What does she want to see with a bum like me for anyways?

What does she want to see a bum like me for anyway?” he said. “I can’t let her see me like this.”

By this he meant greasy-haired. By this he meant a half-shaven, wearing a stained blue sweatshirt. By this he meant poor. Homeless. I don’t remember his name – if I just forgot it or if I ever knew or asked him what it was.

I was still in college, just twenty-one and working the twenty-four-hour shift at Jessie’s House; a Victorian turned into a transitional shelter for homeless families. I’d sit behind a desk in an office that might have been a formal living room. It had a never used fireplace, a commanding but dusty chandelier and a rug covering hardwood floors.

I answered the phone or door and gave out vouchers for $5.00 meals at Friendly’s or a bus ticket to Springfield where there was an emergency overnight shelter. I could never give anyone a place to sleep. In a family shelter where there were no extra rooms for the last-minute homeless, the drunk wanting to stay warm, the person in an unplanned crisis or leaving danger in the heat of a fight. The best I could give was money for maybe a bite, coffee or a bus ride.

So when the buzzer rang, as it did at least once every shift, I headed for the front entrance.

There were two doors kept locked at all times. Staffers were the only ones allowed to touch the doors. Someone might be showing up dangerous, a stalker, an enraged ex, a scary father or partner. That was the safety reason. The other was unspoken. Who knows what a resident might let in?

Between two doors I stood in the foyer. Beside me on the right, beige pants wooly sweaters and a pale blue suit hanging out of a garbage bag. The donation pile next to a stack of blank forms for those who needed proof they made a donation. I detested writing the tax receipts, and  the “do-gooders” who thought there was any monetary value to the dirty, ripped or outdated clothes they brought to the door with smiles and would claim as tax-deductible donations.

I wanted to tell them about the time I got into trouble at my job letting the residents rummage through the bags to do a donation fashion show. Middle-aged men in bright colored sweaters from a decade or three earlier. Young mothers in suits from the 1950’s with matching hats.

Didn’t people realize that the majority of homeless people work and go to school and can’t wear polyester shirts popular during the disco era anywhere?

Maybe some thought of homeless people as birds who use thread or clothes to piece together a nest or outfit. But I saw people leave for school and work and knew these clothes wouldn’t be worn.

“Can I help you?” I’d ask when answering the door always keeping one foot behind the wood so that it couldn’t be flung open by force, just in case someone was coming looking to make trouble. Quickly, I’d have to assess (which meant guess) – if the person before me was batterer or non-batterer, before allowing or inviting them into the shelter office.

“I need a voucher,” one guy said. He was a regular.

“Just follow me,” I said, relieved.

“You in school?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Where?”

I always hesitated before answering questions when alone any man in the office or the world. First, I’d wonder why he was asking.

“What do you study?” he asked.

“Sociology,” I said, self-conscious it would sound like people-like-you. I study people like you.

“My daughter studies sociology too,” he said, his face lighting up.

No. No way, I thought because I couldn’t believe he had a daughter in college even though I was a college-age woman with a homeless father. Still, I was surprised that a scruffy, middle-aged homeless man had a daughter in college – and that he spoke of her.

I bit my lip.

“Meal or ticket?” I asked.

“Excuse me,” he said.

“What kind of voucher?” I said.

“Meal,” he said.

“It’s for five dollars, o.k.?” I said.

“That’s fine,” he said, as though he had a choice or could ask for more or different.

“Do you see her,” I asked.

“My daughter? Not for years,” he said.

“Years,” I said, “You haven’t seen her in years?” My disgust slipped out.

“No, not since her mother died. My wife…”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“She died in a car accident,” he said, “My Rosie. I tried to take care of her but what good is a man with a little girl? I was broken, lost. I wasn’t very good at taking care of her anyways, you know?”

I did know.

I felt bad for asking questions, bad that I had no boundaries and no social-worker distance. He thought I was sorry about his wife, and I was, but also sorry he got me, the relief staff who had no idea what to do or say or what the hell I was even doing in this job.

