Editor's note: This story was first published on Sept. 6, 2003

The alarm goes off at 6 a.m. and Oshanette Neal reaches over and presses snooze. She's tired but already awake, an Aladdin cartoon playing on the ancient television at the foot of her bed. She always sleeps with the TV on a cartoon channel, volume low.

The only thing she hates more than waking up in the middle of the night to complete darkness is waking up to something scary.

''Titus,'' she shouts.

''Yes, mom,'' he calls back from his room down the hall. ''Yes, mom,'' that cracks her up. It's never ''yeah,'' never ''what,'' just ''yes, mom.''

''It's time,'' she says.

Titus is her second child, 11 years old and strutting his stuff, the little man of the house. He goes downstairs to roust her 13-year-old, Toswanette, and as usual, Tos has a fit. ''Get out of my room,'' she yells. ''I'm up.''

Oshanette was 16 when she had Tos and a year later she went on welfare to support her. Eleven years and five babies later she was still on welfare. If the law hadn't changed, set a limit, made her get a job, she might still be on assistance. But that's one of those questions that can't be answered, a 'what if' that isn't.

She went off the rolls last October, and for 11 months has been working the same $7-an-hour job as a teacher's aide in a church-run day-care center. She brings home $960 a month, about $300 more than she did on welfare. This makes her a rare success story in welfare circles, a ''lifer'' who found and has kept a pretty decent job.

The alarm beeps again and she hits snooze one more time to gather her thoughts. Titus and Tos leave for school at 6:30. Then she'll get up and get ready — the bathroom all hers for a blissful half-hour. At 7 a.m. she'll awaken the two middle children, and the two little ones get up a half-hour later. She has to be out the door by 8:30 to clock in at 9 a.m.

''Oh, God,'' she prays. ''Thank you for waking me up. Here I go again. Be with me.''

Lifetime limits are kicking in

Remember the Clinton administration phrase, ''ending welfare as we know it?'' It was true.

In the name of self-sufficiency, welfare recipients were given a mandated work requirement and a lifetime limit of 60 months of benefits except in certain circumstances. (A few states adopted shorter lifetime limits.)

In July 1997, when the reforms went into effect in Colorado, 7,200 families in Denver County were on welfare, now called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.

Today, 1,800 families are.

It's impossible to know what has happened to everyone who has dropped off the rolls. Some no doubt have found steady work or have left the state. Others go on and off the rolls, finding jobs then losing them again. Some have been sick enough to qualify for Social Security Disability.

But last summer, the first group of women who were on welfare in 1997 and never went off — women like Oshanette — hit their lifetime limit. In the year since, more women have reached their limit. Except in situations where it is impossible for them to work — they or their children are disabled, for example — their benefits are cut off.

Women who have reached 60 months represent only a fraction of the entire caseload but their numbers are growing. Not surprisingly, they tend to be people with serious issues and how to help them raises tough questions not just for the welfare system but for society.

I know some of you have no sympathy for welfare recipients. I understand how impatience does battle with compassion. When Oshanette tells me four different men fathered her six children, I look at her, a beautiful, earnest, seemingly sensible woman, and find myself wondering, ''Why would you keep having children you cannot support?''

This is a common question of recipients. The answer is complicated. To look at the single fact — single women having babies they cannot afford, to dismiss them as irresponsible — is to see only a fraction of the picture of their lives.

What caseworkers have learned is that many of the women reaching the 60-month lifetime limit are mentally or physically disabled or both. Some have a child's reasoning ability, IQs of 60, 70, 80. Many are dropouts. Others are mentally ill or are addicted. Depression is common. So is domestic violence.

They themselves are children of lonely women and revolving-door men. Some spent their childhoods bouncing from foster family to foster family, sitting on steps waiting for mothers who never came home, waking in the night to an adult's groping hand, cringing under the wrathful, poisonous glare of the people who were supposed to love them.

Simply put, the people now maxing out their benefits tend to be women with many problems and many children. Their struggle to get off welfare has been compounded by a competitive job market that pits them against more educated, more experienced workers at a time when the other two linchpins to success — affordable child care and housing — are increasingly scarce.

The truth, now blindingly clear, is that among the lifers only the healthiest, the most resilient and the most determined will ever reach self-sufficiency.

Card from a dying mother

The brief history of Oshanette Neal.

She never knew her father. Her mother was a drug addict, always in and out of prison, always on welfare. Her mother's boyfriends beat up her mom and touched her and her sister. When Oshanette was 13, Social Services took her and her six siblings away from her mom. Her siblings went to live with grandma in Tennessee.

