Who is Homeless and Why Part II: A Mother, Her Children, and Survival

*Rachel is a pseudonym, but everything in this article is factual.

Note: This article was originally written for a column a web site called Themestream which I was writing about homeless women in 2000. The other articles in the series have been lost.

The first time Rachel was homeless she was 18. She had not had an easy life before that. She had been abused. She had a history of depression, bulimia, and an addiction to self-mutilation, all of which are often aftereffects of abuse. To find a substitute family, she hung out with a gang of kids. They lived in a poor area, so sometimes there was violence.

Once, her boyfriend, who was abusive, started beating her up outside a mall. He had a gun, grabbed her by the throat, and held it to her head. She tells this story without any evidence of drama; it was a fact of life. She even laughs about it. Some of her friends drove by in a van. The guys carried guns; it was common in their neighborhood. They saw her with him from a distance, and gathered something was wrong. Then two of her male friends came up from behind, taking her boyfriend by surprise. They yelled at her to run; she kicked him and did. Then her friends beat the guy up. That's the part she laughs about. Then she says, in retrospect, people who she thought of as her close friends were really not the best people for her to be hanging around with. The way she sees things now is that they did not care about her as she thought they did then.

She became homeless the first time when she was 18 for reasons I don't know, possibly from being kicked out of her parents' house. She lived on the streets for months. During that time, she was pregnant with her first child. She was also raped, while sleeping outside. Then, when some people arrived at a shopping center one morning and saw her sleeping on a bench in front of it, they called the police. She had not eaten in days and was really sick. She was arrested. She told the police she was glad to be going to jail; it was a place to sleep.

Eventually she wound up with her husband who was abusive. Abuse can become a fact of life when it's all you have ever known. She had another child with him. There were times when he beat her badly, and the police were called. He broke a lamp over her head once. She got a restraining order, went to court, but he never left her alone and somehow she ended up back with him. She had two children to support, no family to rely on, no friends who could help, no money.

When I met Rachel she was in a shelter I was staying in. She was nine months pregnant, and her children, ages 2 and 4 were with her. Her husband was not. He was living in an apartment. She had been trying to get into a domestic violence shelter but couldn't so she had ended up here, at a homeless shelter that was run by people who were, for all intents and purposes, criminals. Some were, definitely, criminals. It was not a good place to be. Like several other pregnant women there, she became dehydrated from not having enough to drink. She had a room on the second floor, and she had to drag her screaming little boy and chirpy little girl up there while she was pregnant, and afterwards, when she had the baby to carry with her too.

At the shelter, they did not do much to accommodate mothers with infants. She would have to bang on the kitchen door and search the building for an employee so she could get her baby's formula from the kitchen we were not allowed to enter. She spent most of her time, with her kids, and all their stuff, and eventually with a roommate and her baby too, in her small room, upstairs. Most of the people in rooms around her were doing drugs. The bathroom was disgusting and not sanitary. There was almost never any soap or toilet paper (even though it was available for employees to give if they would do so). She was terrified her baby would catch pneumonia like several other infants had in that shelter.

You could call her a welfare mother if you wanted to use a stereotype to describe a human being. In fact, being a white woman in her 20's she fit into the category of people who do use welfare the most (contrary to the popular belief that it is minority women or teenagers who do so). She was also a victim and survivor of many things. I saw her struggle with the misery of being cramped in a tiny room pregnant and not pregnant, but always with restless kids who had nowhere to play. I saw her drag the toddler, the four-year-old, a stroller and a baby carriage, up those steps, as she had to do whenever he went anywhere. She did not go anywhere much. She had no car and it was a long walk to the bus stop with the kids and the stuff. So she did keep in contact with her abusive husband; he had a car. He could pick them up and did, a few times. She wanted to cut him off, but she needed to get out of that shelter sometimes and she needed any money she could get from him for the kids.

