Kirsten Anderberg

I was riding the bus today, lost in thought, when the bus pulled up to a stop and I looked out the window I was leaning against to see several women, with their baggage and small children, sitting on the pavement in a parking lot, looking weary and forlorn. I was immediately overcome with a familiarity; it reminded me horribly of my mom and me, when I was a child. I immediately realized this was a pick up spot for homeless shelters. As my bus rolled on, I saw the next block was lined with women, young and old, carrying their bags, hovering around, looking agitated, anxious, hot, worn out, and desperate, waiting outside the YWCA in downtown Seattle, to see if they will have shelter tonight (as local shelters cannot accommodate all of the women who need shelter nightly). By the time we had rolled past that block, I was in tears. I looked around me on the bus. It seemed no one even noticed what was outside our windows for the full length of the previous block.

"Once you have been homeless, you can never go back," I scribbled on a piece of scrap paper in my backpack. It occurred to me that perhaps many of the people on the bus around me did not understand what was going on out there on the street around the YWCA. It occurred to me that many, if not most, of those on the bus around me, had never been homeless and thus would not recognize that snippet of street reality that just was in our windows, for the painful scene of suffering it was. The way that scene got my attention was something outside the window triggered a very strong feeling in me, a bad feeling, a feeling of discomfort and anxiety, yet a familiar feeling, and I looked out. What I saw was me as a child, and my mom, fretting in worry, as we waited to figure out where we would sleep that night. I remember that feeling so much that I am still shaken hours later after feeling it again.

Outside the YWCA this evening, there were many women pacing around outside. And in the brief moments I looked at them through my bus window, I could remember the feeling of homelessness so vividly. And it is not a feeling I remember with any romance or sentimentality. I look at the periods I was homeless as pure survival and am glad I survived them. I do not look at them as adventurous times, at all. They are not fun memories, but scary, sad memories. Tonight I saw those mothers sitting out there, waiting, with those looks of surrender, those looks my mom had, like she had just given up...but I saw that look on the younger women out front of the YWCA too. Homelessness is incredibly hard work. It is a slippery slope. If you do not get out of homelessness quick enough, it becomes like quicksand, on several levels. Not only does it get hard to find somewhere to live and work without housing and clean clothing, etc., but there is this thing where you lose the will to try after a while and once that threshold is reached, all can just implode irreversibly. I feel my mom went over that threshold, and I have hovered at it, but thank god, never gone over it. I always got out of homelessness just before I gave up, is how I look at it. And when I see homeless women, frustrated, weighed down with their bags, I think, "there, but by the grace of god, go I."

People's reactions to poverty and homelessness can often be linked to the way they were raised. My dad was raised in a large single parent family in poverty during the Depression. My mom, in contrast, was raised in relative class privilege until her mid-30's when she went on welfare after the divorce. My dad was always embarrassed of his poverty and hated his mother for allowing them to be poor, basically. So his way of dealing with that, was to go into the Navy, get on the G.I.Bill, and to become an engineer. He then worked on making money and made sure to look away whenever poverty was anywhere near. He taught me not to look at poverty and to even shun it as well. But then my mom and I became poor, due to him not paying his child support and alimony and my mom being a single mom. My mom had taught me to be friends with poor kids, and also taught me that there was nothing wrong or "lesser" in poverty, as she had never been poor, and it really had nothing to do with her directly. Unlike my dad, who made every effort to LOOK AWAY from the poor and homeless people, my mom looked and spoke about the class oppression for what it was and condemned the powers that created poverty, such as racism, sexism, etc. before she was poor. I think that probably helped save her some sanity later when she became the poor.

My first homeless experience was with my mom when I was about 7. After that, I went through a series of institutional and foster care situations, then I went back to my mom. We were then thrown out of two different residences when we first moved to Seattle, when I was about 9 years old. It was scary being thrown out. I remember one time, we came home, and our bags and belongings were on the lawn and we were told to leave. And we had no car. And no money. And my mom freaked out, broke down, it scared the hell out of me. And when I saw those women tonight in that parking lot, I felt that feeling my mom used to sweat out her pores. I could smell it through the bus' thick windowpane. That sorrow is a smell I can smell from far away.

There are many religious axioms that have stories of people who were ignorant of suffering on earth, but then they see it, smell it, touch it, and they cannot go back. They are not the same. And once this is seen, one's duties on earth and to each other change. If one did not help others when one did not know there was suffering, that is one thing. If one refuses to help others, when he does know about the suffering, and he could help alleviate it, then that is considered sinful. And due to my knowledge that women are on their last legs, lining up at shelters, in my town, every night, makes me horribly uncomfortable. The others on the bus tonight had no feelings about it at all, it seemed. But me, it still is haunting me. I have just barely achieved sustainable housing in the last two years myself, and I would lose my housing if I brought a river of homeless folks into my apt, yet, the survivor guilt is very haunting and frankly, I am not sure what to do with it either.

It is true that once you have been homeless, you can never go back. I saw those women today in the parking lot as homeless mothers, when maybe the others on the bus just thought a bunch of women were hanging around together in a parking lot. But it was the grief on their faces that I recognized. And if you do not recognize that grief, having never been near it, then you have a sort of innocence, almost an excusable ignorance.

Not a day passes, that I do not thank the gods for my housing. I am serious. I have been homeless so many times this lifetime, that I do not take housing for granted, at all. As a matter of fact, that is why you can never go back. I never had fears of homelessness until I had been homeless. Until it happens to you, you do not really understand what being homeless entails and you do not think it has to do with you. When you realize it can happen to you, it looks very different than just some street scene you can roll by. I still have a haunting feeling about those women I saw tonight, and I can still feel my tears welling up as I even think about the front of the YWCA tonight. Because homelessness will forever be a wolf howling at my door, and I am always too close to being those women, which is why I cry, most probably. I cry for me, in them. And them, in me. I just think a world this full of riches, especially in a country claiming to be the last remaining Superpower, can only be shamed for lines of homeless women on modern streets praying for a night's housing in desperation. And my survivor guilt is something I wrestle with every night, as I sleep in my bed, in my housing, that I know so many do not have.

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Source: http://users.resist.ca/~kirstena/pageonceyouvebeenhomeless.html