The First Day
by Kelly Robinson
Published: July 8, 2009
Just by the very nature of life, difficult and heartbreaking things happen to everyone. If we wanted to, we could rate these events in our lives on a scale of wonderful to worse. In fact, and I am pretty sure that at some university somewhere they are doing a study on creating that scale at this very moment. So I won’t go there, but if we were to create that scale, the first day that someone becomes homeless would certainly be at the far end of worse.
It’s the day you can hear the rafters and iron girders that have held your life up begin to twist and create that awful sound of bending and breaking metal. It is a deafening and desolate sound. It’s that moment when your heart empties out and feels like a barren wasteland, never to be filled again. Even if you have become homeless with people that you love beside you, you’ve never felt so alone and the fear fills up the places in you that were once filled with laughter.
People become homeless for many reasons. They often don’t see it coming until it is irreversible and even more often can’t see an end in sight once it happens. One of the most profound parts for me was that being homeless changed me in ways that are difficult to explain. Ways that I cannot just go and tweak back to normal. It opened me up to the fact that we really are all alike. Some luck out and some don’t. That pretty much summed it up, or at least it did for me.
After I got the phone call that told me that not only did I not have anyplace to go back to, I had no place ahead for me to go either, I tried to drown out the sound of the twisting rafters, but it was a loud roar and originated more from my frightened soul than from an external source. I tried to see through the fog of desperation, but it was thick and dark and heavy. All of my senses seemed to abandon me. Everything but my sense of loss. I had lost things before in my life, but this loss was total. Like a car that is declared “totaled” after an accident, there would be no repairing my life this time. I would have to start over from scratch.
I got myself together the best I could that first morning and checked out of the hotel. I had to conserve what little money I had left. That I knew. I started to drive. I didn’t know the area at all. There were long stretches of country roads and I found myself driving and driving. I would stop at a roadside park to get food out of my cooler and then I would begin driving again. I somehow was driving in a loop because I kept finding myself back in the same city where I spent the night before at the hotel.
On one of the country roads I found a church that was full of cars in the parking lot. I went around to the back where the church offices were and found a group of women chatting about a lunch they were planning. I must have looked a mess, I know I felt like a mess, but they were welcoming and kind. When I told them that I had just become homeless, though, their demeanor changed.
Where they had been kind and accommodating at first, I could see a coldness come into their eyes. These kindly churchwomen didn’t want the burden of this woman who looked like she could be one of them, but wasn’t. Homelessness had made me a different animal and they couldn’t get me out of there fast enough. This reversal of attitude scared me as much as anything had that day because it told me that now I was different. I was no longer part of the crowd, congregation or decent society. I felt that I understood what lepers must have experienced back in biblical times. These women were afraid to touch me or get too close lest they catch this homelessness disease. It was more than heartbreaking, it was sickening.
I gladly pulled out of their parking lot and started driving again. Driving kept me connected to everything somehow. As long as I was driving I could ignore the fact that I had no real place to go. In the hours and hours that I drove through those same back roads, I helped a school bus driver through a small crisis he was having with his bus. As I stood with him waiting for help to come for him, I told him my plight. He was wonderful and gave me the phone number to his church. He told me he would be praying for me and it dawned on me that not one of those churchwomen had offered that simple kindness.
After help had arrived, I drove away feeling a bit stronger, a little more protected because this bus driver and his church would be praying for me. Silly little things like that made so much more sense to me than those who treated me like homelessness was a disease and I was rife with it.
The next time the road wound back into that city, I went to a place that was for family protection and social services. It was there I found out that since I was a Caucasian woman with no small children there was no one and no program that could help me. I am not exaggerating about how being white hurt me that day. They actually told me that if I were of a minority race they could help me, but being white pushed me out of all of the programs they offered.
They did give me directions and the phone number of the Salvation Army shelter. I had called ahead and they were waiting at the door for me at the shelter. The workers at the Salvation Army understood this first day of homelessness devastation. Just knowing that I was with someone that understood made it easier somehow.
They made sure I had a warm meal, stayed with me in the women’s dorm until they could tell I was calmed down and then left me alone to let the day’s events sink in. It was the right thing to do. I felt safe even though I was the only woman in the dorm that night. It turned out to be a blessing because I was able to break the rule about sleeping in the television room and break the rule about leaving the television on past ten o’clock. I slept huddled in ball on a sofa, letting the sounds of the television keep me company. It is how I would sleep the whole time I was there. I never used the dorm room where bunk beds where stacked end on end. I felt safer on that dirty old sofa even though that really made no sense. Nothing made sense anymore. That was the first thing I realized and the first thing I started working to correct. I was a homeless woman now, though, and it would take me a while to make sense of that.
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