Bad Day, Worse Ending

After a couple of hours in the waiting area and another couple of hours in the back offices with the caseworker filling out paperwork and another hour-and-a-half or so outside having lunch the kids and I returned to the waiting area for someone to call us in the back again to tell us in which shelter we would be placed. This was not a fun day for any of us, the kids would have much rather been in school but it was required that they be there at Social Services for us to be placed. Just another dumbass rule.

After another hour or so we were finally called into the back offices again by the same caseworker. He led us into a cubicle where we were joined by an elderly woman who carried a stack of papers. She didn’t sit but very flatly told me that we would be placed at Project Redirect in Wyandanch, NY. I stared at her like she was nuts and then I started to cry. I wasn’t just softly letting the tears flow, I was crying to the point that I couldn’t talk. You know what she said to me after offering me a tissue? “You need to stop crying, you’re scaring your kids.” Fuck you, bitch!

I was scared myself and, contrary to popular belief, it’s okay to cry in front of my kids. It’s okay to let them know that I was scared and that I was not happy with our situation. Not only was I scared but I was humiliated. I was 43 years old, couldn't find a job and had to put my family in a homeless shelter. I felt like I'd let my kids down, that I'd let myself down, and I had absolutely no clue what would happen after we got to the shelter. The male caseworker excused himself to get back to his job, although I just think he couldn't handle my extreme emotional state, and the woman finally sat down.

She said she understood why I was upset at having to be placed in a shelter but that sometimes it was just what people had to do. DUH! I knew that, but I also knew that she understood absolutely zilch about how I was feeling, and I didn't bother to tell her. She wouldn't have cared anyway. I explained to her that I didn’t want to go to Wyandanch because it was about 45 minutes away from where we’d been staying with my friend and where the kids went to school, not to mention the fact that it wasn’t exactly known to be a very safe area. She said it was the only opening they had right then so we didn’t have a choice.

Then I started asking questions. What did I do with my two cats? Were they allowed to be with us? No, they weren’t and she didn’t know of any facilities that would foster the cats for me. I asked what they expected families with pets to do with the pets when they didn’t want to get rid of them. She was clueless. My cats are part of my family and there is no way in the world I would get rid of them. I’d have to figure out what to do with them until we got out of the shelter.

I asked her what I was supposed to do about my belongings since they’d already made arrangements with me for the storage company to pick them up the next morning. I made it very clear that I wasn’t about to get my kids up at 5:30 in the morning to drive all that way to let the movers take my things and then have to turn around and drive all the way back to the shelter to take care of business there. She looked stunned, not by what I’d said but by the fact that the movers were scheduled for the next morning. “Oh, you’ve made arrangements for that already?” Her department made the arrangements for me. Just another example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

So I asked if we could just stay at my friend’s house that night and report to the shelter the next morning. Her answer aggravated the shit out of me and I wanted to slap her just on principle alone. She said that we could stay at my friend’s house that night but would have to report back to Social Services the next morning to be placed again. I seriously wished she was kidding but she wasn’t. She said that once we were placed the State was paying for us to be there so we had to actually sleep in the shelter because a bed hold wasn’t permitted. I didn’t know what a bed hold was and I didn’t care right then. I’d find out what it was at a later date.

I took a few deep breaths to calm down and asked if I had to bring the kids back with me the next day because I didn’t want them missing any more school. Yep, they had to be there. Now if I’d kept my kids out of school because I felt like it the State would have been all over my ass for educational neglect. But I guess it was okay for them to miss school because the State mandated that they be at Social Services to be placed in a homeless shelter. Stupid mother fuckers, the whole lot of them. Whatever! If the kids had to be there, they would be there.

Finally I asked her what we needed to bring with us to the shelter as far as clothing, bedding, kitchen supplies, or anything else we might need. When we showed up that day we didn’t bring anything with us because I’d never thought to ask in all of my phone conversations and nobody ever offered the information to me. She actually told me she didn’t know what we needed to bring because we may not be placed in the same shelter. If we were in a shelter we might have cooking privileges – I didn’t realize cooking was a privilege, I’d always thought it was a necessity – or we might be placed in a motel and given a meal allowance. To me a meal allowance meant that my kids would be eating fast food for weeks. That was unacceptable to me but, again, I didn’t really have much choice.

She did say that we “probably” didn’t need to bring much clothing because we wouldn’t be there more than a week or so, that the staff at the shelter would help me find a place quickly. I didn’t really know what to believe because she’d been so unhelpful with her answers up to that point. I came to find out later that she had no clue whatsoever what living in a shelter meant. So I simply told her that we’d stay with my friend that night and wait for our belongings to be picked up by the storage company the next morning and would then return to Social Services to spend another not-so-fun-filled day sitting and waiting to be placed in a homeless shelter. I gathered my kids and we left, already resigned to the fact that June 1^st would be just as bad as May 31^st had been.

Until next time…peace to all.