My name is Maya Hart, and six months ago, I was not homeless. I was a nursing assistant with a modest savings account, a car that smelled like vanilla air freshener, and a future that felt like a straight, manageable line. Then came the cliff.
If you have never tried to get a six-year-old ready for school while living in a family shelter, let me summarize the experience for you.
It’s like running a small, chaotic airport, except the passengers are weeping, the security line is made of shame, and you are doing it all with one sock missing. That morning, at 6:12 AM, Laya’s sock was the one missing.
We were huddled on the edge of a cot in St. Bridgid’s Family Shelter, a room that smelled faintly of bleach and other people’s despair.
The cot was narrow, designed for one person, maybe one and a half if you were optimistic.
We made it work by sleeping like spoons, Laya’s small body curled against mine, her breath steady and warm against my arm through the night. Outside, the sky was a bruised gray, threatening snow. Inside, I was rummaging through a plastic bin—the kind you buy at dollar stores, flimsy and cracked at the corners—my hands shaking with a caffeinated anxiety that had nothing to do with coffee.
I hadn’t had coffee in three days.
Couldn’t afford it. “Mom,” Laya whispered.
It was that specific tone kids use when they are trying to be the adult in the room, when they’re trying to manage your panic because they can feel it radiating off you like heat. “It’s okay.
I can wear different socks.”
She held up one pink sock emblazoned with a unicorn and one white athletic sock that had seen better days, the elastic stretched out, a small hole forming near the toe.
I stared at them like they were evidence in a crime scene. A mismatch. A tell.
A sign that we didn’t have our act together.
At Laya’s school—a good school in a nice neighborhood where I’d fought to keep her enrolled by using my parents’ address on the paperwork—the other kids had matching socks. They had lunch boxes with their names embroidered on them.
They had parents who picked them up in SUVs that smelled like new car and organic snacks. “It’s a bold fashion choice,” I said, forcing a brightness into my voice that felt brittle, like ice you’re not sure will hold your weight.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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