Christine Wade, 31, has six children ranging in age from 14 to two years old. Next year she’ll have seven. Her next child is due to be born in mid-January 2018. The oldest two are step-children that she wasn’t willing to leave behind when she divorced her husband.

Wade says the costs of raising children don’t change when you’re homeless. People still have to eat, and they need clothing and school supplies. She spends $300/month on diapers, $200/month on sanitary wipes. These are costs no one really thinks about unless they have babies, she said. And when you don’t have an income to begin with, well, buying diapers is a necessity that sometimes takes the place of a meal or two.

Originally from Ft. Smith, Arkansas, she was adopted when she was six, left that family when she was 14. Her birth mother had also been adopted, and ended up a heroin addict. She was abused by her foster father. Wade was determined not to follow in the same footsteps. “I broke the family chain of addiction,” she said. “I don’t even smoke.”

She learned to sell real estate and make her own way in the world, maintaining a strict ethic about drugs and respecting personal space that she instills in her children.

When she was married, she started working at Sharp Memorial part time so she could raise the kids while her husband was working as a security officer for an apartment complex. But she discovered her husband had a side business running prostitutes and drugs at the complex. She left time, took the kids and ended up at St. Vincent de Paul.

Recently she was living with the family in one of the large tents at the tent city operated by Alpha Project for the Homeless. Most of the children take the bus to school during the day which leaves her time to try and find housing and fill out paperwork to get on housing lists. Each child’s personal clothing box is stacked neatly in the corner, their blankets and pillows folded in designated corners during the day. Shoes remain outside the tent.

“I just need a hand…. to get a place. The kids are all in school. We’re a normal family except we need a place to live,” she said while organizing clothes in her tent. She’d like to find a job working with children in some capacity. “I like being in a mom environment,” she added.

As the tent city is about to close, Alpha Project was able to place the family in St. Vincent de Paul’s temporarily. Wade still wants to find a permanent home so she can give the kids a sense of normalcy. “These kids, the biggest, baddest things will not be in their lives; things that traumatize children and debilitate you as an adult. I don’t want them to ever suffer any of that!

“We’re a normal family. We get hormonal sometimes, but we stick together. They are all the family they have. Family is worth fighting for. The kids get to be kids, but they have respect for me,” Wade said, as she called them all to the tent after dinner, to settle in for the night.