motherlove.

Janika and Gabrielle (9 months)

***

The two of them arrive around 1pm, just as lunch is being served. Proud mommy Janika tells everyone, she's got a tooth! Her first tooth!

Women of all ages, colors, sizes crowd around mother and child. The baby, in her light purple sweatsuit, is definitely a rock star. She loves the faces surrounding her, the attention, the laughter and arms reaching out to touch her.

I'm at WDDC, otherwise known as the Women's Daytime Drop-in Center, in North Berkeley. The WDDC is a non-profit program that empowers women and children to move from the streets to a home. Not all of the women here are mothers. Some are single, older women: some homeless, some getting aid for housing. All are here for lunch and companionship.

The WDDC is an unusual place. It's a home, literally. Situated in a residential neighborhood, there's a kitchen with two volunteers cooking barbequed pork and yams, a living room with sofas and chairs and books, a dining area, and then several rooms devoted for client consultations and offices. The home is old, but still, it's a home. It feels comfortable and welcoming. Instantly upon my arrival, at least three people bid me hello and ask me if I need help. I can't tell if they're working there or the clientele.

I'm taken around and introduced to everyone. I tell them I'm there to collect stories, to listen, to take photos. I tell them I'm with Help A Mother Out, and that we help donate diapers here. Women who don't even have kids thank me for the diapers. Everyone realizes here that any assistance and outpouring of help benefits them all. Janika especially is so grateful for the diapers. She says," I haven't had to worry about diapers at all since the baby was born. Thank you!"

Some of the women are shy. They don't want to talk or have their photo taken. A couple others want me to teach them photography. We sit around the long tables while they eat their lunches and they talk about finishing school, finding new homes, getting jobs.

I will be back.

***

WDDC provides ongoing and intensive counseling, case management services, daily support groups, a comprehensive children's program, a variety of referral services, and a transitional housing program for for single-parent families.

Due to cutbacks, WDDC has had to lay off two key employees, one a counselor for the children. 

You can read more about WDDC here and more about Help A Mother Out here.

You can donate diapers online to WDDC or other Bay Area nonprofits here.


You can read more about our diaper drive and awareness raising efforts here.

More Happy.

It's still raining but I have more Happy for you.

Gregory and Xeno.

Memories of Greener Days

When I was in the third grade, I had a green, short thermos. Wide-mouthed and plastic in that 70s avocado green that was so en vogue. The thermos was just large enough to accommodate one of the small cans of Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, and for some reason, I was very aware that this thermos was lined with glass. I remember carrying it gingerly and worrying about it often. That I would drop the thermos and the glass would break. I remember that being a big concern of mine, although I was glad to have the soup for lunch. One day, at lunch on the blacktop, a boy grabbed my thermos. To my amazement, he threw it as far as he could across the playground. I remember being frozen, stunned. Shocked. It seemed that he had thrown that thermos incredibly far, and then he ran away. When I retrieved my short, wide-mouthed avocado green thermos from across the playground, it was leaking soup from its threaded matching cap and when I picked it up, I could sense the broken glass moving around inside the liquid. In my little 8-year old mind, it felt like a huge violation and a random, unexplicable act that frightened me.

Last year, reluctantly, I signed up for Facebook. To this day, I'm still not quite sure why I did. My sister, almost five years younger than me and more of a socially inclined person, encouraged me by saying things like, "You'll have so much fun finding your old school friends."

Which always made me laugh because we both knew darned well that I barely remembered anyone from any year of school, K through 12. And probably college, for that matter. With whom and why would I reconnect? Even my mom would ask me periodically, after some mother of a former classmate said, "Tell Julie so-and-so said hello!" and I would draw a total blank. My mom would say, "Do you remember going to school at all?" And we would laugh but it was pretty strange. I can remember my teachers, what we learned, what the classrooms looked like, but I'm hard-pressed to remember any given child besides their name. What I also discovered was how much I didn't remember about myself, which was a little more disconcerting.

***

A few weeks ago, I looked at the people on Facebook who were in my high school. There were a couple of girlfriends there, girls I remember hanging out with after school, getting pizza and sodas with. They're married, they have kids now. They politely said hello when I sent messages to them. I complimented them on their families.

There was the usual assortment of pretty girls I never spoke to, cheerleaders that annoyed me, and the boys especially that made me draw my accustomed mental blank slate. A few of the dorky ones seemed vaguely familiar.

And then I saw that boy. The Thermos Boy. I sent him a funny note, something like:

Hey, you probably don't remember me but in third grade, you broke my soup thermos and I thought I should let you know. Happy Holidays!

