Who’s in charge
Marilyn Ray Smith, Paul Cronin,
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DAY 1
$10 does what state couldn't do in 5 years Mary Quinn had a 5-month-old daughter and another child on the way when her husband took off 13 years ago. Without warning, Quinn became a single parent, the only one there to handle middle-of-the night feedings, endless diaper changes and all-night rocking when a child was sick. She was even less prepared for the financial strain. Without child support to help pay for the babies’ food, clothing and the child care that allowed her to work, Quinn lost her two-bedroom Braintree apartment and ended up homeless before her second child was born. After her husband left, “I cried for a good month,” Quinn said. “I tried to figure out how I was going to do everything.” She felt overwhelmed at the thought of raising two children alone and bewildered at the prospect of handling the family’s finances. There are close to 180,000 single mothers with children younger than 18 living in Massachusetts. Thirty-seven percent of them are living below the poverty level and 45,453 parents end up on welfare. That is what happened to Quinn.
When her husband left, he cleared out their bank accounts, used joint credit cards to charge about $10,000 and wrote dozens of bad checks that Quinn ended up paying, partly with money she had saved. But ultimately her money ran out. Unable to pay for child care, she had to quit her job at a North Quincy financial company. For five years, Quinn waited for the state to track down her missing husband. Finally, she paid a private search company $10 to locate him. The company found him in California. After five years of no child support payments, Quinn’s ex-husband received a California court order in 1996 to pay $336 a month. He paid nothing for the first six months, then wrote checks for a few months, then stopped for another eight months. He got his payments lowered to $105 a month in January, but Quinn has not received a payment since August 2003. Her ex-husband now owes nearly $4,000, she said. Quinn, who went off welfare in 1997 and now works as a nurse in a Quincy pediatrics office, makes a decent living, but money is tight. The family rents a modest, state-subsidized Quincy duplex. There’s a pantry with no door, a couch with rips. Quinn pulls from her closet the same clothes she wore 20 years ago. She drives a 1987 station wagon with a broken, rattling door handle. “I know my house isn’t the nicest,” Quinn said. “I don’t have two glasses that match. I can pay the bills, but there’s not a whole lot left. The kids know not to ask me for $10 before pay day because it’s probably not there.” And then there are those months when she falls just a little bit short, and something, like maybe the electricity, will get turned off. “You learn that they won’t turn your gas off in the winter, so that’s when you pay less on heat and more on electric,” she said. Quinn’s ex-husband, Everett Glenn, reached by phone in the San Francisco area, said he has struggled with congestive heart failure, diabetes and Hepatitis C, and has not kept a regular job for the past two years, making it difficult to pay child support. “I’m ashamed of not being able to pay my child support. It’s not that I don’t want to pay. I don’t have the money,” Glenn, 44, said. But Quinn, 37, is hardened to years of excuses. “It’s not just the money,” she said. “If he paid every month, you would know that once a month, when he wrote that check, he’d be thinking about his children.” Dina Gerdeman may be reached by clicking here. |
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