By Gerard Dermody

Success may well be measured by a person's ability to overcome life's little intricacies. By this standard, Debra Einstein's journey along the road from welfare to financial independence is indeed a map of a successful life's journey.

In the early 1970s at age 20, Einstein landed in Boulder, Colo., recently divorced and the parent of a toddler. She spent three years on the welfare rolls there.

That was more than a quarter century ago. Now she is remarried, lives in Westchester and works as a marketing/events manager in the financial district. On the day that we met in Grand Central Station she looked none of her 46 years.

Her short blond hair, business suit and attractive features bore no trace of her poverty. Still trying to earn a college degree, Einstein enrolled two years ago in a two-semester course on welfare at Hunter College. There, she came full circle. She met students -- male and female-- currently on welfare. They informed her that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's Workfare program mandates, in effect, that people on welfare must perform unskilled labor in exchange for their checks rather than pursue a college education. The mayor has stated that the program serves as the way out of poverty and off of welfare. The students disagreed vehemently, claiming Workfare was modern-day slavery but without any visible sign of emancipation.

Persuaded by the students' arguments, Einstein resolved to attain her bachelor's degree in political science, something that had eluded her for over 20 years, in the hopes of changing her career.

``I wanted to get back into something worthwhile, and I feel that I have something to offer in the way of mentoring to women on welfare, having gone through it myself,'' she said.

Einstein's path to welfare is a familiar one. She became pregnant, thrown into the role of wife and mother at age 18. Having very few options open to her she did consider an abortion. The procedure was illegal in the United States at the time and to obtain one she would have had to travel to England. To add to her feelings of desperation and panic, her widowed father was less than supportive of her situation.

``It was very difficult for me to tell my father that I was pregnant. He had such plans for me to attend college'' she recalled.

Within two years, she married, gave birth to a son and divorced.

On a particularly stressful Chicago day, she swept her son up into her arms and asked him, ``Honey, mountains or ocean?''

``Mountains, Mama,'' was his reply. At the time, Einstein had often thought that Colorado sounded like a peaceful, healthy place to raise a child. She combined the bit of money she saved while working as a store manager with her income tax refund and bought two one-way tickets west.

Einstein started college at the University of Denver, then became a full-time student at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She recalls that one of the main reasons she moved to Colorado was that it was a very progressive state and had good programs for women returning to school, including free day care on campus and at work sites.

Not that it was easy. For a while she held a federal work-study job while bagging tea at night in a supermarket.

Nevertheless, she remains embarrassed that she was on welfare for three years. Looking back, she sees how immature she was to move so far from home with too little planning and too few resources. She felt overwhelmed being so far from home with a toddler as her only companion and today describes the era as ``very frightening and disturbing.''

Her ex-husband sent only enough money to pay for airfare for her son to return to Chicago for summer visits.

To supplement her income she took an untraditional job for a woman as a light construction worker for the Parks Department. She got involved with the anti-Vietnam War movement and New Age festivals.

Einstein's relationship with her father remained strained throughout the early years of her sons life to the point that he refused to allow her to come home to Chicago in the mid 1970s after she broke her back in a hiking accident. Today, she and her father have reconciled, due in no small part, she says, to the fact that he saw how hard she was trying to make a life for herself and her son while she attended school.

After she recovered, she drifted east, eventually settling in Washington, D.C., and enrolling in 1980 at George Washington University, because of its highly regarded political science department. However, she found it increasingly hard to work and attend school and dropped out. She remarried in 1989 to a man involved in the music business and the couple moved to New York.

Today Debra Einstein is enrolled in a distance learning course with the University of Maryland, still working toward that degree she started 27 years ago.

She attended seminars at the United Nations and the Ford Foundation on raising money for non-profit organizations. She was instrumental recently in helping to raise $10,000 through a direct mail campaign for the Welfare Rights Initiative.

``I only wish that the initiative was around back when I was a single mom in Colorado or even in Chicago. I might not have left home in the first place,'' she said. ``That's why it's so important for me to get my degree. It's not a case of wanting to; it's a case of having to, so that others don't have to take the same road as I did. I can help them. It's all very clear to me.''