Oshanette stayed behind in Denver to be close to her mom. She lived with relatives who were also on welfare, stayed in school, got pregnant, dropped out, moved in with grandma. Three of her brothers are now in prison. One of her baby's fathers is a gang member. The father of another is in a federal penitentiary. The father of three of her sons, the man she ''thought was the one,'' turned out, she says, to have a wandering eye and a hard fist. The last man, the father of her 4-year-old girl, Miracle, simply disappeared.

''When I was three months pregnant with her, I got up to go to work and I told him, 'You have your half of the bills and either you pay or you don't have to be here,' '' Oshanette says. ''When I came home he was gone. I guess he chose, 'You don't have to be here.' ''

None of the fathers pays steady child support.

So, I ask, ''At this point are you questioning your taste in men?''

She laughs. ''All men are the same, they dogs.''

Oshanette laughs a lot. While she's ironing her children's clothes in the morning, while she's combing one son's hair at the same time another is reading his homework to her and while a third is peppering her with questions.

''Y'all are having oatmeal bars for breakfast because we're out of milk and no one told me,'' she says. ''I just bought two gallons on Sunday. The way y'all are drinking it you'd think we have a cow in the back yard.''

Her house is immaculate, walls decorated with fancy, framed posters with sayings like, ''When things go wrong, as they sometimes will . . . rest if you must, but don't quit.''

She shows me a picture of her mother who died two years ago. No matter what, Oshanette says, her mom always sent her a birthday card, even from jail. She was expecting a card on her 27th birthday but by then her mom was dying of hepatitis C and it never came.

''The people from the prison sent us her stuff and my birthday card was in there,'' Oshanette says. ''She was going to send it me but didn't have the chance. That just made me feel so good. I loved my mom so much, she was my best friend. I know she wasn't a perfect mom like everyone deserves. But she was mine and I loved her.''

It was her mom who taught her never to call her children ''bad,'' especially in front of them. ''Say challenging,'' she instructed.

And Oshanette's children are polite and well-behaved. They each have their chores. In case they forget, Oshanette has posted ''House rules'' on the front door.

''If you sleep on it, make it up. If you wear it, hang it up. If you drop it, pick it up.''

She still lives below poverty level and besides her salary, Oshanette receives Medicaid, $517 a month in food stamps and her rent, $141 a month, is subsidized. Her food stamp allocation went down and her rent went up as soon as she started making more money. She considers herself lucky she has a car, beat up as it is. It all helps. It doesn't make it easy.

''I answer to six kids, then go to work and take care of 15 kids, then go home to six kids,'' she says. ''It gets really frustrating. I'm tired and there are those days I just want to give up, I don't want to go to work. But, if I don't go to work, I can't pay the rent and the kids go to Social Services because we're homeless. So I get up.''

Absent the luxury of choice

Welfare reform was not intended to lift people from poverty, and it hasn't. It has forced those capable of working to work, and new regulations being considered by the Bush administration would get more people to work longer hours with less support for child care or job training.

The more women work the better you might say, and I wouldn't necessarily argue. But one must ask the obvious: If a poorly educated woman with little work experience is being moved into the work force, how realistic is it that she will become self-sufficient without affordable child care and housing, without adequate training? And if this same woman has the kind of hard-core problems I mentioned earlier, how much more remote the odds of success?

Getting people to work isn't the same as keeping them working. This is one of the first, tough lessons of welfare reform.

The Denver Human Services Department, trying to address some of these issues, has a class for incoming recipients with multiple problems. Students talk about substance abuse, domestic violence, how to search for housing, how to adapt to work, how to budget.

One of the teachers, Kelly Vigil, was on public assistance and has now been working with welfare recipients for almost seven years. She gives her students the confidence boost they need along with a good mother's strictness.

Every morning, she makes them list five things for which they are grateful — and they cannot say their children more than once. She doesn't allow them to dwell on horrible childhoods and bad relationships. Her rules are simple. No sweats. No cursing. No hickeys. That's welfare thinking, she says, and if you go on to Temporary Assistance with two children, she tells them, you better leave with two children.

Her students tell me she has given them hope. When you're on welfare for years, a lifer tells me, ''you lose part of yourself.''

''Have a good weekend,'' a fresh-faced young woman tells Kelly at the end of a recent class. ''You, too,'' Kelly says.

When the girl is gone, Kelly turns to me and says, matter-of-fact, like she's talking about the weather, ''Her father started raping her when she was 4 years old.''

