A Fruitful Enterprise

The Lemon

When life gives you a lemon, so the saying goes, make lemonade.

I was talking to my daughter about her job. She has a cool job helping people navigate through the bureaucracy of Social Security. Her clients are those who have disabilities of one sort or another, but they are trying to help themselves. My daughter works some magic, and the system works for the client, many of whom then are able to get jobs and ultimately reduce or eliminate their dependance on the dole. That's a really broad generalization of her work, but it's something like that, and usually it's a win-win situation for the client and for Social Security.

She said one of the reasons she likes her job is that she deals with those who have already bottomed out, come to grips with the situation, and are attempting to rebuild their lives. Most social service jobs, however, deal with people "on the way down." People find themselves out of work or unable to work for whatever reason, and their lives begin to unravel. They begin looking for help and find out that most of the help available will not protect what they have. Indeed, in most cases, government assistance is only available once you've depleted your own resources and have close to nothing left. Along the way, you have to also divest yourself of status and self-esteem. All of this is a frightening and humiliating process. People go through typical grief stages -- denial, anger, bargaining and depression before they get to acceptance, and for some, that can get ugly.  It is the exceptional person, my daughter says, that can run that gauntlet gracefully, and it is easy for the social service workers who deal with this day in and day out to get burnt out.

I have it on good authority that my daughter is very, very good at her job, and from her stories, I know that she deals with people who accomplish some absolutely heroic tasks on the way to supporting themselves.

But people do look at me funny when I say that my daughter runs a lemonade stand in Stockton. Go figure.