I didn't expect a reply. I guess I didn't expect him to remember me. Expecting that most people wouldn't remember me just like I didn't really remember them. I was just happy to have something to recall. I don't know what I would have written to anyone else (Hey, we went to school together but I don't remember shit about you isn't worth writing.)

But I was wrong. This person did remember me, with much kindness. In fact, he remembered me quite well and throughout our most of our school years. He recounted teachers and kids that were lingering in the back of my mind, dusted off and dimly seen again for the first time in years. It was charming, a sweet novelty. He also apologized about the Thermos.

It was so intriguing seeing myself through someone else's eyes, someone who I barely knew but who seemed to know the-me-that-was quite well.

***

He lives in another state now, has a little boy himself. He mentioned that he would be visiting the Bay Area for Christmas, and I suggested that they come up for a visit, and I would take their photos together as a present. I was curious to see what we would talk about. I wanted more of my memories.

We had a lovely visit. His son is a warmly engaging and friendly boy, who walks up to everyone he sees and says Hi! and grabs your index finger in a tiny handshake. The child also walks around saying Hey, you! Look at this! and points to all kinds of things he finds of interest.

And all through that, like dictation, came little snippets of my life, not from me, but from this man who was somehow still a boy, too. We walked around the Conservatory of Flowers, a fin-de-siecle confection of a building, humid like the tropics and full of mist and broad green leaves. In this greenhouse, the pale winter light was colored as it passed through the old stained glass, shining brightly blues, reds, greens, violets on us as we looked at the fecundity of the jungle.

I felt like I had been given a gift. The gift of myself as a girl remembered, green and vibrant like a little precious terrarium and I could peer inside of it, and see the tiny girl's world that lived inside. The green, new and tender world of life before sex: before the body is changed, broken, before the heart has expectations too big to realize, before the mind grows up and thinks it knows everything.

And no more of the memory of the broken thermos, with those sharp shards floating inside.

Diapers for Everyone in 2010!

Can't start the new year fresh without a new project, right?

Some (many?) of you might be familiar with the young homeless family that I was helping last year. I'm assuming that most of you know part or all of the story but if not, the link is here. Blogging about K's story is how I came in contact with a lot of you in the first place. ;-)

Meeting K (the homeless mother and domestic abuse survivor) and her young children (ages 9, 7 and three months) was a life-changing, eye-opening happy/sad experience. I learned first-hand about the dangers, fears and daily life of a family living on the edge of society in my beloved adopted hometown: San Francisco.

Right after I met K, a young mother named Lisa wrote to me and asked how she could help. She met me at a run-down hotel in the Tenderloin, 2 kids in tow (ages 3 and 1), and brought diapers, bags of clothes and toiletries and nursing supplies for this family. I can't tell you enough how happy and needed these donated supplies were to K. Especially the diapers.

I came to know Lisa and also to help her when I could with her budding effort called Help a Mother Out (HAMO) which she had just started with a friend. Through constant effort, Lisa and HAMO have collected over 130,000 diapers for shelters, crisis nurseries in the SF Bay Area. The Bay Area does not have a diaper bank and there is no other organized way of helping needy families get diapers for their babies.

Why all the explanation?

When I was working with K and the kids over the course of several months, I learned a lot. Let me give you an example.

When I first met K, as a homeless mother, she was not on any sort of assistance at all. She fled an abusive, dangerous husband with all the cash she could gather and found a cheap hotel in the Tenderloin. That hotel was $60 a night. The day I met her was her last day in the hotel unless she could come up with more money (which many of you were kind enough to help with). The following month after I met her, she started to receive welfare. These are real numbers below. I became very familiar with them over the course of months last year.

• $583 a month for a family of four for housing (that means finding housing for $145 a week in SF. Try to imagine what kind of housing that will get you.)
  
• $380 a month in food stamps for a family of four ($95 a week/$23.75 per person, per week. That doesn't go far, trust me.)
• The part that gets left out... diapers. If you're on food stamps, it doesn't provide for diapers, just food. So if you're already struggling, you don't have any extra money for diapers.
• Also, diapers are expensive, especially in San Francisco where you don't have access to Target, Costco and big box stores or online. Small corner groceries, especially in the Tenderloin, means more expensive diapers than moms can purchase in other neighborhoods.

I'm using K's situation as an example because it's really how things were. I saw it with my own eyes. This kind of situation is replicated in many families just in the SF Bay Area alone.

Why diapers?

