Tag Archives: families

More Adventures with Homeless People

Talk radio is a tough medium. Hosts can be hostile; callers are often abusive. Liberal pundits avoid these venues, where they come under attack with no one to defend them. Facts turn out to be puny weapons against ignorance and prejudice. But the guests on this particular show were as tough as the medium. And they came armed with more than facts. They had stories to tell.

More than 30 years ago, I sat in the green room at WRKO in Boston, watching four women battle with host Gene Burns and his right-wing audience. These women were homeless along with their children. They were living in welfare motels and time was running out on their stays. If they couldn’t find anywhere to move when their time was up, the state would put their kids in foster care and they’d be on the street. They had nowhere to move; if they hadn’t already run through all their options, they wouldn’t have been in the motels. They were desperate. They were angry. They had nothing left to lose.

Burns expected these women to be victims, or leeches. He had no idea who he’d be dealing with. These women were warriors.

TriCap, a local anti-poverty agency, had hired me to organize people on welfare, scraping my poverty-level salary from the dregs of federal and state programs. I got to know dozens of homeless parents over a year of meetings. These four women were among the most articulate and clear-minded people I had met. They had been training for this show one day a week for a month.

In Massachusetts, families can only get shelter if they go through the whole eviction process, waiting until the Sheriff throws all their belongings out on the street.
photo from Bread of Life in Malden, MA

At our first training, the women told their stories. One survived a serious illness but lost her job. Another one’s husband disappeared with their car and their life savings. Another fled a man who had raped her daughter. The fourth had been trying to escape dependency by going to college, until the state raised the fees so she could no longer afford rent. The women critiqued one another’s stories: be sure to tell that part, maybe leave those details out.

At the second training, we brainstormed how to respond to the worst calls they might get on the show. They came up with witty rejoinders to every ugly assumption, corrections for each common misunderstanding. They practiced responding calmly to name-calling. We laughed a lot that day.

The Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless sent a policy wonk to our third meeting. She handed out one-page fact sheets and the women quizzed her on state policies. That was a serious discussion. We had pizza, and they brought leftover slices back to the motels where volunteers had been taking care of their kids.

Our fourth meeting wasn’t really a training. The only thing we did was tell our birthing stories. Only mothers can stand all the gory details, and even relish them, if mother and baby survived. By the end of that day we were sisters.

Burns had booked the women for the first hour of his four-hour show. After that hour, he called me in the green room to see if they could stay another hour. He did that twice more. When they started talking, he was skeptical and condescending. But as they answered his questions honestly, and met his listeners’ nasty comments with humor and understanding, his attitude shifted. Eventually he started saying things like “I can’t believe this is happening in America” and “This is such a cruel system, we have to change it.” Even his callers began to show some respect.

The show ended at 2pm. Burns thanked the women, praised their intelligence and courage, and then told them the station wanted to treat them to lunch at a nearby Italian restaurant. That was the first hot food some of them had eaten in months. They weren’t allowed to cook in the motels. Everyone got boxes for the leftovers, to give their kids.

We had to take three trains back to our ride in Revere. An old man was playing guitar in the Park Street subway station where we waited for the first train. He began to sing “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” a standard by Doris Day that everyone seemed to know. We sang along.

Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you
Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you
But in your dreams whatever they be
Dream a little dream of me

When our train came in, I gave him my box of leftover lasagna. After we got on board, he blew us kisses while we waved and smiled.

Burns told us that his show reached 100,000 people. Two weeks after the women’s show ran live, he played the whole thing again, on Mother’s Day. Who knows how many minds the women changed. Maybe the strength they showed that day was enough to bear them through whatever came next. But I don’t know what happened to them. Their time at the motels ran out, and in those years before cell phones and email, we had no way to stay in touch.

Today, the US is about to experience a new wave of homelessness, worse than the one Reagan caused when he destroyed affordable housing programs in the 1980s. There have been eviction moratoriums during the pandemic, but they don’t cover everybody and they can’t last forever. Sooner or later, the rent will come due. Many renters won’t be able to pay. Some will find new, cheaper housing. Some won’t.

There are still talk radio shows people listen to while they drive to work, and podcasts galore. Pundits will share what they think about homelessness. I hope somebody remembers to ask the homeless.

Adventures with Homeless People

The women were nervous when we entered the Statehouse. They had chatted excitedly all the way from the welfare motel in Everett, where two volunteers with vans had picked us up. But now the sight of the enormous gold dome, the series of broad granite steps, and the lofty, echoing marble entryway intimidated them into silence. I handed out the information packets we had written together. Before they split up to go to various legislators’ offices, I reminded them that they were the experts. They were here to educate their elected representatives about family homelessness.

I was here as a baby-walker for one mother who couldn’t keep her infant quiet while she was sitting still. He slept on my shoulder as I wandered the halls. I was also responsible for a four-year-old, antsy from months of confinement in one room, who darted around touching things but came when I called her. I consulted my hand-drawn map to find the offices where we had made appointments. Sometimes the doors were open, and I could see the women talking calmly to the men behind the desks. During our training sessions, I tried to build their confidence by assuring them that they had built-in advantages communicating with the reps, since they were women and the reps were, well, men.

At one point, the elevator doors opened near me and my small charges. In the elevator stood that redheaded scourge, Barbara Anderson, then head of Citizens for Limited Taxation, and her coterie of tall white men in suits. While the doors stayed open, I blurted: “You’re kicking families out of their housing! You’re hurting old people and sick people! Shame on you!” Everyone in the elevator looked over my head, stone-faced. The little girl asked me why I yelled at that woman. “She’s part of the reason you and your mom had to leave home, honey.”

