Without a Net

Sunday, March 16, 2008
Another book that I’ve just finished reading is Without a Net: Middle Class and Homeless (with Kids) in America: My Story by Michelle Kennedy. I just picked this up at the library on Tuesday and I finished it last night, so you know it’s a fast read. I also had a hard time putting it down.
Ms. Kennedy was a young woman who had a promising future when she started college until she could no longer afford it. As a dependent of her parents, she could not get financial aid, and she couldn’t get it until either she got married, or had been unclaimed on her parents’ taxes for 2 years. She chose to tell her boyfriend to marry her so she could stay in school. She then got pregnant and had 3 children in quick succession, causing her to drop out of school and be a housewife while her husband went to work at his technical job. Things were very tight and she learned budgeting very well.
Her husband quits his job when she is pregnant with their third and takes them up to a one-room cabin in the woods to get “off the grid”. The cabin has no electricity or phone or insulation. They sleep on blankets on the floor and the husband is gone for weeks at a time and rarely sends any money home. Ms. Kennedy has to go out in the deep Maine snow (this is winter) to collect firewood every day. When her husband comes home for a while, she finds a job waitressing, but her husband is incompetent watching the kids, and often leaves the woodstove open or lets it go out and generally doesn’t pay the kids any attention. It’s after the 4-year-old daughter is mauled by a dog while playing outside (the husband says, “I heard her screaming but didn’t think anything of it for a while”) that Ms. Kennedy decides to leave him to try to get a better environment for the kids to live in. The husband makes no objection.
She drives to a tourist town and is able to get a job waitressing the first day there. She has no money, but by now it’s June, so she decides that she and the kids can live in the car until she saves up enough to get an apartment. She’s scoped out the Laundromat and a truck stop where they can get daily showers, but quickly discovers that food takes a large portion out of her money because she can’t buy anything but convenience food without a refrigerator or a place to cook. When she works at night, she beds the kids down in the car outside the back door of the pub and the cooks help keep an eye on them. She can’t afford child care.
Every day she tries to find an apartment, but with less than $1000 saved, she can’t afford the security deposit on top of first and last month’s rent. Also, the only apartments she can afford are one bedroom, and no one wants to rent that small of an apartment to a woman who has 3 children. She tries to get food stamps so she can save more money for a bigger apartment, but she earns too much. She tries to get subsidized housing and spends half a day filling out forms, only to have them lost by the welfare office.
Finally, after more than 3 months living out of her car, she finds an older woman who is renting out rooms that she has made into small apartments in her house who lets her move in despite not having all the money required. She finds babysitting with a woman who is doing it mainly to give her own child some playmates, so the price is well below normal. These things in place, she’s able to get a job at a bank and make enough money to be comfortable. Finally, she falls in love with a man she’s been working with at the pub and they get married. Now after several years, they have been able to buy a farm and she writes for such publications as The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor.
I found this very interesting. She talks about the constant awareness that even today, after 6 years, she is only a few months from homelessness. She now realizes that she could have gone to just about any church or church organization and receive help, but being agnostic, it never crossed her mind at the time. The last chapter is about the statistics of homeless women, children, and even whole nuclear families today. Even with all the help available, it’s very difficult to survive when you are actually working but have no insurance, childcare or home.