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to realize that a baby in dirty diapers gets sick more. Goes to the emergency room more. Means more stress and hardship for a child and a mother living under already incredibly stressful circumstances. Many parents can't afford diapers and food, so they get food. They try to wash out disposable diapers and reuse them. (BTW, laundromats have various rules about washing cloth diapers, and many do not allow it, in case you were wondering. And having enough cloth diapers on hand is obviously another expense most families can't afford either.) So if you're low income or homeless, odds are you don't have a washer and dryer for cloth diapers.

These kids get sick and that affects all of us. (I know in K's instance, she must have taken the baby to the emergency room at least six times.)

***

So now to the project at hand. What I'm working on with Lisa:

The Mother's Day Holiday Playdate (sometime in May 2010). So even though this may not sound like a lot here, our success at this event will dictate the direction HAMO can play in helping families in a more established and meaningful way.

• HAMO’s Mother's Day Playdate will be held in the Bay Area (most likely SF).
  
• The goals of the event are:
• to physically collect diapers and
• to raise awareness of the need for diapers, why families may not have access to them, and the health and social repercussions of going without diapers, and
  
• HAMO online gives people easy ways to help. (HAMO also has diaper drive kits that can be utilized in any city where someone wants to create their own event.)
  
• The event will be a 2-3 hour playdate at a location TBD.
  
• We hope to have a major sponsor to underwrite the cost of the facility rental (unless we can get a place to donate a few hours for the cause). We're working on it. But more than one sponsor is definitely encouraged and welcome.
• Guests are asked to bring a pack of diapers in lieu of the normal per child admission price.
• Attendance goal of 100 families.
  
• Invitation list will include bloggers, entertainment professionals, and social media and tech-savvy locals as well as local mom and dad influencers.

What we need:

• A place to hold the event (SF would be ideal but we're open).
  
• Catering or help with getting food and beverages
• Donated shwag for gift bags
• Media coverage – local print, web, radio, television
• Other nice to haves:
  
• Door prizes
• Live entertainment – musician preferred.
• Funds or talent donations to cover additional entertainment (ie: crafts, body glimmer art, balloon animals)
  

So that's the purpose of this post (if you've read this far, thank you!).

If you can and want to help in some way, you can do one or a few of these things.

• You can go online and purchase a pack of diapers on Amazon through HAMO's donation link that will be sent directly to one of the shelters or nurseries in the Bay Area. Now, or now and again in May.
• http://www.helpamotherout.org/donate/virtual/
• You can come to the event in May and bring your kid (if you have one), a package of diapers and meet us.
• If you have kids and know other parents that can help, please pass this on to them. Schools, nurseries, day care, churches, synagogues, other organizations... all around us are people who can help if they knew about it.
• If you have access to catering or food to provide...
• If you know people in the media or can help us network and get more exposure...twitter, facebook, blogs.
  
• If you would like to be involved in planning the event, let me know! We would like to have a host committee because Lisa and I can't do this all by ourselves.
  

Any or all will be most appreciated. I'm just getting started on this but you can't plan too early, right?

The Big Picture.

The Big Picture is that this event will kick off a month of awareness and diaper donations online through HAMO. Lisa has picked May since it's the month of Mother's Day. I have signed up to help her make this event as successful as I can. I'll be working on other projects with Lisa, mostly photographic, that will illustrate what we're doing, but this event is the most important part of the puzzle right now as far as the future direction of HAMO is concerned.

I am open to any sort of suggestion, advice, connections and help. Please contact me about any questions you might have, too (tangobaby2 AT gmail.com). Whatever it is you can do, and for some, a donation isn't in the cards (I can totally understand). But even passing this post along to others you know creates the snowball I'm looking for. I've experienced the snowball effect before and because of that, I know it can happen again.

I'm not a mother. I've never had kids. But even I know how a little something like a clean diaper can make a child's life better.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Julie

ps.: Facts to keep in mind:

• In the San Francisco Bay Area, there are over 60,000 children under the age of five who are living under the poverty level.
• The cost of a healthy change of diapers for one child is about $100 a month.
• Food stamps and WIC program do not cover the cost of diapers
• In low-income and homeless families, babies often spend the entire day or longer in a single diaper. Inadequate diaper changing leads to numerous health risks and problems.

pss.: If you live outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, you can do your own diaper drive. There's info on HAMO's website on how to get started!

Charming naked vintage baby photo found on this blog.

Child's Play

I think these little people are gonna have to go on my website.

From a recent family photo shoot in Golden Gate Park.

For the little ones...

These were the beautiful faces I saw today.

***

I'm so grateful to keep getting my perspective readjusted. Just when I am way too focused on myself (which is frightfully easy, unemployment or no), something comes along that makes me snap to.

