Never Ending Cycle - Welcome Project

A two-part audio story, told by mother and son, about their experiences with family, work, health, and homelessness.

This story is from the Invisible Project, a collaboration between the Welcome Project and Porter County Coalition for Affordable Housing, Housing Opportunities, Gabriel’s Horn, Dayspring Women’s Center, and Porter County Museum.

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Transcript for Never Ending Cycle

A two-part audio story, told by mother and son, about their experiences with family, work, health, and homelessness.

(PART ONE)

I’m fifty seven years old. I worked from the time I was twenty one to the time I was fifty one when I had the heart attack. It’s not like I didn’t work. I worked. And it’s embarrassing when you have to put everything out on the table and say, Well, this has happened to me, and I’m trying very hard right now, but I just can’t get it together. And I don’t have the wherewithal right now to get back to work. And I need to keep these bills, I don’t have any family that’s another thing. A lot of people don’t believe you don’t have any family. And we don’t have any family. I mean we do, but they’re not in our lives, they’re not assisting us. And that part of it was very difficult for me.

(MOTHER)

My mom died in 1983 and my dad died in August first 1991. I was pregnant with him, he was born October sixth. From my father’s death, I had Sharon, my sister, Sharon. Once my dad died, I became her legal guardian. For twelve years I took care of her. My father provided a stipend for her, like eleven hundred dollars a month. But that was for her. Nobody helped me. I have a brother who lived less than a mile away. I have a set of twins, girls, sisters. Nobody called, nobody sent money. And then Sharon had a lot of physical issues. I needed a bigger bathroom. And I took my IRA money and I did that. I put that into the house. So I had no more, my own pension. I started losing money in 2000 and then by 2002 they had foreclosed on me. I couldn’t make up the months I had been behind. I couldn’t catch back up. And nobody would help me. Once I lost my home, they came in, and they took Sharon and put her in an assisted living facility, and never said nothing to us. They just let us… so we were homeless for eight months. And we lived in a shelter on the south side of Chicago, in a very, very, very bad neighborhood. There were shootings at night, you could hear–you could smell the gunsmoke, the gunpowder, you could smell it at night. There were times you literally had to crawl around because there was so much gunfire around. So as a young man, he’s been through a lot. I mean, an eleven-year-old lost his house. And then on the streets with his mother with nobody from this family helping him. Nobody.

(SON)

I felt like my years before ten was easy, and it should be for a child. It was in the shelter, it was an all-women’s shelter, they had children. I was like a shy… like a year away before I couldn’t be with my mother in the shelter. It wasn’t really kept very nice and it wasn’t clean at all. I was itchy like crazy. I was walking with my mother, we were getting off the bus from the doctor’s office, walked to the shelter and five youths jumped me. They hit me over the head and my mother chased them away. And they knew I was just a boy and they were like eighteen, twenty years old. I went to the hospital, there wasn’t much. Just a bruise. And that’s when my OCD tendencies came through. After losing the house and this issue with the shelter. My mom bought me a gift for my birthday. And she had very little money but she did it anyways. It was like a Gameboy and they kicked us out for that. So my mom called a friend and we moved back to the south side, not too far from our old neighborhood. She got a better job. He helped us get an apartment from his friend, that’s a landlord, and we obviously paid rent. There was… something about him that wasn’t right, with my mother. He did not like the fact that she was taking care of herself. He seemed sexist in a way. He liked everybody else that was with, a relationship, you know, I don’t know, it was just weird. That was the first time, too, I’ve also seen how my mom was being put down by somebody that gets intimidated by a woman, a single mother, who takes care of her family.

(PART TWO)

It’s very difficult to ask for help sometimes because it’s a debasing situation. You have to first of all go in and show ‘em your income, give them the reason why. And many times you have to go from the trustees to… they give you a church to go to. And they usually give you fifty dollars. And then you have to go somewhere else and they might give you a hundred dollars. And you’re trying to get six hundred and seventy dollars. I understand that that’s how it’s done and that’s just the way it is, and not everybody has six hundred and seventy dollars. But it’s just a very debasing situation to go into… then you have to explain it over and over again each time you walk into these places why you have to do it and the reason why you’re doing it. Most people I have to say are very kind. But a lot of times people will roll their eyes and look at you like, “Yeah right, what do you mean you can’t go out and find a job.”

(MOTHER)

I rented a house in Valpo, and we were there for three years? I had a heart attack and became very sick. I couldn’t afford the rent there anymore. And a neighbor on Beech street told me that if you need help with your rent–trustee’s office–they may be able to help you. So I called them up and made an appointment and kept the appointment and went in and they told me that housing opportunities may be able to help me, to contact them and see if there’s anything that they can do, and I was fortunate enough, and blessed enough, that they were able to help me. Because we would have been on the street otherwise.

(SON)

When she had her open heart surgery they helped her very good–she had no insurance. And this was the time where they shut off the water on us, for fifty dollars. And I had three cats. So I had to go to 7-Eleven, get some water, visit her, bring water back to give cats the water. And when she got out of the hospital, one of the child support checks came through, and we had to go to pay the water bill. Yeah, it’s a never ending cycle.

(EPILOGUE)

I’m definitely emotionally more stronger. But it also makes you more emotional, so you’re a little bit more vulnerable, where you see someone that’s—we would see that poor guy in Portage walking on the street, and the poor guy, has no… his neck is like this. I always would say to Andy, “That poor guy. I wonder how the heck he gets around.” So you learn to be more empathetic when you see things that… I think about walking around all the time like this, how terrible that must be for that guy. So you learn to put yourself in that person’s shoes, which I think we all need to learn a little bit more.