"I get up, go to work, talk to the
speech therapist, talk to the developmental therapist, talk to our family
counselor, try to spend enough time with my son so that I can be a help to
him, so that he feels comfortable and not ignored, do the shopping, make the
meals, do the dishes, do the laundry, arrange transportation for tomorrow,
go to bed and then get up and do it all over again. Four hours of sleep is a
blessing, but even then it's not easy sleep."
Right now my son Michael and I are homeless.
We are sleeping on a friend's couch while I try desperately to find a new
place to live. I'm having a hard time finding a place because I just lost my
job too, and we have no income right now except my son's monthly SSI check
of $545. I've signed up for Section 8 housing, but there's a waiting list
that's five years long in this area.
I left TANF in 1999 when I began working full
time at a deli for $6.50 an hour. Since then I've had ten different jobs.
I've worked as a dishwasher, a waitress, a telemarketer, and just about
every other low wage job you can think of. The most I ever earned during
this period was about $1,500 a month-usually it was more like $1,100. My
expenses were always more than I brought home and we never got ahead. I
don't have a car or a driver's license. Sometimes I've had to take a cab to
work; sometimes I've paid a friend to drive me. If I could take a bus I did,
but there were lots of times that that just didn't work. I never got any
help with childcare and that costs a lot too.
The reason that I've lost so many jobs is
because my son has a serious disability called Pervasive Developmental
Disorder and I've had to miss a lot of work to take care of him. Although he
is four years old he doesn't learn like other kids. He's not yet potty
trained. He is afraid of people and has a lot of difficulty interacting with
other children and adults. He needs speech therapy, occupational therapy and
other development services. He has seven to nine appointments a week that
last about an hour each. For the last year I haven't been able to go to his
appointments with him because I couldn't get the time off from work. The
therapists all tell me that I should try to be with him in therapy so that I
can be more help to him at home, but that just hasn't been possible. I know
he would be progressing faster if I could spend this time with him. Not only
am I missing his therapy, but also I get called away from work a lot by his
day care to take care of a problem that he is having. Its' been very hard to
have to choose between keeping a roof over our heads and doing what I know
is best for my son.
After I lost my first three jobs I started to
worry that employers wouldn't hire me because I couldn't keep a job. I
decided that the best strategy was to go to work for a temporary agency.
Working for temporary agencies you have more flexibility to leave a job and
it doesn't reflect so badly on your resume. I worked for three different
temporary agencies but after awhile learned that people like me who get
called away from work because of their children get labeled as unreliable
workers. We get the worst jobs at the worst pay. I never knew what I was
going to be paid from one week to the next and this kind of instability made
it very hard to budget. Working as a temp was a short-term solution to what
I now know is a much bigger problem-I really need more education if I'm ever
going to get a job where I could really support us.
I'm only 24 and I have medical problems
myself-a lot of them are because I've been under so much pressure. I have
ulcers and migraines from stress. I suffer from PTSD from physical and
emotional abuse that I went through as a child. I have sleeping problems and
for a while was malnourished from skipping meals. I haven't been able to see
a dentist. I'm in a lot of pain and am losing my teeth. I miss work
sometimes because I'm sick myself, and that's another strike against me.
The reason that we're homeless now is that
just a couple of weeks ago they found cockroaches in the apartment where we
were living. They came to exterminate them and set off 8 pesticide bombs in
the house without giving us any notice. Our neighbor downstairs got sick and
had to go to the hospital. When the city found out what happened they
condemned our house. We were told to leave right away. I lost some of my
furniture, clothing, pictures and some things that were important to my son.
That's when we became homeless. Getting disrupted so suddenly like this and
losing our things was very hard on my son. He became so upset that I
couldn't go to work. Even though I tried to explain the problems we were
having to my employer, I lost my job. After two years of trying to make it
on my own, it's humiliating to think that I may have to go back on TANF. But
I'm afraid that's where we may be at least until we can get our lives back
together.
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