Today I joined Lisa from Help a Mother Out to attend a family event with the APA Family Support Services in their Chinatown office. HAMO, who you might remember from previous posts, is doing something to help parents that our social service system cannot: getting much needed diapers and toiletries to low income and homeless parents.

It sounds almost too simple to be true, but diapers are not covered under a family's food stamp ration. Which means if you've got a baby, and you're on a fixed income, you have to use your precious dollars to buy diapers because your food stamp allotment won't cover them. And for those of you who may not realize it, diapers are expensive. Some mothers are forced to go without, or reuse diapers, which causes health issues for the babies and emergency room visits that could be avoided.

Wouldn't it be so simple to make sure that families can get the diapers they need without sacrificing food? It's been a while since I've written on such issues, and I only want to write when such issues are before me, so that you're experiencing what I'm seeing.

So if you can, check out HAMO's website to learn how you can help donate diapers that will be given to needy, grateful families and babies.

***

Being in Chinatown is always a joy for me. Being able to help in my way (photography-wise) with this family support center, which helps Asian families throughout San Francisco, was even more special. The people at APA provide valuable services to the families that come to them: parenting classes, English classes,

APA's goal is to provide family support services to prevent child abuse and domestic violence.

If my camera and photos help in any tiny way towards that goal, then I am truly happy.

For more info:

Help a Mother Out
APA Family Support Services

***

UPDATE 9/22 8:19am: Lisa at HAMO has posted the story behind our visit to APA yesterday. Check it out here.

The world from their window

I think I forgot to share this photo with you before I put it on flickr.

Three little girls looking out over Polk Street from their Tenderloin apartment window. Someone paid me a huge compliment and said this had some Robert Frank magic to it, which I do take as a huge compliment.

I love their unique and individual reactions to what they're seeing on the streets below. I guess they didn't notice me.

There's a recent article on Frank in Vanity Fair (thanks Plug1, for making me aware of it). I still wonder why it was that he gave up photography. At this time in my life, I can't imagine that someday I won't want to capture images. Perhaps one can get tired of seeing. Or trying. I hope I don't.

***

Listen, I've kinda hinted around about the article in the San Francisco Chronicle (!!) on me and the i live here:SF project. I know some of you goodhearted souls are as anxious as I am to know when the article is coming out, and I still don't know. It will be sometime after Sunday, that's all I know now.

So if you want to start buying newspapers, you can but I swear, the very minute I hear any news, you'll be the next to know. Promise.

please please please let's help her

Please meet K., D., little K and baby M.

***

I met this beautiful family on my way home from a photo shoot today. I walked past them, just like the other people on their way home. I admit it. I saw her and sailed on by. I read her sign ($60 for a motel room... you know what kind of motel room $60 will get you in this city).

But I had seen the tears in her eyes, too, and so halfway down the block, I yelled at myself inside my head for being an asshole and went back. I had $30 in my wallet and gave it to her.


I'm not telling you this story so you can think I'm some sort of hero, 'cause I'm not.

And then we talked, and I learned her name was K. and asked her about the shelters in town. She rattled off the names of homes that I know are where abused women and children escape to when their lives are in danger.

None of the shelters had rooms for her and her children.

Then it dawned on me that maybe I could do more than give her $30 and hope someone else gives her another $30 so the young family can find a place to sleep tonight. I asked her if we could share her photos and her story so that somewhere, some of you might be able to help.

***

K's eyes are perpetually brimming with tears. She's tiny and her hands are chilled. Baby M is sleeping under a blanket on her chest. The two younger children, D and Little K, are relatively quiet considering their ages. At 7 and 9, they could be tearing up the sidewalks, but they're not.

When I explain to K about my blog and that I hope that maybe someone out there reading might have a way to help, she thinks it's a good idea and says it's okay to take the pictures. "It can't be any more embarrassing than what I'm doing now," she says.

I ask her if she lives in San Francisco and she says yes. But she cannot go home. It's too dangerous.

***

And then D and K want to take pictures, so I show them how to use the camera.

Baby M, taken by his brother D.

Me, taken by Little K.

Tall buildings on Montgomery Street, taken by D.

Me, taken by D.

Little K, taken by D.

D, taken by Little K.

***

I have K's voicemail number. But if there is anyone out there who can help get this woman and her children to shelter, a safe and warm place so they can be settled and happy, I can leave her a message with any information you might have.

Please, I am so serious about this.

We can do great things.

This might be one of those things.

Please contact me if you can be of any help at all.

xoxo