This was an emergency situation, even for people whose whole lives were one long emergency. Massachusetts was planning to kick hundreds of families out of shelters and motels when the federal funds ran out, refusing to pick up the tab for their stays with state money. That deadline was approaching for many in the following week. These were women and children, and a few men, with absolutely nowhere else to go.

It was the late 1980s. Reagan was tough on poor people and all the programs ever designed to help them. I had been hired by an anti-poverty agency with the dregs of state and federal funding to organize people on welfare. People on welfare, I soon discovered, did not want to stick their heads up for fear of losing the little they had. They were happy to meet once a week and eat free doughnuts and complain about the system. They provided good support for one another. But they were not going to speak out in public and risk coming to the attention of the authorities, which could cut off their benefits for any reason at any time.

Families in the welfare motels, however, were facing eviction from their last housing option. They had nothing left to lose. They were angry, and scared, and they were ready to fight.

The welfare motels were terrible housing, but better than nothing. Several kids could be crowded into one room with their parent. There was mold; there was falling plaster; there was broken plumbing; there were cockroaches. The hotels would not allow hotplates so all their meals were cold. Children had no place to play, and often could not reach the schools in their home communities.

Parents were already traumatized. Some had suffered an accident or illness that made them unable to work for a time. They lost their jobs, then their housing. Some had gotten the short end of the stick in a divorce. One married her high school sweetheart and soon got pregnant. When the baby was born, her husband left her, disappearing with their car and all the money in their bank account. Some women had children with medical problems, and the only way to get health care for them was to leave their jobs and go on welfare. Many of these families had suffered actual eviction, where they watched as sheriff’s deputies carried their belongings out to the street.

The women told their stories to the legislators. They also dispelled some myths. Most people on welfare were white. Less than half of all families on welfare had access to any public or subsidized housing. The majority had worked full time until they no longer could, often because they couldn’t afford childcare and refused to leave their children alone. Some had worked part time, under the table, because every dime they admitted to making came out of their welfare check, which was about half what they needed to survive. Sooner or later they couldn’t make the rent. They and their children couch surfed with friends and family members until they got kicked out. Some had already lost a child to the foster care system because they had no safe place to stay.

We met up at the agreed-upon place and time. The women were exhausted. On the way home, they talked about the legislators’ reactions, or their lack of reaction. None of the legislators had known about the planned evictions until the women told them. Some of the moms said they had spoken with a reporter for a local news radio station, the only media person who responded to the press release I had sent to so many.

Back at the hotel, we all crammed into one room to watch the six o’clock news on tv. We were astounded to see the state welfare commissioner make a statement, in the midst of camera flashes and boom mics. The state had never planned to evict homeless families from the hotels, she said; that was all a misunderstanding.

In the motel room, there were screams and laughter and hugs and tears. These women were warriors. They were fighting a war against impossible odds. But today, on this battlefield, they had won.

Why women need abortions

Let me start by pissing everybody off. I think both sides of this debate have important things to say. If women have no access to abortion, they have no freedom to determine the course of their lives. But when the anti-choice people tell us the fetus should be respected as a human in progress, we should listen. Even if we must take a life, we should recognize that it is sacred, and grieve the necessity of its loss.

Being a mother is a heavy responsibility. The pregnancy is the least of it, though being pregnant is uncomfortable, inconvenient, and challenging to your physical and mental health. By the time a baby is born, you are tied to the child forever on an emotional level, whether or not you keep it to raise. You brought a new person into this difficult and dangerous world, and the fate of this tiny being in large part depends on you.

If a woman is not ready to take care of a child, either financially or emotionally, forcing her to bear one is a cruel and unusual punishment.

In America, it’s a struggle for families to stay together. Many jobs pay barely enough to support one person, never mind two or three, and lack of money can ruin even relationships that began in love and tenderness. There is not much corporate or governmental support for pregnancy and child-rearing, and little access to help of any kind if financial disaster strikes. When a couple breaks up, most often it’s the man who leaves and the woman who is left with the child.

Even mothers with money have a hard time. The focus of news and gossip has been the fathers and potential fathers as they compete for money and power. The needs of mothers have not been foremost, never mind the needs of children.

But women and children without money, without men? That’s a disaster. Much of the misery in pre-pandemic America came from trying to raise families without enough money. If the father is not able to make enough money to help support the child, the man’s hurt pride is often enough to make him take off.  But even if the men stick around, it’s hard.

And it is to her children that a mother owes her first allegiance. Once you give birth to them, you are theirs for life, no matter what happens. You and the father, whatever your relationship – you were volunteers. Your children came into your hands completely at your mercy, through no fault of their own.

Because raising a child is such an enormous, costly, exhausting responsibility, people should be willing and ready to do it – at least as ready as you can be for this stranger who will remake your life. If a woman is not ready to take care of a child, either financially or emotionally, forcing her to bear one is a cruel and unusual punishment. Of course she most likely will love the child, but that is hardly the point.

To bear a child you can’t feed, can’t keep safe, whom you can’t be there for – that is a terrible kind of pain. Society has no right to make you bear it. In either sense.

Abortion is far from the worst thing we have to worry about, this year or any year. Actual, born, no-argument-human beings are getting killed every day, including infants. Yet somehow, the anti-abortion people don’t view war or domestic violence as a larger problem. They see abortion as the murder of innocents. Does a fetus lose its innocence once it is born?

So let’s try to retain some perspective on abortion. The alternative is for a woman to continue a pregnancy she does not want and bear a child for whom she is not ready. That child will be a burden on her life and her heart, no matter if she keeps it or gives it away. That child will begin life with a big count against it. And if society forces a woman to give birth no matter what the circumstances, will society then help her deal with the consequences? Let’s not kid ourselves, if you’ll forgive the pun. That woman and her child will be on their own.