this woman’s work

For today’s Blog Action Day, I wanted to pull out a post out from my archives. But I also wanted to direct you to John Scalzi’s: Whatever: Being Poor. It has 436 comments to it now and if you haven’t read it yet, you should.

My post is about a woman at the YWCA shelter in Portland, OR where I worked during my last couple years of college and until Noah was six months old (when we moved home to Ohio). Working in shelter made me realize how complicated politics really are and helped me appreciate (if not support) the “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality. I could see that there were some women who waited for other people to fix things, who were trapped in waiting for a hand-out. But they were few and far between. Most of our clients floundered and struggled to understand a system that had no respect for them or their efforts. Most of them were hemmed in by challenges so great that just getting out of bed every morning was a miracle.

There were a handful of clients who were amazing. I don’t know what was different for them but they fought and fought and fought to get out of the traps that they were (usually) born into. They were able to stop internalizing the messages they got from disdainful caseworkers, disrespectful teachers, abusive parents and partners and they somehow managed to pull together the scraps of government programs for which they were qualified and able to utilize. Vicki was one of those people.

I dedicate my 2008 Blog Action Day post to her and to the women like her and to their children — they deserve better. They deserve more from us.

V. had been in the shelter before when her youngest daughter was only a baby. Back then she was still using and her stay with us was cut short when she was asked to leave for coming home wasted. This time, she was sober and because I had set up the family program, she and her daughters would be my clients.

V. was 37 but looked 52. She was missing most of her teeth and her face was heavily lined. Her intake form read like a bad B movie. She had a history of gang involvement, drug use (heroin, crystal meth, alcohol, and marijuana), childhood abuse, sexual abuse, and most recently, domestic violence. Her daughters M. and A. (then 2 and 3) had been dragged along through it. Originally, her abusive partner had gotten sober with her, but when he returned to their drug-infused lifestyle, he got abusive again, too. V. finally found the impetus to leave him when he broke 2-year old M’s nose.

Why didn’t she leave him earlier? Well, for one she was drugging earlier. When you’re neck-deep in heroin addiction, it’s hard to make good choices. Why didn’t she leave him after? For awhile he wasn’t hurting her and she had hopes that they could be a real family. Her concept of what a healthy family looks like was skewed because she had never seen a healthy family. She came from a long line of addicts and abusers and it was only with the education she got in court-enforced rehab that she realized things could be better.

Her daughters had not always been in her care. But because she went to 12-step meetings, consistently produced clean UAs (urinalysis), and faithfully attended her parenting classes, M. and A. were removed from their foster home and given back to their mom. And they loved their mom so that’s where they wanted to be.

When her partner started using again, V. knew that she had to get out but without job skills (or a high school diploma) and reliable childcare, she didn’t know how to pull the money together to leave. As she tried to work out a plan, things got worse. He began beating her but she comforted herself with “but he never hurts the girls” not realizing that they were being hurt every time they saw their mother beaten. Then one night he did turn on the girls and little M. got her nose broken. It was the last straw. V. called the police and as they left with her husband in handcuffs, they handed her a list of shelters.

Portland, OR has a lot of shelters compared to some cities (like Columbus) but we still turned away more than 70% of the women who called us. All the shelters do. Ironically, the fact that V. was escaping recent domestic violence would make things easier for her. Grants that fund shelters stipulate who can sleep where and if she was homeless because of domestic violence that happened, say, last year (like if she’d left a violent partner and was sleeping on a friend’s couch and then the friend kicked her out) some shelters wouldn’t be able to bring her in. Having kids, however, made things harder. It’s easier to find shelter as a single woman.

I don’t know how many phone calls she made until she got shelter but she finally did at one of the confidential locations. Five weeks — the longest she could be in their program — generally isn’t enough time to turn your life around and so she was grateful to get another five week reprieve with us.

What I remember about V. was her absolute commitment to her kids. Maybe it seems strange to you since she had done so little to protect them before, but she was a good mom. She *knew* how badly she’d screwed up and she was doing everything in her power to undo the damage. Because of their chaotic lives, M. and A. were not easy kids, especially A.