His eyes filled and I felt maternal. I wanted to make him soup, to light a fire and let him sit while I wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and said, “There. There.” But this too was bad boundaries and I wasn’t supposed to care so much. I never knew where my feelings were supposed to go and how come kindness seemed to be a curse rather than a gift.

“So what happened to your daughter,” I asked poking at him with curiosity instead of warmth.

“They don’t want me to see her.” he said.

“Who are they?” I asked, angry, “You’re her father.” I said.

“I’m a drunk,” he said.

And I wondered how many times he’d heard that, been told that, or if it was his go-to line and what he said to himself?

Then I thought, Oh, I see now… I get it….  Was it him driving the car that killed his wife? Did he hurt his daughter? Did he get so drunk he forget his kids, like mine did, and leave us at the bar? Did his daughter crawl under bar stools eating peanuts or sit quiet and afraid in a corner waiting for someone to remember they were responsible for her?

Is this why I can’t let the people I work with get close to my heart?

Is this why I’m supposed to help with paper and vouchers but not feelings?

Is that why there is this imaginary line I don’t know how to find so I don’t cross it and is that why I can’t stop thinking about every person I meet and their loved ones and stories?

Like his daughter… I thought of her, this student who lost both of her parents and imagine her in blue jeans and plain white Oxford, hair neat and tight in a ponytail. I wondered if her friends know who her father is or isn’t. I wondered if she’s afraid of bumping into him, longs to see him or some mix of both. I wondered if we’ve sat, strangers, on the same bus with a similar story invisible to one another and the world we hid from as though it wasn’t within us.

“So you don’t see her,” I said, cold and flat, offering nothing of my story.

“I send her a card every year on her birthday.”

Well whoop-tee-do and good for you, I wanted to say, assuming that meant he sent no child support.

I wondered if the cards got sent or only thought about.

I felt angry, mean and jealous. At least his kid gets a card.

 “Do you call her?” I asked, and it was almost a challenge.

“No.”

“Will you?” I pressed not sure if it was for him, me or his daughter I was asking.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Not now. Maybe later when I get my life together. What does she want to see a bum like me for anyway? What does she want with a bum like me?”

“You’re her father,” I said as though that meant something, as though I believed it meant something.

A young woman knocked on the office door, a resident in her mid-twenties wearing tight jeans and a short-sleeved sweater. Her youngest child was in her arms sucking a bottle filled with sugar water while her eldest clung to one knee and stared at the man.

“Can I get into the freezer?” she said.

“Sure, let me get the key,” I said and excused myself from the office for a moment.

“What do you need?”

“Hamburgers.

The waist-high freezer coughed out a white mist as it opened. I counted out four hamburgers and handed them to her. At only twenty-one I held the key to the freezer because I was a staffer, in college, studying sociology. It felt wrong and bad and made me feel ashamed. I wanted to crawl into freezer. I wanted to say I’m sorry for the way the world works, wanted to confess I’m one of you, more resident than staff, except it wasn’t true. I was getting paid to hand her food.

I was not poor anymore. I was in college.

I never fit in wherever I was. I always felt I didn’t belong and was wrong.

When I interviewed for the job the Director, a thin white woman with long own hair told me part of my job would be to model adult-child interactions for the residents. Appropriate was the big word. I’d model appropriate interactions as apparently, the residents needed to see what that looked like.

“I don’t have kids,” thinking maybe they thought I did.

That wasn’t even an issue, was known and fine.

I realized it didn’t matter if I was a mother because I was presumed to be middle-class just because I was in college and in some social-work world that meant I’d be kinder, gentler, and more appropriate. I learned right there and then not to say too soon I had a teen mother or a homeless father and that’s why I had applied for the job, because I wanted to help people like my own family who I couldn’t help as a child, who no one seemed to care about. I didn’t say I was going to model how poverty and homelessness impact people. I nodded and smiled and with guilt and nerves, passed for middle-class and got the job.