And what do you with that? How does something like that impact the choices a person makes? I often hear people say, ''I don't want my tax dollars to pay for someone else's poor judgment.'' Fair enough. But at what point do choices become so limited they are not really choices? Because the reality is that choice is a luxury — a luxury of a good, stable upbringing, a luxury of education, a luxury of those blessed with sound minds and bodies, a luxury of money. So many women clinging to welfare year after year possess few of these. They have nothing to fall back on. One bad decision, one bad break, and it all falls apart again.

I struggle to put this into words for Kelly, wanting to know I'm not sure what, how, perhaps, some of these women will ever escape poverty, fear, desperation.

She tells me almost every student she sees wants to improve his or her life, if not for themselves for their children.

''These girls are just sad, most of them,'' she says. ''They don't know where they fit in the world except as mothers, it's all they think they can do. I tell them, 'You were someone before your children and you will be someone after them.' ''

It's up to you to change your life, she tells her students.

''If you always do what you've always done,'' she tells them, ''you'll always get what you've always got.''

Courage to be the example

Oshanette is not a woman who bothers with regret. She has only one. She had an abortion on Dec. 15, 1990, ''and to this very day it haunts me.''

But, Oshanette says, she would change a few things if she could. She would start over in ninth grade, she'd finish school and go to college and wait to have children.

She makes no excuses for what she calls her own irresponsibility.

''I chose to lay down and that's what happened,'' she says. ''I brought my babies into this world knowing they can't have the best of everything in life and maybe that was selfish. But I will do what I can to make sure they are happy and know they are loved and a part of family, and I think that's the most important thing I can give them.''

Will you have more children? I ask. She laughs. ''Oh, God, no. Six is enough.'' Well, what if you fall in love again and he wants children? ''He better come with his own.'' But what if he wants you to have his children? ''Then he better be plenty rich,'' she says.

We laugh about this, but Oshanette tells me later that her mother had seven children by six men.

''She had different men, too,'' Oshanette says. ''You think if this one don't love me, maybe the next one will. And that's just what I wanted, someone to love me.''

She prays that 13-year-old Tos will not get pregnant ''until she's at least 21,'' and that the day never comes when she has to visit her sons in prison.

You're a good mom, I tell her. But I cannot hide my pessimism. You came from such a tough life. How hard will it be to keep your children from repeating old patterns, to break the cycle?

She answers immediately.

''I have already broken it,'' she says. ''I have shown my kids that you can get up and go to work and have a family. I'm showing them you have to earn your way in life. My mother was in and out of the house a lot but she always knew that welfare check would be there for her. There was no one to set an example for me in my family. I've changed that for my family. I am the example and I'm doing all I can to be a good one.''

A modest prayer

Bedtime. Like the morning it goes in shifts. The little ones at 9 p.m., the next set at 9:30, the oldest two at 10 p.m.

The last few days have been hectic. Oshanette is trying to get her children into some temporary after-school care while she's at work, but she just received a letter from Aurora saying there's a waiting list for subsidized child care. There is no way she can afford to pay full cost.

''What am I supposed to do now?'' she says. ''I don't want my babies at home alone. And I don't want to quit my job.''

She had spent her lunch break waiting with hundreds of people hoping to get some kind of federal grant that had been promised at a location on Parker Road. She was going to ask for money for a minivan. The kids don't fit safely into the old Dodge Shadow. Turns out the whole thing was a scam. ''You now what they say,'' she says. 'If it's too good to be true, it probably is.' ''

She's tired but things went relatively smoothly today. The kids had their chores done — floors swept, mopped and vacuumed, kitchen clean — by the time she got home just before 7 p.m. She forbids them from going outside until she gets home so they run around in the yard while she makes supper. It's Ollie Ray's 10th birthday. The night before he was so excited. ''Mom, when I go to bed tonight, I'll be 9 but when I wake up in the morning I'll be 10.'' She laughs. That was cute.

She makes a strawberry cake while the ground beef is cooking for sloppy Joes. She figures when she gets paid on Friday she'll buy Ollie Ray that watch he wanted at Payless. Later, after they're in bed, she slips downstairs and checks their backpacks for unfinished homework, letters from school, stashed toys — 7-year-old Devontrae is a bad one for that.

Back in bed, she watches the first half of the news, then changes the channel to Disney and turns the volume down low. As always, she thanks God for getting her family safely through the day and asks him again to help her find a job that has benefits and an opportunity to advance. Now that she's off welfare, she wants off food stamps and Medicaid. Off all of it. Shoot, she tells me, giggling, ''God's probably sick of me by now, probably up there saying, 'Who does she think she is? Benefits.' ''

She double-checks the alarm and says one last prayer: ''Let no danger, evil or harm enter into our home.''

Then she goes to sleep.

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