Conversations
with Twenty-One Maine Families
Lisa
BIDDEFORD, MAINE
"Transitional housing to escape an
abusive husband saved my life and allowed me to build a safe and stable life
for my children. Without it, we might very well still be living in an
abusive situation because we had nowhere else to go."
In January 1999, I fled an abusive husband
with our four children. My youngest was only about six weeks old and I
didn't know where we could go to be safe but I knew we had to leave. We
wound up at Caring Unlimited, a domestic violence shelter in southern Maine.
Caring Unlimited was able to house me with my
children in their emergency shelter for several weeks while we got our lives
together a little and tried to figure out how we were going to survive. As
we began the lengthy chore of unraveling the impacts that domestic violence
had on us, we moved into transitional housing. The TANF Program helps to pay
for this housing and it was so important to us because we had absolutely
nowhere else to go. We lived there long enough to get our feet on the
ground, and are now happily living on our own.
I am earning my nursing degree through the
Parents as Scholars program and know that soon I'll be able to support my
family on my own. Even though we've had a lot of help from counselors to
overcome the effects of abuse, it's been a long road.
I don't know what we would have done without
the stability that transitional housing provided us. It gave us the chance
we needed to pull our lives back together. Without that support it's
possible that I would have ended up back in that abusive relationship
because we had no family or friends or other resources. Transitional housing
literally saved our lives and allowed us to move into safety and toward a
much more hopeful future.
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