Last week, in preparation for this week’s blog post, I sat down for a short interview with my next door neighbor Jane, who I’ve known my entire life. Although I initially took a video of the interview to post here, yesterday she called me and asked me to not post the video and if I wrote a transcript to change her name.
Jane, 59 years old, has had experiences with homelessness, transitional living in a homeless shelter, and is now a foster mother, wanting to prevent situations that have happened to her from happening to other children.
Me: So Jane, where did you grow up?
Jane: I was born and raised in a small town in West Virginia, basically the middle of nowhere. The kind of place you would drive through but never stop in. I lived in a primarily rural place, but about a fifteen minute drive from where I was born there was a town.
Me: You’ve told me in the past about how you have been homeless before. When was that?
Jane: The first time I was ever “homeless” (she used air quotes) I was thirteen years old. I decided I was sick of my parent’s bullshit-You know the dramatic way thirteen year olds can have-and I ran away, telling myself that I had had enough and was never going back. No surprise, I was only on the streets for two nights though before the cops brought me back home. So I went home again.
Me: You said the first time, but you never mentioned being homeless twice to me before.
Jane: That’s just because I usually don’t count that first time. It was just me and my brother being kids, thinking that if we ran away no one would care enough to bring us back, but there are laws and whatnot for that kind of thing. The second time was the time I really consider to be “homeless” homeless. I was kicked out of my parents’ house on my eighteenth birthday, no surprise there. Now I have a tendency to harp on my parents, rest their souls, to be negligent or abusive, but the truth of it was that I was probably just as awful to raise as they were at parenting me.
Me: I find that hard to believe.
Jane: That’s because you’ve only known me as the God fearing, church-going [Jane]. I turned my whole life around somewhere in my twenties, long before you or [your brothers] were even born. But when I was your age I was probably the most nightmare of a child you could ask for. Name a drug, I’ve done it-hell-name a boy, I’d probably done him. Pauses to laugh. By the time I was fourteen I was drinking my days away. And when I was old enough to be considered an adult my parents had had enough. And it’s not like I had anywhere else to go. So I hitch hiked my way to the city, although keep in mind the city to me was essentially any town that had more stores and restaurants than farmland, and I lived on the streets for about six months, all together.
Me: Where did you sleep during those six months?
Jane: It really depended on the week. One time I had myself a boyfriend or whatever you’d call him, and I stayed with him a while, but then I messed all that up. After that, sometimes I’d find myself a boyfriend and I’d stay a few nights with him, but I didn’t want to become too dependent on nobody and whatnot, so I’d never stay with one person for more than a week. It made me feel like an outdoor cat, the kind that you let out of the house knowing that he’ll come back at some point in the future when he gets cold or hungry again. Not me. I didn’t want to be that outdoor cat.
Me: So when you weren’t in someone’s house or apartment, where did you sleep?
Jane: For a while me and a couple of friends I had made had it pretty sweet in this one building that used to be some sort of store. I guess you’d call it squatting. But then some more, rowdier type people got in on that, and that got shut down after a while too. Most of the time, if I wasn’t sleeping in someone’s house or in that building, I’d just try and sleep somewhere that had some cover. Most of the time I’d have some shelter from the elements, but I was in a place where homelessness was a big issue back in the day. And if you tried to sleep in someone else’s spot, it’d be… shakes head and mimics an angry expression, clenching her fists
Me: When did you move into transitional living?
Jane: I got lucky, girl. I made a friend with another woman trying to get out of town, and we hitch-hiked together to one of the bigger towns around. She told me all about a women’s shelter that we could stay at for a bit, as long as I didn’t have a criminal record. Now, every time I had had a run in with the police, I was able to get myself out of it. Some of my friends at the time weren’t so lucky. So anyways, I was living in a woman’s shelter. The one I was at was cushy, but with that cushiness came some rules. I had to start passing drug tests. They were especially strict on the women that had kids with them. And I had to get a job interview within the first week of staying there. But I stayed in my lane and did what I was told, and the rest is history.
Me: How old were you then?
Jane: I’d say I was only homeless for five or six months, not including one of those months staying with a man that I called my boyfriend, and a couple weeks at a time where I’d have other months. But I was definitely still eighteen by the time I was in the shelter. Also, although I barely graduated, I had a high school degree, and that was enough to get me at least some sort of job back then.
Me: And how was your life after that? How do you think your experience being homeless affected you throughout the rest of your young adulthood?
Jane: I was on and off drugs for a while. I was lucky that while I had definitely tried some of the harder stuff and whatnot, I really only had a habit for marijuana at the time, and that wasn’t too hard to kick when it was all said and done. It was harder to put down the bottle. When I was a teenager, I would drink to forget about how much I hated high school and how much I hated my parents. When I was homeless, I would drink to take my mind off that situation and whatnot. And when I wasn’t, I drank to forget about the whole ordeal. It wasn’t until I got pregnant with [her son’s name] when I was twenty two that I knew I had to make a change, and it wasn’t until I got back into church when [her son’s name] was five or six that I said to myself, “[Jane], you got to make that change in your life. It’s not just your life anymore, it’s his, too.”
Through this interview, my original goal was to see how Jane’s experiences through homelessness and transitional living affected her desire to become a foster mother later on, but as Jane elaborated more on what it was like to be homeless and how she felt as though she had nowhere else to go when she was eighteen, and how her homelessness made her feel like an “outdoor cat”, I found myself more interested in how young people find themselves in those types of situations, particularly people around the ages 18-24 like her.
Jane was one of my babysitters when I was young, and as I grew older, I began to see her more as a friend, especially when she confided stories of her past in me. Now, she’s a successful business owner, with two sons and a daughter. Though she never married, she now has a partner that she loves very much and who lives with her. She’s very active in our church and is a member of our neighborhood council and used to be a substitute teacher and was part of the PTA. For as long as I’ve known her, she’s been very against drugs and alcohol, constantly warning me from a young age to stay away from what she would call “the drink and whatnot”.
When I was in middle school and learned that she had struggled with homelessness in the past, I was very surprised. I thought to myself that Jane was not the kind of woman that would ever find herself in that kind of situation. She is a very strong willed and outspoken woman and was a huge role model to me when I was young, so I couldn’t believe that when she was a teenager she was a runaway and that she had lived on the streets for almost half a year. Also, considering how religious she was when I met her, I found it incredibly implausible that she had ever struggled with a drug or alcohol addiction.
I know now that she had turned to religion in order to help herself heal from these addictions, and that her homelessness continues to affect her daily life even over forty years later. Growing up, she was the strictest adult I knew in terms of always finishing your dinner, never wasting water, and always donating to the church or volunteering at local food banks and homeless shelters whenever possible. Even now, she opens her home as a foster mother and tries to nurture children that grew up in similar situations as herself.
Through my discussion with Jane, I identified the topic I would like to study through this research blog as homelessness, particularly homelessness among children and young adults. I want to learn more about how homelessness affects mental health later on in people’s lives, how young people find themselves placed in situations like that, and even how I can help contribute aid to the problem as a college student.
