Sweet Jane

OK.  Now I've gone and done it.  I just had to unlock the memory box and now they are tumbling out.  My plan, such as it is, is to record these stories as I think of them, in no particular order.


I'm not certain why I start with Jane except for the fact that it's a good story.


In two respects her story was not typical.  For one, she did not have children.  For another, most women we dealt with did not have visible injuries.  It is amazing the different ways there are to hurt a person without leaving marks.

She arrived at the shelter at a point when I was employed there and had some experience under my belt.  We had a big dry erase board in the office on which we would write the names of the residents and in which room they were staying.  The shelter was (theoretically) staffed 24 hours a day.  Part of the morning routine was checking the board for new intakes from the previous night.

It's important to point out that this was a group living situation, thus a certain amount of regimentation was necessary to assure the smooth running of the place.  The families did not just hang around doing nothing.  There really wasn't time for that.  The house itself needed to be maintained, so there was a rotating chore list for cooking meals, doing dishes, and cleaning bathrooms.  There really is no escape from housework!  The women also had a limited amount of time, 30 days, to figure out what to do and where to live. 


The full-time staffer I worked with, Wendy, was the daughter of a state trooper and an enforcer of the rules.  She came in that morning and noted that the new resident was not yet up and about, so she sent me upstairs to rouse her.

That's when I met Jane.

She was awake, but still cowered under her blanket.  She had two of the worst looking black eyes I think I have ever seen.  With her small frame and swollen face she bore an uncanny resemblance to ET.  I'm hoping that I remember correctly that I didn't have the heart to make her get out of bed.  Once Wendy saw her I think she agreed.

Jane was a ghost of a person.  Petite and soft-spoken with a gentle southern drawl.  I swear she trembled all the time.

But the clock was running.  She had to move forward in putting a life back together.

A rite of passage for coming to the shelter was applying for Welfare (aka Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), now known as TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families)).  It was a simple equation.  Women in the shelter were classified as homeless.  Unless you had the money to hire a civil attorney, or good grounds for an arrest, you were not going to be returning to the home you came from.  The shelter only received funding for each resident for a 30 day stay.  In that time these women, most of whom didn't work, had to come up with a regular income and enough money for a deposit, first month's rent, and utilities.  Welfare, for all its headaches, took care of that.

I took Jane to the Welfare office.  Imagine your most stereotypical image of the place and I'm sure this place was worse.  The building it used to be housed in, it has since relocated, was an old school which had not been remodeled very well.  It retained a certain oppressive, dusty, institutional atmosphere.  The long waiting room had no windows, just big overhead fluorescent lights.  The walls were painted a color that must have been called "Bureaucratic Dinge" on the paint swatch.  I also used to joke that the receptionists were raised on a special farm.  They were large women parked behind the glass who, I swear, absolutely never cracked a smile.  Not rude, exactly, but any attempts at pleasantry made no impact on their demeanor.

This was torturous for Jane.  Not only was it humiliating to have to apply for public assistance, but she was convinced that everyone was staring at her.  Truth be told she was right.

I don't think she stayed at the shelter very long.  She was too fragile and returned home.  This happened a lot.  Unless the resident had been a complete nightmare to work with, and some were, we always let the women know that they were welcome to call or come back to us if needed.

Fast forward about a year.

Sharon came back, and it was amazing.  She was a new woman.  I think it happened that she was returning home from shopping one day, and, aside from the grilling she was sure to receive about where she had been and what she'd been doing, she'd realized that she'd forgotten to buy her husband's cigarettes.  She knew she was probably headed for a beating and something in her just snapped.  She never went home.  She left with only the clothes on her back.

And she came back a new woman infused with strength and energy.  It had finally broken through for her that she didn't need to take it anymore, and she preached this gospel to her fellow residents.  She was happy.  She was funny.  Now that her face was back to normal she was cute as a button.

She wound up relocating, and, sweet person that she was, she even sent us a letter to let us know that she was okay.  Still happy that she had left.  Told us, though, that one day she was walking in high heels, slipped on a slick floor and fell, banging her nose against a doorknob on her way down.

Yep.  Once again she had two black eyes. 

Chrysalis

What I will always remember is the laundry.

The house that was Chrysalis was as much a character in the story as anyone I ever met there.

The theory of a shelter is to be a safe house, therefore we kept our location confidential. But it was a house in a neighborhood. We were hiding in plain sight. The neighbors had to know something was up, but there were various types of group homes around so we blended in suprisingly well.

It was a large, faded beauty of a house on a small lot. There was no front yard to speak of and the back yard was taken up with a decrepit garage and a small gravel parking lot. We only used the back door, never enjoyed the porch on the front of the house.

Walking in the back door led to two sets of steps. One went straight ahead and led to the door to the kitchen. The other went down to the right and led directly to the washer and dryer in the basement. They were always, and I mean always, running. It would be the first thing to greet me when I walked in the door.

