(Jane Calderon and her sons)

When I walked by Jane Calderon’s house, she was out front, watching her seven-year-old twins play on their scooters. As we spoke, she stopped occasionally to warn them not to go too far from the front step or to tell them where in the fridge they could find a snack.

Jane seems to have the job of motherhood well in hand for someone her age. She’s just 23. The boys were born when she was 15.

Jane grew up in Lowell, Mass. Her mother had come to the city from Puerto Rico when she was 20, and she struggled to learn English, so Jane often ended up acting as translator, using what she learned in bilingual classes in elementary school.

When her parents arrived in Lowell, they didn’t know anyone there. Her father started out collecting cans for money and later got a job at a fish market. After that, he worked at one of the city’s last remaining textile mills.

Today he’s a truck driver. Jane said he often drives through Nashua on the way to a delivery. Recently, he stopped by her house for a bite of shish kabob before continuing on his way.

Jane remains close with her parents. She goes down to Lowell pretty much every weekend. But she says she tries to raise her boys differently from how she was raised. She wants to support them in whatever decisions they make in life, and to guide them with examples and explanations instead of bald demands.

It’s hard to imagine that the biggest conflict between Jane and her parents during her youth didn’t come from her pregnancy. The boys’ father is a man 20 years Jane’s senior, and soon after their birth she went to live with him.

Today, she still lives with him. She said he’s an idol to his sons and has been a mentor and good influence to her as she’s matured.

“I’m glad I got with someone older, not somebody my age,” she said.

For most of their relationship, he was also a good provider. He worked in chemical plants, doing jobs that included climbing into huge tanks. By 2006 he had gotten a promotion to a supervisor position. Then he had his first epileptic seizure and had to stop working.

“It was very hard, for all of us,” Jane said.

She said her fiancé had worked since he was 13, and the disability hit him emotionally as well as financially. He had complained about people on welfare when he was working, and the idea of seeking government assistance was repellant.

“It came to a point that he saw himself in the welfare office… After that he understood, when you need, you need,” she said.

Today, in addition to his disability benefits, the family gets Section 8 housing assistance and food stamps.

Jane said she isn’t looking for a job. When she told me that, my first thought was that, with no high school diploma and little work history, she probably couldn’t find work that would do much to support her family, if she could get a job at all in the current economy. But that wasn’t her reasoning at all.

She said she takes her role as a mother seriously, and she can’t stand the thought of not being there for her sons. She loves being able to go to their school plays and events.

Jane gets a little extra money by doing friends’ nails, and her fiancé does the same fixing cars.

The family budgets its money carefully and can occasionally spring for minor luxuries like a trip to an amusement park. Two years ago, they saved up and went camping in the White Mountains. Jane and her fiancé try to save enough to have $10 left for a six-pack at the end of the week.

“So far we’ve been able to manage,” she said.

Jane hears people complaining about their taxes going to government aid recipients, and she understands why they’re upset. But she doesn’t take it too personally, she said, because she can easily imagine a future in which the economy gets worse and those critics are forced to apply for aid themselves.

“It’s not that I like depending on the government,” she said, but she wants to do everything she can to support her kids.

“Once you become a mother, it becomes a need to sacrifice yourself for them,” she said.