I saw Rachel be more than a welfare mother, more than a homeless person, and more than any stereotype. I saw her be a young woman, much younger than she looked, struggling to be a good parent. The evidence of that was obvious when you talked to her daughter who was incredibly bright, creative, and funny. She is the face I picture most when I think of homelessness, because her smile and her dramatic little voice that told me all sorts of stories were always a reminder of what so many people do not understand. People who are homeless are not necessarily stupid, or bad mothers, or lazy, or mentally ill, or drug addicts, or guilty of anything. Sometimes they happen to be little girls you could see in a suburban ballet class, only you're talking to them in the bathroom of a crummy shelter while their mother struggles to keep her sanity and raise them well and survive, alone, all at once. Rachel did all that. She had a daughter who was not only very smart, but mature beyond her years, and compassionate.

One day, she found me and said, "Mommy is crying. Because we don't have any place to live and roommate is gone, but we have nowhere to go." She shrugged her shoulders, and looked like she wanted an answer this country might never bother to give her in her lifetime, though she is only four years old. I found Rachel then; she had needed someone to talk to. Her little girl had gone hunting for a person, understanding too much for someone so small.

Rachel was what many politicians and citizens want to eliminate, a recipient of public assistance. That did not prevent her and her children from being homeless. She stayed in the shelter much longer than is usually allowed. Part of the reason for that was bureaucratic stupidity; another part was she was lucky they never kicked her out. She got extensions because she had to reapply to get a Section 8 voucher for subsidized housing. She had applied while pregnant, and, although the Department of Social Services and the Housing Department were well aware of her pregnancy; they did not count her unborn child as a future resident of her future home. Rachel did not even care about that; she told me the baby could sleep with her, she did not need any extra space for her. But you do not get to decide things like that when you apply for public assistance. A baby (born) is a resident; therefore it is illegal to have one living in a subsidized house without having her listed as a resident.

So what happened to Rachel was that she actually got her coveted voucher; the goal of most shelter residents. She had it and was ready to look for a place. But then she was told she had to reapply. So she did. She finally got her new voucher. She had been at the shelter for at least three months by then. Like most of us, she was miserable there and could not wait to move out. Yet, even with that voucher that took such a hassle to get, she did not find housing by the time I left. She went to look at apartments one day, and told me, enthusiastically, how she was hoping to find one. A man she had met through a telephone personals line was diving her and her children around to do this, since she had no easier way to get around.

She came back disappointed. See, since she was arrested at 18 for sleeping on a park bench, while pregnant, homeless, and recently raped, she had a criminal record. That meant she did not pass the background check for that apartment complex or for several other ones. She also did not have a great credit history, which was also held against her. She did not want to move into a place that would have taken her easily, an apartment in a project; like most of the mothers at that shelter, she did not feel that her kids would be safe in an environment of drugs and violence. She just wanted an apartment in a decent place.

To illustrate how sadly common such an experience is, here is a quote by one of the homeless women featured in Eliot Liebow's book, Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women, "Kim: "The #1 reason why a job is not the way out of homelessness is discrimination in housing. We may have the money to rent an apartment, but the minimum income requirement is out of reach for many of us. Apartment management companies require an established positive credit history and recent rental references that homeless persons, due to circumstances and situation, very often do not have. Rental policy restricting the number of persons per apartment directly prevents poverty-level wage earners from obtaining housing"."

So, despite fair housing laws, housing discrimination exists. Despite the remnants of welfare available from states (but not from the federal government thanks to so-called welfare reform), a mother and her children can be homeless. Despite the stereotype known as "welfare mother", a mother struggling to survive with her children is no less a human being than any mother you know. Despite being ostracized by society, these women survive, and survive, and survive. But each blow they take knocks their self-esteem a notch, puts a dent into their goals and dreams, jades them a bit more. They do not deserve these blows.

What they deserve is a decent amount of money and housing to raise their children, child-care to be able to work since America wants them off welfare so badly, and job-training so they can get jobs that will allow them to feed and clothe their children and themselves, and pay rent since America wants them off welfare so badly. Maybe what America should want is for a brilliant four-year-old, and her little brother, and her baby sister, and her mom, to be treated like human beings, like people equal to the rest of us, the way a democracy is supposed to treat its citizens. Maybe America should want to put an end to child abuse, domestic violence, sexism, and poverty, rather than an end to an amount of money that adds up to nothing but a tiny Band-Aid on a huge, gaping wound.