We lived in a nice house. My parents divorced when I was about seven, and after that nothing was steady again for a very long time.
My mother was a schoolteacher. She was working full time, trying to hold a house together, and raising two young children in the 1970s — when a woman on her own was expected to manage quietly and not make anyone uncomfortable. She was also carrying more than anyone could see. Her first husband, a military flight surgeon, had died in training six weeks after my brother was born. She was still grieving him. She was struggling with her own parents. And mental health was not something people talked about then; there was no language for what she was carrying, and certainly no help she could ask for without shame.
It did not collapse all at once. That is the part people misunderstand. It went slowly, and then all together. We went from comfortably middle class — arguably the higher side of it — to food stamps. The lights went out. The phone bill went unpaid. The mortgage fell behind and we came close to losing the house. Every one of those was survivable on its own. Arriving together, on one exhausted woman with no support system, they were not.
And the financial collapse did not stay financial. The pressure triggered mental health struggles that had been latent in her for years, and once those took hold the two fed each other. She struggled for a long time afterward — longer than she needed to, because the help that would have worked was not something anyone offered her and not something she knew how to ask for.
She did get there. When she finally received appropriate mental health care, she was able to live her last years happily. She rebuilt a nest egg through her teacher's retirement and other sources, and she recovered her financial footing. The ending was good. It simply took decades longer than it should have, because there was nowhere to go early.
That is the whole reason this Center exists. Not for the woman who has already lost everything — there are organisations for her, and we will walk you to them. For the woman in the middle of it, still holding on, still looking fine from the outside, one or two events away from a slide she cannot climb back out of. If that is you right now: you are not the first, you did not cause this, and you are not alone. There is help, it exists in this county, and the rest of this page and this website is about finding it while you still have room to move.