A. was a whirlwind of anger. She would come into my office and start dismantling the toys. I had things set up for kids just like A. and so our toys were pretty resilient. We had a plastic kitchen set, dolls and stuffed animals, playdough, a dollhouse (with a police car and an ambulance) and a rice table. There was a doctor’s kit and various costumes. Lots of art supplies. The point of my office was to give the kids in shelter a safe place to explore the things that had happened to them. For A., the game was always the same.

“Do you hear that?” she’d say, hiding under the table. “It’s the police coming to get my daddy.”

She’d leap out.

“Here he is! Come get him!”

Screaming and whirling, she’d rip down toys and throw the babies. I’d come to hold her and sometimes she’d lash out at me. I’d try to keep my arms around her, murmuring, “It’s all ok now, A., you’re safe here, A.”

“He can’t come here, right?” she’d ask. “He’s in jail isn’t he? He was hurting the baby and now he’s gone.”

We were able to get A. in to see a psychologist so that she’d have real play therapy. In her sessions she disclosed what was already suspected — her father had been sexually abusing her for some time. V. steeled herself to go to court to keep him in jail but it didn’t work and he was released to await trial.

There was a lot that happened during her stay. She got herself signed up with every program there was to try and find permanent housing. She went to meetings and trainings required by the various programs and every day she took a complicated little strip of paper scrawled with various numbers and instructions to the pay phone. There she would sit until her quarters or her daughter’s patience ran out, trying to find them a home. Her abuser followed her to the shelter, too. We weren’t a confidential location and we were right downtown so one day when he was waiting at a bus kiosk he saw them and followed her. He showed up outside the building on a bike and started screaming for her. We called the police and he was arrested on some outstanding warrants. Normally if an abuser finds a client at shelter, she has to be moved for safety reasons (she loses her housing since there isn’t always another place to send her, sometimes we had money to voucher her into a hotel for a few nights hoping that would buy her enough time to find someplace to go) but since he went to jail, she got to stay.

I gave her as much childcare as I could. I was limited because there were always three other families in shelter as well as meetings with case managers and time I spent on the phone giving referrals and trying to convince other shelter workers at other shelters to take in my clients whose time was running out. I was falling in love with A. and M. — their pasty faces and lank hair were becoming beautiful to me. Every day their mom would come in and brief me and I would cheer her on, awed by her resilience and perseverance. She never lost her temper with those girls, not even when A.’s anger caused her to lash out at little M. Not even when A. spun out of control, unseeing, and destroyed whatever room she was in. Think of it: this was a woman who had only been clean and sober for a few months. A woman who had no good parenting role models and whose life was stressful in a way we can’t comprehend. She kept her children entertained in a tiny un-carpeted room with the few donated toys they received upon intake with us knowing that her time there was running out.

Women like V. are heroes to me.

Eventually, it was time for her to leave us. We gave her an extension but our grant stipulations were strict and she had to go. Fortunately, the reprieve had given her time to get into another program and so she left us. There were lots of hugs and tears and she promised to bring the girls by soon.

Six months later, we were on our way to visit V.’s house. Her favorite case manager and I took the bus to her section 8 house in an inner-city, working class neighborhood. Boy she was proud when she opened the door and my I was pleased to see my tax dollars at work! V. now had her own three bedroom house. It was small and strangely built (it looked, as she said, like Fred Flintstone’s house with all of these strange, curving stucco walls inside) but it was hers. The girls’ paternal grandmother (yes, the woman who raised the monster who hit M. and molested A.) was there, too, helping her hold down the fort and watching the girls while V. went to her training class at the community college.

We were wary about grandma but after talking to her, our worries subsided. Like V., she’d married an abusive man. Unlike her, when he began to hit their child, it wasn’t enough to make her leave. Her son’s fall saddened and angered her. She would never lay a hand on a child, she swore, and now she wanted to see her grandchildren have a better life. These two women were committed to seeing the cycle of violence stop here. We were so proud and happy for them.

A. was in a therapeutic preschool and though her temper still flared, she was happier and more relaxed. M. was still a shiny little ball of red hair and smiles; maybe she was young enough that she would get through relatively unscathed.

Around Thanksgiving, V. came by the shelter with cards for us all and news of a job. Thanks to the job program offered by the state, she was now making more money than we were at the shelter! Her mother-in-law had been paid by the same program for providing childcare to the girls but now that V. was doing so well, the loss of that income when the program ended wasn’t going to hurt them. Her section 8 certificate remained (she was paying $1 a month rent) but she was confident that when that ended, the landlord would allow her to stay and that she would be able to afford to keep their home. They had made curtains and she asked us to come by and see them.

