Aftercare Matters: Stuff

By: Sara Barrett, Aftercare Case Manager

 

Three weeks in to Aftercare, I was excited to get to a particular home visit with a Community LINC client. She had received furniture to fill her home, due to a referral made to a partnering agency to fill this need. Feeling great about the fact that she had all of the material things that seemed necessary to make a home a home, and excited to celebrate this with her, I was greeted by a home in disarray and an upset, overwhelmed young mom.

 

Furniture was all over the living room and the kitchen was stacked to the top cabinets with cooking necessities. My client burst into tears and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to do this in my own place.”

 

When I asked her what she meant, she went on to explain, this was her first experience living in her own home and owning all the furniture and materials one might put in a home.

 

She had spent the week trying to get the home ready for my arrival of our hour long home visit, hoping I would be impressed that she had put a whole home together, but grew stressed and overwhelmed with the responsibility of caring for so much. She said, “Is this what it’s like to be not homeless? Why do people think all this stuff is what creates happiness? Why did I think that?”

 

My heart sank, and I sat down on the couch, which was halfway in the dining room and halfway in the kitchen. My client sat next to me and we made plan to get the home in order.

 

As we worked to put things in their “proper place” my mind swirled. What is my job here? What is happiness? What is success in this program? I had this idea of what it looked like to move from homelessness to self-sufficiency; what I as a “social worker” would call success, what a put-together home might look like; but I’m not here to make my ideas my client’s ideas. I was humbled by the power I have as a worker-that someone would spend a week in distress to impress me with the condition of her home. 

 

My client eventually settled in to the responsibility of caring for and seeing the benefit of having the material things she has in her home - a table to eat family dinners around, a couch to plop on with her kids and watch a movie or paint nails, and a full kitchen to prepare healthy meals for her family.

 

We laugh now when we talk about that day, but our conversation on this topic always ends with the idea that all the material things we have are just stuff.

 

Self-sufficiency is about more than the roof over our heads or the things we have in our home, it starts with the belief in one’s self that he or she can become self-sufficient; that one does have the ability to maintain a home and that this ability is valuable.

 

My job as the aftercare worker is to see the strengths in the clients I serve that can be cultivated into life skills, help the client see those for him or herself, and partner with them to develop those into what self-sufficiency looks like to them. If we can do that, all the other “stuff” will fall into place.