the stats on her children too. Two girls. Jayden and Kaylee. Three and eighteen months. At her auntie’s house.

I also know that her vouchers include cans of Enfamil, but no carrots and no tuna fish. This puzzles her and now I must explain that I get carrots and tuna fish and I don’t get formula because I breastfeed my baby and then we have to have a conversation about breastfeeding. Her cousin breastfed, she tells me, but she heard it would make her boobs saggy so she said, “I don’t think so.”

“It’s cool if you do, though,” she adds. I’m a customer after all.

A pubescent male saunters over to bag my milk and flirts with my cashier instead. He tries to untie her apron and she says, “quit!” He tries to untie it again and she says, “I said, quit.” Giggling, she remembers that I’m still waiting to sign my voucher and hands me a pen.

“You should come work here with us,” she says. “We’re always cutting up, having a good ol time.” (Does this mean she thinks I need a job? I wonder. No, I decide. Probably it just means she thinks we are the same age.)

“I couldn’t get away from my baby long enough,” I say dumbly. “Going to get the WIC every week is like my only vacation.” I’m not sure this makes sense after I say it, but she understands. After all, we’ve made the connection. We know the names of each other’s babies. No telepathy needed here.

“Drive around the parking lot a couple of times before you go home,” she yells as I’m walking away.

I have to make two trips to get everything up the stairs. My son is glad to see my breasts alive. I’m glad to be home, because the snow is really coming down. Packing milk jugs into the fridge with one arm and balancing my baby with the other, I’m pretty well loaded down yet I feel far less weight pressing on me than I did in the store. It’s with a sign of relief that I think, I’ll have tuna fish sandwiches for lunch all week. And that’s the reality that all this anxiety boils down to. I may hear the airy voice of a girl in a crocheted toboggan whenever I put a pot of dry beans to soak. This isn’t really my life, she says. I’m not really a mother on welfare. I’m just passing through. And I may pull up to a red light and look over and see a Designer Handbag in a full-size SUV looking back at me. You know, that’s the problem with the world today, say her eyes. But neither of those women are me.

I’m in transition. Too new at this to be critical of anyone, yet well beyond playing Kitchen to snag a boyfriend. I’m not sixteen, but I’m also not ready for an orthopedic shoe. The truth is, motherhood has made me a bit unsure who I am. The road is icy. Visibility is dim. I need all the help I can get. I imagine that I stick out like a sore thumb in the grocery because surely, all of this worry, this insecurity, this fear of inadequacy, that I’m going to mess up my child, must be showing. What seems to be the collective nay-saying of everyone else, “if you can’t afford such basic things, perhaps you shouldn’t be having children…” is actually the voice of my own ego. And while he isn’t quite dead yet, he’s on the way out. He’s in the process of being replaced. In his stead I find something older, something mammalian emerging—the survival instinct, the true rhythm of maternity that assures you do what is best for your children, even if it does not seem best for yourself. You realize, albeit slowly, that you’ve embarked on a life that from here on out will be one WIC run after another after another. And you also realize that you never once ask yourself whether or not it’s worth it.

Naomi Hughes is a freelance writer from Houston, Texas. The birth of her first son, Layne, in Asheville (where she lives), has solidified the feeling that she’s truly home here at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
[ naomi.s.hughes@gmail.com ]