Shelter Portrait #2
D. came to the shelter from another shelter, I believe. The details of her intake are hazy but I know that she had a history of partner abuse, that she had three daughters but only two with her (a 14-year old and a 4-year old) and that she was thin, with shaking hands and sunglasses.
D. was in her late 30s with long greying hair and a defensiveness bordering on paranoid. Her oldest daughter was all tight jeans and bad attitude but her youngest, K., quickly became a favorite among the shelter workers. K. was tall for her age with a long, sad face and big blue eyes. Her lank, straw-colored hair added to her morose mien. She wasn’t playful even when she played. She was wary and weary and obviously the put-upon child in a stressed, unhappy family.
D. entered the shelter and became one of my first clients. Her room was right next to my office and every day I heard her yell at K. for being hungry and asking for breakfast. I would go knock on her door and remind her of her case plan and appointments and tell her that it was her responsibility to feed her child. K. would show up at my door and ask to play (my office doubled as the child care room) or to borrow a toy.
One of the most important rules of the shelter was that children under a certain age (was it 9? 12? I don’t remember) had to be supervised by their parents at all times. This could be a really difficult rule. Take for example the mom with three children under four using the big room at the end of the hall. Let’s say the three year old wants lunch but his little brother and sister are sleeping. Does she wake them all up to get a snack? Does she dash into the kitchen with only one kid in tow? What does she do if the payphone at the other end of the hall rings and she’s expecting a call about a job? Or if she has an appointment with her case manager? Our rules had to be pretty strict because our shelter oddly shared the floor with a public, women-only hotel and was four stories up with no bars on the windows. We did eventually get baby monitors for our family rooms but they got lost, broken or proved ineffective across cinderblock walls. Also clients could get another client to babysit but our insurance stipulated that this be done formally with a childcare sheet filled out and signed by everyone. A huge nuisance to take a five minute smoke break. It’s not easy being mom at a shelter, even in one that’s more child-friendly.
D. was one of the worst offender of our “stay in whatever room your children are in at all times” rule. We found K. standing on windowsills, left alone in a bathtub, or wandering the halls asking grown-ups for food. The truth is, D. should have been kicked out. We gave rule violations for these kinds of infractions and operated under a “three strikes, you’re out” policy. D. got a million strikes but was allowed to stay and even got an extension when her six weeks were up. It was because of K., of course. We all loved her and we knew that being at shelter was the only thing keeping her safe.
We called child protective services a number of times trying to get them to open a case file. Because K. was theoretically under our jurisdiction, they wouldn’t do it. We made D. feed her, we made D. supervise bathtimes and tuck her into bed. We disallowed violent discipline (we suspected that K. was hit by her mom). At shelter, K. was relatively safe and so the overburdened, overworked CPS department felt they couldn’t spend their resources getting involved. I told them that D. was thisclose to getting kicked out and then there would be no safeguards. Call us when that happens, they said. “But you won’t be able to find her then,” I argued. “She won’t have an address!” They still wouldn’t budge.
Eventually through sheer luck, D. got a much coveted place in a long-term housing program. The shelters rotated chances for the program and our turn happened to come up. At staff meeting we decided to give the place to D. for K.’s sake. For two years D. would receive free housing in a nice furnished 2-bedroom at a neighborhood resource center. She would be given counseling and job training. Her kids would receive schooling, childcare, and counseling, too. The resource center required some things of their clients: adherence to counseling, a mandated savings account wherein some of their social security or welfare check would be put aside to be used upon leaving the program, and that they remain clean and sober throughout their stay.
Now I have to tell you something here: I had terrible instincts when it came to clients using. I could spot mental health issues a mile away but if I saw a client shooting up in front of me, I’d believe her if she told me she was a diabetic. I ignored D.’s constant sunglass wearing, her groggy behavior if woken before 10am, and her occasional bouts of enormous good cheer because I’m a bit of a twit. The other case managers weren’t as blind as I was and recommended that she get a urinalysis before she went into the program. Well, you know what happened, right? It came up dirty. And that meant that D. had 24 hours to leave the shelter and no, she wasn’t getting into that great housing program. As her case manager, I got to break the news.
In a fantasy world, people upon being told that they royally screwed up would say, “Wow, I take full responsibility. I vow to change my ways.” In reality, many many people instead say, “What?! I didn’t do it! And if I did, I had a right! And since I had a right, you had no right! This is all your fault!!!” (This isn’t limited to the shelter; look around and you’ll hear people saying this no matter where they are in life.) That’s pretty much what D. did. She cried, she attacked me, she gave excuses for her continued pot use, she appealed to my love for K. Yeah, it sucked. Because no matter how much D. deserved to lose her housing, K. did not. And CPS still wasn’t taking my calls on this family.
I went crying to my boss because I felt so damn guilty about throwing this little girl out on the streets with her loser, demented, drug-abusing mother.
“What if she’s right?” I asked, sobbing. “What if she needs to smoke pot because of her chronic back pain?”
“Listen,” said my boss, a mother and many years clean and sober herself. “If you told her that if she drank milk she’d lose her housing and she drank milk, I’d say she has a milk problem. She’s the one who lost this housing for her family.”
Clients like D. are more rare than Republicans would want you to believe but they are among the most infuriating. Sure D. had problems, sure she had a history of abuse, but when you come right down to it, her history wasn’t all that bad compared to the women who came in with post-traumatic stress disorder from being repeatedly raped or brain injuries from being slammed into walls. No, D. just would not take responsibility for her actions. In fact, she said that really it was her kids’ fault that she had to use pot because the care of them was such a strain for her and she was in so much pain and they were so difficult and disobedient. Not that her pain prevented her from the rest of her life hanging out with her friends and wandering around pretending to look for a job. It’s not like she was laid up unable to move or anything. Just unable to feed her 4-year old really. It must have been a very specific sort of pain that didn’t allow her to shuffle across the hall to the kitchen and pour out a bowl of cereal. /sarcasm mode off
She periodically came back to our shelter and we kept notes on K. (her teenager was hanging with the local streetkids at this point and never came with her mom to visit us). Later her eldest daughter left the jobtraining program where she was staying and used our shelter briefly. They lived on a boat for awhile, a little boat moored to a dock. They lived with various boyfriends. D. partied with her teen daughters’ friends and found some guy with a motorcycle. K. got taller and taller, her face got longer and longer, and the haunting circles under her eyes just got deeper. She must be about 12 now and I’m sure her future will be a difficult one.
During my time at the shelter, I met many flawed parents who did damage to their children, parents who perpetuated abuse or who neglected their children. But even evil acts do not necessarily define a person as evil. Some of our clients were so broken or so ignorant that they did the terrible things they did because they had no other choice. These are tragic situations and heartbreaking. However it was the mothers like D. who were the most frustrating. There was no twisted survival instinct going on for D. She wasn’t trapped in a pattern foisted on her by her upbringing. No, she was pure selfishness.
I wrote this entry because I was inspired by a little debate we were having about Dr. Phil on the Insecure Writers list. For the record, I don’t like him but I also wouldn’t mind seeing him verbally tear into D. But you know what she would do? She would just let the tears seep slowly out of her eyes, looking more and more betrayed and victimized. She would say, “I know but…” And when it was time for her to leave the stage, she would go with her chin up, convinced that she was in the right. Then she’d tape the show and make a big production out of it, rewriting the script to prove that she somehow got the best of old Phil. She’d host a party and invite all of her friends and make K. pass around the beer, yelling at her if she took too long. Yeah, I can totally see it. Argh. This is a useless entry. I’m going to resist the desire to delete it. Double argh.
