The next 5 years was a roller coaster ride. The furniture went around the world and we made more than a quarter of a million in wholesale orders. Mostly what I took from those years was learning about myself and my capabilities, gaining confidence and motivation. We all learned more than we could imagine about the human spirit, good and bad.

I’ll back up a bit for you. When I went missing and homeless in ’89 I’d left my abuser, moving a few states away, returning to California with my girls. He was thankfully, not their father. On so many levels we had it easy compared to other women, whose abusers are spouses, legally attached to children.

When I left SLO it was after a year of job hunting, except for odd jobs. I was a marketing consultant, office helper, and advertising peddler. We decided to head north to Olympia, where my mom and step dad lived. She was recovering from Breast Cancer and needed help. I traded the beater sedan I was driving for an empty Dodge propane van to move a few accumulated belongings to Washington. Our plan was to make a fresh start in a place that neither of us knew and have the girls with us by Christmas. It would only be three and a half months.

It could have been an exciting time but I was falling apart at the thought of leaving the girls behind with family in Grover Beach. It was late in August 1990. I had it in my head that something would happen, and I wouldn’t see them again. It was more than fear, it was the first time in my life I knew cold dread. Not a good feeling.

When you’re living week to week, so many things can happen and usually do. When you’re homeless it’s like being a hamster on a small wheel. one small jerk of the cage and the wheel comes loose and it’s chaos. I knew it was the best alternative but my heart was ripped open. I cried most of the way to Olympia. And It did get a lot worse, before it got better.

When I’d get really into the fear the idea of them coming home to me again was all that kept me going. The realization was immediate that home is not a place, it was who you re with and family. That was another thing I learned. It wasn’t about the stuff of home, it was all about my girls being with me again. Honestly, I would not be alive or have wanted to be without my girls. I understand why women can feel justified to hide their children, knowing they’ll lose them. Coming out of the creeks would be the hardest thing a woman could do for her children, and the bravest.

Women who have been homeless are comfortable around me.  I’m comfortable with them.  More so than women of the other side.  The other side is where you and I live.  Funny, they talk about outsider’s art.  Whose outside, whose on the other side?  Guess it’s always relational.  How I relate to my life now is, I feel guilt.  Guilt that I have a warm airbed to sleep on.  Guilt that most evenings I have eaten sometime during the day.  It’s hard going in California for a disabled woman my age but I get by.  A lot better than those women and children living in the creek beds of California’s Central Coast.

I was homeless by choice, like most women who are homeless with their children.  Those that chose to live away from an abusive spouse or partner.  I know there are those who lost work and are out there, but by in large it’s women who are running away from their own imminent death, like I did.

There are many women in the U.S. who are underground.  I don’t know the numbers because they’re part of the victim’s witness protection program, slipped through the system—I guess to avert costing the taxpayers a lot of money to prosecute our spouse or partners for murder.  Instead they can give us the extended vacation option, to change our identity and trade places with another woman with children.  So, MANY women are given a one-way ticket and a pat on the back.  I turned it down.  My name is important to me.  It’s my maiden name and it’s one of the things my abuser couldn’t take from me.

Last year I decided to come out, so to speak.  I hadn’t been photographed for a story or anything dramatic like that in almost 20 years.  Missed one opportunity to be in PEOPLE Magazine to tell my story.  They passed when I told them I could tell my story but they couldn’t print my name or photograph me.  That was a story killer.  I thought and still think it’s pretty interesting that women in this new century, 2008 are underground, with the feds trading numbers from county to county, state to state and shipped even to Hawaii from New York to stay alive.

What’s the cost to American tax-payers instead of changing laws to protect women who are beaten, tortured and dragged by the hair by a family member, with fewer rights than if she was assaulted by an unknown assailant.  Go figure.  Someday that will change when enough women sit in positions of power and change the laws, at last.

Most people don’t know women and children are traded across the country.  When I mention it to county workers, it’s common knowledge within social services.  They shake their heads and admit it, albeit sadly.

This is my blog and I’m going to tell my story and other’s stories here, who can’t speak for themselves.  It feels good.  I’m feeling a little emotional right now about it, but it feels alright and safe.  I wrote some stories on my about page, so, I”ll say goodnight now. Goodnight.