I didn’t understand this modeling word, what it was or how it helped anyone, in a shelter or anywhere for that matter.

Does anyone feel better seeing a person half her size in an outfit on a runway when that’s not how it looks in the store or at home? Is it only plus-size people who know modeling just makes people feel bad?

I didn’t have the courage to say how it was easy for me to be nice and polite and patient to kids because I was on the job. I was getting paid. I wasn’t in crisis, poor, without a home and living with a bunch of strangers in one room with three kids under five. If I were really to be modeling interactions shouldn’t I also be modeling the conditions the parents were living under in order to know how to manage in those?

How could a cheery and seeming carefree me help a parent in crisis to parent? It felt punitive, mean and ridiculous.

Isn’t homelessness about not having a home? Isn’t poverty about not having money? Had I missed something obvious that made me not understand why manners, social skills and classes were required by the residents?

I liked the social workers. They were nice but they seemed to know a lot about social work and almost nothing about homelessness or poverty and didn’t seem to think this was even problematic.

*

When I got back to the office to get the guy his voucher, the guy was gone. I didn’t hear the door close.

Like my father, he just disappeared.

And then I wondered if he had ever had a daughter at all or if I was suckered and maybe he was trying to get more sympathy or a bigger voucher. I put the freezer key back, and I watched it swing from side to side I thought, he probably stole the voucher booklet, I’m such an idiot, and I panicked realizing I wasn’t supposed to have left him alone in the office.

What would I tell the other staffers?

But the booklet wasn’t stolen. It was still on the desk with his $5. voucher. What made him go without it?

I looked out the window hoping to see him so I could yell and call him back and let him know but he was done.

There were four hours left on my shift, and I couldn’t help think of him, his Rosie and her too short life, and their kid. I wonder if his daughter is a shattered girl or a together one or some mix of both like me.

I ached the way one aches over people not even known. I empathized with his daughter and wondered if she kept his name, like I kept mine, kept his existence a secret or had found a better way. The one I still hadn’t found.

And him? I see his scruffy-face, his greasy hair and the dark blue sweater with darker stains even now, decades later. He was a homeless, middle-aged man who I assumed was alcoholic and vulnerable like my own father. I imagine him seeking refuge at a shelter in Boston.

I wondered for years if someone sits behind a desk and ask about his daughter and if so, does he have any pictures or stories to share? What does he say? Does he pull a picture of my sister or me or does he avoid conversation and eye contact?

And I wonder too if she is out there, this faceless social worker in the city working a night shift. Does she have a name? Does she know the reason my father left and never returned?

Does she feel bad for him, a veteran of Vietnam left to fend for himself like a stray dog on the street? Does she know more of my story than I do? Is she sitting, right now, listening to his?

Note: In college, I planned to become a social worker and worked at a shelter for homeless families. I was passing for middle-class and “normal” at the time and ended up feeling it was impossible to be me and to do the job the way it needed to be done at the time. It was decades ago before trauma-informed was a phrase and before peer-support or lived experience (as though there is any other kind) were in the vernacular. I was still figuring out how to get comfortable with my own life story and learning from symptoms all about post-traumatic stress.

Anyhow, it is decades later and I still get nervous when I hear the word modeling though or when programs or policies seem to describe people as though we are fundamentally different somehow, as though there are the helped and the helpers – as they are different types of people not people in different situations or with different resources. 

I used to think that I was too close to certain issues to be any kind of a social worker but that’s not what I think today. Today, I doubt all trauma-informed initiatives unless they are in fact informed by the trauma survivors that they are intending to reach.

In the Parenting with ACEs group I manage at ACEsConnection, I hope we can share our own experiences and share what we want, need and know. I don’t believe people need fixing, just each other and access to the same supports, privileges, and resources that others are often born into and take for granted.