By Jessica Bliss, The Tennessean
When your stomach and wallet are equally empty. When your three
children sleep next to your wife in a shelter. When you play piano for
pennies on a downtown sidewalk. That's when you know you are poor.
It's
a twisted realization for a family that once earned $100,000 a year,
owned a BMW and never gave a second thought to a Starbucks stop or
Cheesecake Factory lunches.
"Life on life's terms," Seth Mayer says. "It will shake you down sometimes."
During
one of the worst economic periods in U.S. history, many Americans have
experienced financial destruction and the stress of making ends meet.
More than one out of every six Tennesseans (1.1 million) lived in
poverty in 2010 -- a 2.3 percent increase from 2008 -- and those getting
by with the help of government assistance, social services and
nonprofit support continues to rise.
After years of financial security, many have to learn how to be poor.
But
who teaches them about food stamps, local soup kitchens, filing for
unemployment, seeking government assistance? The answer is, people in
this community teach one another.
The day Seth Mayer arrived in
Nashville from Arizona, with nothing but his keyboard under his arm and a
bag on his back, he turned to a homeless man on the street and asked
where he could get a hot meal. The people who fed him told him where to
find shelter. Those who housed him suggested other resources for social
service support.
For every successful lead, he also encountered
challenges and dead ends. Services were scattered across the city. He
and his family, who soon joined him, had no transportation and little
money for food, much less money for the bus.
Government and
nonprofit leaders who work with the city's poor admit there's room for
improvement in how organizations communicate with those newly in need,
but once initiated into the city's systems, the Mayers, and others like
them, discovered Middle Tennessee has a wealth of resources and a
generosity of spirit.
And, as the Mayers learned how to be poor, their lives became richer.
"We ended up with nothing, and we started over," wife Ronica Mayer says. "But I think we are happier."
A drunken driver
Life
felt comfortable in the dusty cactus neighborhood of New River, Ariz., a
town 35 miles north of Phoenix with a population of just less than
15,000 and a medium household income of more than $85,000.
Seth
Mayer delivered flowers part time and taught piano to 26 students a week
at $50 an hour. Ronica Mayer worked at a nonprofit. In November 2008,
Seth Jr. arrived, joining sisters Anissa and Elise.
The week
before Christmas, the couple planned their first post-baby date night.
As Ronica returned home from dropping off the kids at Grandma's, a
drunken driver struck her Hyundai Elantra. She tumbled into a ravine,
breaking her neck, her tibia and her fibula. The other driver had
$15,000 limited liability insurance. Her doctor bills were $800,000, she
said.
They sold what they could and pawned what they couldn't,
including Ronica's wedding ring, but, she says, it wasn't enough. "We
ended up losing everything."
For the newly homeless, family is
often the first resource, says Clifton Harris, executive director of the
Metropolitan Homelessness Commission in Nashville. Generally, loss of
housing results from loss of income, Harris says, and many are forced to
turn to family, friends and congregations for financial support, food,
transportation, employment or "whatever the specific need is at the time
in order to ward off the crisis that is staring them in the face."
Seth
Mayer's family moved in with his parents, also in Arizona, for more
than a year. "His mom would have kept us there forever because she loves
her grandkids," Ronica Mayer says, but as the grandparents considered
retirement in Alaska, something had to give.
"When you live with
family, it's really hard to do what you need to do to get out because
you are comfortable," Ronica Mayer says.
"We needed that push to hit the end of nothing and lose our expectations."
Seth
Mayer got a lead on some Christian recording work in Nashville. He had
no money for a place to live, only a car in which to sleep. He packed it
and headed east. His car broke down outside Oklahoma City. His wife
sent what little cash she had for the bus. When he arrived in Nashville,
his job opportunity vaporized.
"The life of a homeless person is
filled with tasks and complexities," Harris says. "You cannot be
homeless and lazy. ... I think you adapt. When you find yourself in dire
straights, you do what you have to do to survive. You get a really
quick education. The streets are very cruel, so people do what it takes
to stay off the streets. You have a sense of persistency about you in
order to get beyond whatever 'nos' to get to the 'yes' you are looking
for, and you don't give up until you get that."
Help on the streets
Seth
Mayer's first meal in Nashville came through the direction of a
homeless man who sent him to Room in the Inn. There, Mayer, a former
radio communications specialist in the Army, was directed to the
Veterans Administration office and then to Operation Stand Down, which
assists homeless veterans. He arrived at the building on 12th Avenue
South just before it closed. Employees gave him a bag of food and told
him to come back the next day.
"Put one foot in front of the other
and the end of the race will come to you," Seth Mayer says. "That's
what I always tell my kids. ... I was scared, and hungry, and dirty, but
I wasn't too embarrassed because that's where I needed to be to get
where I was going."
Two months later , his family joined him. By
that time, he was immersed in the homeless community. He knew where to
get free meals, where he could sleep at night and how to find day labor.
When he didn't know the answer, he used the cellphones his parents
bought for his children to call 2-1-1, a free information referral
organization that helps with food, housing, employment, health care and
counseling.
