Nearly fifteen years ago my colleague, Maureen Norton-Hawk, and I began meeting with women recently released from prison in Massachusetts. our goal was to learn how women navigate life post-incarceration. Over the years we have written about their experiences with housing, pregnancy, children, illness, love, abuse, drugs, police, bail, parents, jobs, moves out of state and back to Massachusetts, and much more.

This post, starring Daisy (click here for more about Daisy), is the first in a series exploring what it’s like for women to grow old on the social, legal and economic margins of our society.

Daisy and Me

My relationship with Daisy feels special: We are the exact same age and we both became grandmothers for the first time within months of one another. For various reasons – in part covid-related — neither of us has been able to be with our grandchildren as much as we would like. Neither of us has access to the freedom that comes with driving one’s own car. Daisy never learned how to drive and I no longer can drive since losing partial vision. More trivially, both of us like purple flowers.

When I first met Daisy she was unhoused, staying at various shelters, never having the good luck to land a long-term placement where she could store her belongings during the day and count on having a place to sleep at night. She often looked disheveled and sounded confused.

In recent years, as her living situation became more settled, she has made it a point to call me regularly, especially before holidays to wish me well and during tough periods in my life. She called to check in on me nearly everyday when my father was sick and dying, when I had a bad flu, and when I struggled after eye surgeries. She also calls to remind me that her birthday is coming up (a gentle reminder to send her a gift) and whenever something particularly good — such as the birth of grandchild — occurs, even though she knows she is unlikely to see the grandchild very often.

Daisy’s Challenges: On the Streets

Daisy’s lives with physical and cognitive disabilities. She is of unusually small stature, her toothlessness makes her speech difficult to understand, she cannot read more than her name and a few other words, and she has a penchant for consuming far more alcohol than her body can handle. All of that, together with her overly trusting nature and keen desire to have a friend — resulted in years of nearly constant harassment from others on the street, shopkeepers, police and fellow shelter-dwellers. Harassment would be punctuated with occasional assaults, especially on the day she received her Disability money.

In the ten plus years Daisy spent unhoused, she never quite learned how to work the system. That, of course, is not reflection on her persistence or character. Rather, the system is meant to be difficult to work. In Daisy’s case, homelessness happened suddenly so she had no experience or connections to draw on. She’d always been housed with her parents, her first husband (who passed away), and then her second husband – who died suddenly. He was the financial provider for the family; with his death she couldn’t pay rent and was evicted. Her children were taken in by relatives of their father (her first husband) and then went to college and lived in the dorms. Throughout those years, the children were reluctant to engage with their homeless, alcoholic mother – a mother who had been written off by the rest of their family.

I’ll never forget the time Daisy stood in line to board the bus to the Long Island shelter. She was carrying a backpack and a few plastic bags with all of her belongings. Tiny in stature, she was weighed down by her few possessions. When the driver told her she couldn’t bring all of her things on the bus, she left the plastic bags on the ground. A police officer supervising the proceedings promptly wrote her a ticket for littering. Not only did Daisy have no money to pay a ticket, but the interaction with the officer caused her to miss the bus – leaving her to spend a night sleeping the park where she was at risk for arrest for loitering as well as for being robbed.

Growing Old

When Daisy’s children reached adulthood – finished their education, entered good careers, settled down with wonderful life partners — they turned their attention to helping their mother get settled. Having chosen classic helping careers (one child a nurse, the other a social worker) they were well-positioned to arrange housing for their mother. They took over as Daisy’s payee for Disability and found a room for her to rent in a suburb far from the Boston neighborhoods in which she used to “get into trouble” (that is; drink and get robbed.)

Daisy was delighted to have her children back in her life, happy with the day program for disabled adults that her daughter arranged for her, thrilled to have a safe place to live. But as much as she didn’t want to admit it to her kids, she also was bored, especially on the weekends and holidays when the day programs were shut and her children – who quite reasonably set limits for how often they would visit their very needy mother — rarely visited.

The start of covid was the end of this comparatively idyllic period for Daisy. The day programs closed, her children told her not to go shopping for fear of infection, and she fell down the steps in the house in which she was living. Virtually stuck in her room, her mental health deteriorated.

Daisy’s Group “Home”

Following a stint in a psych unit, Daisy moved to a kind of group home for elderly people with disabilities. Her daughter had to use all of her connections as a social worker to get Daisy into this small, quite lovely facility out in the countryside. For Daisy, this is a home in the sense that the plan is for her to live there long-term. It is not, however, a home in the sense that one’s home is one’s castle, or at least one’s own, private space where one can “be oneself”.

In the group home, Daisy has no choice regarding with whom she must share a room, the daily routine, or what she eats. Residents are not permitted to have food sent to them from the outside, portions are small and the food is not in keeping with Daisy’s ethnic heritage. In fact, she often is hungry. It’s also hard for her that residents are not permitted to leave the house other than to walk right outside on the property. Daisy craves to go to a store to pick out a snack she likes or a gift for her grandchild’s birthday, but that is not permitted.

Daisy doesn’t complain much (at least to me), but she calls me when she is feeling lonely – and sometimes that can be nearly every day. Throughout the pandemic her day program remained closed, so she had no access to recreation or anyone or anything outside the facility. (It re-opened recently and Daisy is over the moon about that.) The biggest challenge for Daisy is that each time a resident or employee is exposed to covid the whole house is put on lockdown. That means Daisy and her roommate are restricted to their shared room 24 hours a day. Food trays are put outside their door. Quick trips to the bathroom are permitted. That’s it. Daisy understands that this policy is for the safety of all the residents. Still, she chafes both at the lack of privacy and the lack of social interaction.

Overall she is grateful to have a safe place to live, but sometimes the facility feels a bit like prison.

To Be Continued …

Life is too precarious for women on the margins for me to hazard a guess as to what will happen next for Daisy (or anyone else.) I remain grateful to Daisy for sharing her experiences and opinions with me and can only hope that she and I will continue aging together – in our parallel worlds — for a good many years to come.