I'll give a quick tour. Past the kitchen was a small hallway. There was a bathroom to the right and what once must have been either a dining area or pantry to the left. The room to the left was our office, separated from the hallway by a swinging wooden door. Straight through the hallway there was a living room to the left and a foyer with a large wooden staircase on the right. In between the two was a small room, perhaps a small study, that had been converted to a bedroom. Upstairs there was another bathroom and an additional four bedrooms, two of them interconnected. The upstairs bedrooms all had multiple sets of (very uncomfortable) bunk beds.

I can't remember what our capacity actually was, probably about 18 beds. There were times we went over that, usually we'd be under. Having four to six families, women and their children, at a time seemed typical. We'd shoehorn them into the rooms however they would fit.

As I mentioned at the outset, it had been a beautiful house. Inside it had wooden trim and floors that were probably oak. The office was separated from the living room by wooden pocket doors that were kept permanently closed. The furniture was shabby, the plumbing temperamental, and the walls had suffered much from the number of children passing through. But it still retained a certain aura of coziness. Instead of feeling like an institution, it could feel like a home.

Here is how it worked. Most often a woman would call and request help on her own either because she was fearing an attack or had just been through one and was at her wit's end. After an initial phone intake, if shelter was determined to be appropriate, we would arrange to meet her in a public place, preferably the local police station. From there we would pick her and her children up and bring them to Chrysalis.

There was a certain similarity to the arrivals. We'd pull up to the back door with the family, their belongings, if they'd brought any, in garbage bags. The women were generally quiet - stunned, overwhelmed, and exhausted. The kids never seemed to be as freaked out. Some were too young to appreciate what was happening, and I think many of the older ones were simply too accustomed to chaos.

It's hard to express what a momentous time this must have been for these women. Terrifying, really, especially if this was the first time she'd ever left. But imagine a woman walking in the back door. She would be greeted by the dull roar and clean scent of laundry. Then she would walk into the kitchen with its ever present pot of coffee and perhaps the aroma of dinner cooking. (The residents took turns cooking for the whole house.) I'd like to think the sheer normalcy of the setting brought some comfort.

I was still working at Chrysalis when it moved to a larger, more institutional, setting and it really wasn't the same. In the house the staff and residents were constantly in each others' spaces. It literally, and figuratively, brought us together.

The house still exists. I think it has returned to being a private residence and appears to be well cared for by its new owners. I still give it a silent salute if I happen to drive by.

An Introduction

All people are a fascinating collection of stories.

This is the story of what happens when a young do-gooder with boundary issues of her own tries to save the world. In other words, it's about the 3 years (approximately) I spent working at a battered women's shelter fresh out of college.

When I was in high school I interviewed my French teacher and wrote a story for the school paper about her harrowing childhood in World War II France. Her family home was bombed, and she talked about how sometimes she would develop a bump under her skin from a long-buried piece of shrapnel rising to the surface. That is how I would describe my memories from the shelter. A name, a face, a story will pop into my head at odd times, and now I feel compelled to let them out.

Writing these stories is a ticklish business. First and foremost is the fact that the work I did was under a tight lid of confidentiality. If we met a former client on the street we generally didn't acknowledge knowing them or, if we did, not where we knew them from. I'm aware, however, that nearly a quarter of a century has passed. The agency I worked for no longer exists, the shelter has re-located and is under new management. I will never use actual names and will work to keep details vague.

Still, I think it is important that these stories be shared. It was a crash course in poverty, justice, ideals versus reality, and the best and worst that humanity has to offer.

It all started my senior year in college. Actually, it starts with the fact that I chose a psychology degree in the first place. Like many people who enter the field, it was about my needing to fix my own issues, something I couldn't have realized at the time. In a department that prided itself on psychology as hard science, I was what I actually heard one of my professors refer to (somewhat disparagingly) as a "do-gooder." It was not a happy fit. I struggled to pass my statistics and computer science prerequisites.

By senior year, however, I could finally take the psychology practicum, a chance to be exposed to actual work in the field. We were placed as "interns" with various agencies in the area. This completely overlooked the fact, though, that a bachelor's degree in psych doesn't qualify one to actually DO ANYTHING in the field. Many of my classmates ended up doing a lot of observing.

I, on the other hand, was eager to wade into the fray. For reasons I can't fully explain, I really wanted to get involved with crisis intervention. The stars aligned, the Fates decided, and I ended up being placed at Chrysalis, the area domestic violence shelter. Being relegated to the sidelines there was never really a problem.

I wound-up staying for 3 years. First as a student, then working from part-time to unofficial full-time, then about a year officially full-time. I feel like I read somewhere that about 3 years is the average life-span for a career in front-line social work. The cruel truth is that caring makes you a better worker, but it also causes you to burn out faster. I cared a lot and burnt to a crisp.

It is also VERY important to note that Chrysalis was in no way a typical shelter being run in a typical manner. It was a very idiosyncratic collection of people (by that I mean the director and fellow staff members) in its own peculiar place. I repeat - the agency and shelter I worked for no longer exist. My recollections should not be a reflection on shelters in general.

OK. Now that I've (hopefully) piqued your interest, I'm tired of writing for now. Please check back soon for some actual stories.