"There's a lot of resources here, and I imagine
there's a lot everywhere," Seth Mayer says. "But if you don't get out
and start asking about them you are not going to find them. They're not
out looking for you. They are busy helping people, and waiting for you
to come to them."
Accessibility is an issue some leaders would like to see addressed.
"Before
someone enters the service system, I don't think there is a place to go
to get your answers," says Joyce Lavery, executive director of Safe
Haven Family Shelter. "It sounds like a simple thing, but I think it's
frustrating. Imagine having no resources and having very little
knowledge; it's an overwhelming part of the big struggle."
Families
face particular challenges. Tennessee's children are less likely to be
homeless than in most other states, according to a December report
released by The National Center on Family Homelessness, but, the report
says, fewer resources are in place to help them.
When they were
first reunited, the Mayers stayed in shelters, but men and women
couldn't stay together. On one side of the city, Seth Mayer slept,
worried about the safety of his wife, teenage daughters and little boy.
Unable to stand the separation, they moved into the Executive Inn on
Murfreesboro Road. Weekly rent was $179; their money was gone in the
first week.
Ronica Mayer struggled to adjust. An educated woman
who once worked as a pharmacy technician, she now drove vehicles at car
auctions for $171 a week. Where she once had $15 lunches at Cheesecake
Factory several times a week, now she served her children canned salmon
wrapped in wilting lettuce from a church-donated food box.
Before,
Seth Mayer treated dirty clothes like disposables. If he was dirty on
his way home from the flower shop, he would stop and buy a new shirt,
throwing the old one in the back of the car. Now, Ronica washed
hand-me-down clothes in the hotel room sink with a bar of soap.
Her
husband still played music for money, but instead of teaching paying
students, now he panhandled on the street corner and hoped to catch a
quarter from a generous passerby.
"I felt a lot of guilt for our
family being in that position, because before my accident we were doing
fine," Ronica Mayer says. "I was embarrassed."
And she was
exhausted. Each new opportunity meant a different set of challenges. To
verify eligibility for assistance, caseworkers at the Department of
Human Services needed documentation such as birth certificates, Social
Security cards and tax returns, much of which the Mayers lost when they
could no longer pay the bills on the storage unit they rented after
losing their home.
Getting the documents reissued cost money, and
each return trip to the resource office meant money for the bus. Finding
work also was a full-time job. They submitted applications everywhere.
Day labor was the best they could do.
As a person who works with
the homeless every day, Harris says navigating the system overall is not
that easy. "And then it comes down to the individuals' capacity to be
able to deal with the pressure they have on them at the time," he says.
"... It's hard to do things if you don't have a roof over your head or
if you don't know where the next meal will come from. ... If you don't
have that, then you spend an enormous amount of time trying to figure
that out when you could have been doing something else."
Building a new life
On
the day space became available at Safe Haven, it seemed life turned for
the better. Like many shelters, Safe Haven not only offered a safe
place for the family and activities for the kids but also classes for
the adults. Seth and Ronica Mayer learned about budgeting and personal
finance, job seeking and benefits, building a resume and mental health.
"It's
one thing being homeless, and you can imagine, 'Oh, it would suck,' "
Ronica Mayer says. "But it can be so overwhelming, and sometimes you
feel so hopeless. It's very important to have someone help you work
through it, so you don't just give up. Because it would be very easy to
just give up."
Ultimately, the goal of each of the city's resource
centers isn't to teach people how to be poor, but how to get back on
their feet again.
"We could put them in an apartment, but if they
can't sustain it they will be homeless again," says Mary D. Ross, deputy
executive director of Operation Stand Down, which serves homeless
veterans in Nashville.
The Mayers now have their own place. With aid from a Housing and Urban Development stipend, they were able to rent a home.
Now,
rice boils on the kitchen stove, the sweet smell seeping into the den
where Elise and Seth Jr. watch cartoons. Every item in the house has
been donated by a local organization, from the television the kids watch
to the blue-gray couches on which they sit.
The house is
certainly nothing like what they once called home. There are no bed
frames, only mattresses on the floor. But there are three bedrooms. A
toy workbench that Safe Haven gave Seth on his third birthday sits along
one wall in the room 14-year-old Elise and Seth share. Justin Bieber
smiles from the posters in the room 15-year-old Anissa calls her own.
More
often than not, the cupboards are still nearly bare. Mealtime can mean a
creative mix of rice and canned goods. But Ronica Mayer has a part-time
job working as a pharmacy tech at Kroger. Money is coming in, and
government assistance keeps rent at $72 a month.
Looking back, the
husband and wife wish they had been better with their money. They spent
it freely and gave without a second thought, believing that if they
ever faced hardship others would give to them in return.
"I
promised my kids so much better, and I couldn't give it to them," Seth
Mayer says. "I felt like I wasn't being a good husband and a good
father. That's been the worst. I have felt a lot of guilt over that kind
of stuff, and it keeps me pressing on to do better."
Now, as they
start anew, Seth looks forward to one thing above all else: "We can't
wait to get back on our feet," he says, "so we can help other people
again."