Click - Part One

by Guest Contributor AlphaGirl

“You never know when something is going to happen to change your life.
You expect it to arrive with fanfare, like a wedding or a birth
but instead it comes in the most ordinary of circumstances.
The Roman goddess Fortuna snaps her fingers
and changes the channel - click”
-- excerpt from What Remains, by Carol Radziwill

The Roman goddess Fortuna was very busy snapping her fingers on March 14th. Click. My hours at work were cut to less than part-time. Click. Job duties were subtracted. Click. My boss brought in her sister to do my other job duties. No explanation. No discussion. Click. Within days of the hours reduction, I lost my job. Click. My life, as I knew it, was over.

Like 65% of Americans, I lived paycheck to paycheck. This wasn’t due to irresponsible spending; it was due to a high cost of living, and a comparably small salary. Once rent, utilities and bills were paid, there was no disposable income, no money to set aside into savings, even with a small business on the side. I had new reason to resent the stereotype of the hyper-educated, hyper-achieving childfree person with oodles of disposable income. Nothing could be further from the truth for me. I am now without a job, without income, and if things don’t change quickly, I will be without a place to live. Click.

The days since my job loss have been a blur. Filing for unemployment insurance. Registering with several different temp agencies. Posting resumes on electronic job boards. Scrambling to expand my part-time pet-sitting business into full-time with no start-up capital. Hobbies have been abandoned in the name of survival. The cost of gas to drive to my track club’s weekly meeting place/training site has suddenly become prohibitive. In an instant, I lost myself completely. Click.

I had to pay April’s rent. My parting gifts from my employer did not include severance pay. A social worker girlfriend of mine suggested contacting private agencies to see if emergency rental assistance were available. “We only assist families” one told me after hearing my “household size”. Time and time again, that was the response. After many calls, I located a church nearby that would help, provided I showed proof that I had half the rent. In the meantime, Cathy hit the phones, calling around until she located an agency that didn’t base aid on family size. She rushed the grant application, and in the section that asked “How would this gift enrich the recipient’s life?” She wrote, “It will prevent homelessness”. Pure and simple. In the end, neither agency helped out. The church refused to help, because now I was unemployed, and how could I prove I would not need their services next month? Cathy called the same afternoon to report the bad news that “her” agency was not going to help…..again, based on household size, I was not considered in strong enough need. I can understand wanting to take care of kids whose parents had hit hard times, but at the expense of others?

That afternoon was spent in a state of fear and outrage. Essentially, I was not worth these groups’ money. In my anger and complete terror at the thought of losing my apartment, I wondered that if I had come into agency interviews with kids in tow, would my outcome have been different? Would I have gotten assistance? Of course. Silly me for being a responsible, proactive person for not have waited until near eviction before seeking assistance. Silly me for not having kids because I didn’t want them. Silly me for having worked and paid taxes since the age of 13, and having hit a rough spot just now. I joked about becoming a crack mama in my next life, as those folks seem to hit the mother lode when it came to assistance. It seemed as though even hard-working, sober, intact families were being turned away, but not at near the rate that single people and couples without kids get turned away. In essence, these agencies' actions told me I was not worth their help/time/resources because I had not reproduced. My “household size” had worked against me.

Cathy admitted she had to agree, and shared my outrage. Yes, funding is tight at agencies, yes, families are important, yes to all of that. But,...

...as a single person with no family/personal resources, and who has humbled herself to ask for help, am I any less worthy because I chose not to reproduce?

Technorati Tag: Childfree