We were homeless for a year...

A few years ago (2019) my kids and I were homeless. I started writing about it today. Here is the beginning of our story:

I remember loading the kids in the car that night. All 5 of them, bundled up in their coats in the dark, bags piled on top of them. It was snowing lightly, and quiet, and peaceful. I felt like crying as I hugged my sister goodbye in the parking lot of our apartment - the apartment we could no longer afford with my husband gone.

I started driving. It was just me now, responsible for all of these little lives, but I couldn't do it on my own. I had tried. It was too much. I was falling apart.

Everything had seemed to happen so fast but looking back I should have seen it coming.

When we arrived at the shelter, it looked like the picture I found online. Three ranch style yellow houses with a black metal gate in front. I parked by the big green dumpster and unloaded the kids. The four bigger kids followed me - 12, 10, 8, and 4, as I balanced my youngest child, just 1 year old at the time, on my hip. We walked up to the gate and down the windy sidewalk to the office door.

"Where's your stuff?" She asked me. It was still in the car. (How was I supposed to carry the 12 medium -sized bags we were allowed to bring with us (two per person), along with my children?)

She told me to go get our bags and to set them by the house we would stay in first: "Hope house" they called it. It was for the women and children coming straight off the street or in the 30 day recovery program. From the outside it looked like a house, but from the inside it felt like a prison.

Not that I have ever been to prison, or even inside one. But it felt like what I imagined it to be.

After we dropped our stuff by the door for the worker to go through and search for any forbidden items - the receptionist led us back down the path and around the back to a heavy, purple colored door. Inside was a small office and a blonde haired lady in her 50s, Michelle. I had talked to her on the phone a couple of nights before and she had scared me so much that I almost didn't come. But what else could I do? Where else could we go? I didn't feel like I had much of a choice.

I filled out a stack of papers and gave her the required documentation for all of us - birth certificates, social security cards - all of it. She took pictures of us for their files. She took me into the bathroom and made me pee in a cup in front of her while my kids waited outside. To test me for drugs. A lot of the women in the shelter were addicts. They checked our hair for lice. Finally we were allowed to go to the house where we would stay for the next three months. I wasn't crying yet. Maybe I was in shock.

We hauled our stuff in and brought it to the laundry room. We were required to put everything into the dryer for 20 minutes on high because, you know, bed bugs. "Bug protocol" they called it.

They took the medicine we brought with us - everything was locked away in the office to be given out by staff.

The worker that was there that first shift was kind. She let the kids each pick out a new pair of pajamas and let us all pick out some trial size shampoos and conditioners that were donated by area motels. That was probably the most exciting thing that happened that day for any of us.

Our rooms were cold, with tile floors, metal bunk beds, and thin plastic mattresses. We had three rooms: Jaxon, the baby, was with me; the boys - Treyton and Bentley - were in the room adjoining mine. The girls shared a room just like ours, but across the hall. Each room had an open closet with a shelf and a tall metal shelf.

We were all given sheets, pillows, pillow cases, quilts, towels, and washcloths. We were not allowed to bring any of those things from home.

I remember sitting on that hard mattress that first day, wondering if I had made a huge mistake. Maybe I should have tried harder to keep that job and apartment. Maybe everything would have been ok eventually. But the decisions had already been made. I had quit my job and moved all of our stuff out of the apartment. We were homeless. We had nowhere else to go now. This was it.