In the next year, V.’s life flourished. Her abuser went back to jail on a drug charge and his plea for visitation with the girls was turned down. V. came and spoke to other shelter clients about getting back on their feet. She was a featured speaker at a fund raising luncheon. She was a success story.

The one day she came to shelter to visit with me and her old case manager. She looked tired. Very tired.

“What’s wrong, V.?” we asked.

“I’ve been sick,” she said. “I’ve had bronchitis and I couldn’t get rid of it. I was missing too much work so they fired me. I finally went to the doctor and I found out I have AIDS.”

Not HIV, AIDS. Full-blown AIDS. That IV drug use had finally caught up to her. It had robbed her of her teeth and her relationships and now it was going to take her life.

The girls were ok, she said, neither of them had it. But she wondered if we had any idea what she could do now. She wasn’t going to lose the house but a lot of the programs she had relied on were one-shot deals. You get to use them once in your life and that’s it. She was worried about finding more work since she knew she would get sicker. Grandma was ill, too. Her heart was giving her trouble and it looked like maybe the girls were getting to be too much for her. But the girls, “The girls are doing great,” V. smiled. “A. is doing so well in preschool.”

Now V. had a new case plan. She and her case manager were hammering out what amounted to a death plan. For one thing, where would the girls go? V. was adamant that their daddy wouldn’t get his hands on them. Since he was in prison, they seemed safe for now. V. also didn’t want them going to her family because “that’s where the abuse started.” And foster care? Well, you can see the options weren’t that good.

I was pregnant with Noah then and I came home and asked Brett what he thought about adopting A. and M. He didn’t think it was a good idea and, feeling protective of my yet to be born baby, I reluctantly agreed. I still feel lousy about that.

V.’s fall was swift and merciless. When Noah was a seven months old and we were back in Ohio, her case manager called me to say that V. and the girls were back in shelter. Only there didn’t seem to be any place for them to go. V.’s brain was affected by the AIDS and she was becoming cross and forgetful. She was paranoid, too, and started accusing the staff of going through her things. The girls were scared and acting out. The case manager was crying on the phone telling me this. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “there’s no place to send her now. No one will take her.”

All the programs were in place for people to get self-sufficient. The people who fell through the cracks were people who couldn’t be self-sufficient. People with mental illness and fetal alcohol syndrome. People who were too brain damaged to function properly but not brain damaged enough to get into developmental delay programs. People like V., who weren’t ever going to get better and were just going to get worse.

V. ended up being forced to leave shelter because she threatened to hit one of the staff members. As she left, her bags packed, she turned and said to her once beloved case manager, “You’re not welcome at my funeral.”

Clients are limited to three lifetime stays at our shelter. This is to weed out the people who are chronic users, I guess, and to make room for new people who might make it. V. came back a fourth time and our boss made an exception. I understand that the girls weren’t with her. They had been packed off and sent to stay with their mom’s family of origin. A worse case scenario to V.’s mind but there was no other choice. Family reunification was a priority in the foster care system and this was the girls’ family.

V. was very, very ill. She had no case plan in shelter; she was just waiting for a hospice bed to open up through the county. When it did, she left to die.

I think about her girls often. M. would be about 7 14 now and A. would be 8 or 9 15 or 16. I’m afraid that their lives are going to look a lot like their mother’s. I hope that V. is with them somehow, giving them strength and loving them through what are going to be some terrible, difficult times. She wanted things to be better for them and she tried so damn hard. I hope that year she gave them — that year of glory in their Flintstone’s hosue — will be enough to sustain them.

V. got a lot of chances. There are those who would have said to cut her off sooner, force her to stand on her own two feet, but you can see that she needed every chance that she got. Even more importantly, her daughters needed those chances. And this, my friends, is why I’m a bleeding heart fucking liberal. In honor of V. and of women like V. Because every single goddamn chance might be the one that saves her.

This was hard to write and I’m crying, missing her and thinking of the girls. She’s still a hero to me. I’m going to write about other clients, too, when I can. As a tribute and maybe as inspiration. And so I won’t forget. I never want to forget.

God bless you, V.

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