Rosie's New Family

Rosie has a message for other people who have struggled with balancing homelessness, family complexities and mental instability. She also has a message for housed people who cling to stereotypes about people experiencing homelessness.
Family is not the people who kicked you out when you were down. Nor the husband who told your kids you abandoned them. Family is the network of strangers who gave you medications and a place to live, a routine and eventually a housing voucher. Family is the two children who grew up and wanted to meet their mother and learned they had missed out on so much by trusting what their father had said about her.

She wants housed people to see themselves in her shoes, to realize not everyone loses their housing because they are addicts or lazy. In her case, she and her seven-year-old son were living with her father in Texas when he was murdered in Mexico by three assailants. Her sister-in-law and an aunt told her she had to move out; they wanted to sell the house so that an uncle could see the house and surrounding ten acres to build a second auto body shop. Rosie was invited to live with an aunt in Arizona, but the aunt called while Rosie was almost there and reneged on the offer.

Rosie and her son lived out of her truck and used the aunt’s address so her son could go to school. She told him, “You need to get to school, and you are not going to miss a day. It’s not going to happen. Your education comes first. While you are in school I will look for resources and I will see what I can do, I will look for a job, I will do something.” They ended up staying at a women’s shelter for the maximum 60 days allowed. With no immediate available options she asked her estranged husband to take care of their son while she found solid footing again. She was in and out of other shelters while trying to save up enough for housing and to replace the truck that was stolen at one of the shelters.

A woman hired her to be a live-in housekeeper in San Diego, but it didn’t take long for the husband to decide he didn’t like the job Rosie was doing. So she was out on the street in yet another strange town with no job or housing. She navigated her way through one women’s shelter with questionable practices, another with flea-ridden mattresses and limited space on a daily basis, a campsite known as the Jungle where she spent all night listening to raccoons, skunks, rats and snakes moving around her. Rosie was especially having problems with her mental illness because she wasn’t on her meds. “I was starting to see things, I was starting to talk to myself, I was starting to be pissed off, I was depressed, I didn’t know what to do.”

She found her way to The Heartland in Chula Vista where she was able to get medication and stabilize. A gentleman on the street directed her to the Visions Clubhouse, where she was treated as a human being, with respect. “I felt comfortable there. I found a place that I could go and eat, and get on the computer and do games, go to groups, and get help. It was amazing. A place that to this day I still go. There were individuals there that were so caring, they were so in tune to listening to what we were there for.” Doing a few chores gave her access to the art room, a computer, group sessions, doctor visits. While at Visions she met two officers from the Homeless Outreach Team, and told them she’d put in an application for housing years before but never heard back. They puled her files, followed up, and in a year or so she was connected to permanent Section 8 housing.

if you talk to police officers then you’re a cop lover, you’re a snitch. You know what?” she said. “They became my angels. Because they looked after me and made sure that, not only me, but individuals at Visions were given housing. The ones who got housing have got jobs, have got careers, are going out and getting their education.”

She attended classes at community college and has earned two certificates, neatly framed and mounted prominently on her living room wall. She is qualified to be a peer support specialist, so she can help others. To give back. People are losing their homes to wildfires, to the COVID-19 economy. “As a society, how do we help these individuals? These children? You see them in the street with their mom or their dad, they’re homeless and we’re not doing anything.”

Rosie said she was taught morals, and to be humble. Respect others and you get respect back. Any time she was afraid, she thought of her children and the family that never reached out to help her. She would cry herself to sleep. But she realized she had to be a warrior in order to survive. So she kept taking classes, cooked real food for the people on the street near her home even though they only wanted money. Her children reached out to her and she was so proud to have a home to invite them to visit.

“I have a grandson who I adore, and I have my two children,” she said. “But I now have a place to call my own because I fought the fight. Not with drugs, not with alcohol; not with killing the pain that way. Seeking the help that I need for my mental health, keeping up with the medication. I stay here with my business, with my dog Scotty, who was a gift to me, so I feel blessed with a lot of things that I have done in life. …I’m happy for the trust and belief in myself; and if I can do it, you can do it too.”