After another night of sleeping on the street, Susan strolls into the downtown public library in Reno. She has only a few bags, and one of them is full of colorful crochets she’s been working on. Susan has pretty hair— she dyed it red recently. Despite missing her teeth, she has a bright smile.
Susan comes to the library often. On this Friday, she sits down at Our Town Reno’s “Share your Story” table, on the bottom floor of the library.
“Sometimes it's good for people to know what other people [have] been through in life,” she says, grinning. “It helps me feel better about myself, talking. I can't keep this all inside of me anymore.”
Before coming to Reno, Susan says she was living in a group home in Las Vegas, but it didn’t work out. “They promised you they would help you with stuff, but they (aren’t actually) willing to help you,” she says. Now, she says she sleeps wherever she can find a good, safe spot on the streets of Reno, covering her things with coats or blankets.
“I came back to Reno because- I love Reno. It's not big. I can take (all the) buses I want. I can't get lost. Many times, (I’ve) tried to get lost. You can't.
People say that I'm handicapped, but I don't really see myself that way. Treat me like a person. I might have a learning disability, but if I need help, I will ask for help. That's what kind of person I am.”
Susan says she’s had terrible luck in relationships. Previously she lived with her first husband in Minnesota, where Susan is from, but he was physically abusive to both her and her son.
“I didn't believe in my marriage anymore because… if I lived with my husband, I know I wouldn’t live. He said he would kill me, many times…and I thought, okay. I need to have a better life. I need to take my son with me. The last thing he saw was his dad choking me.”
Susan had support from a cousin, Sandy, who helped them get out of that situation. Susan told her then husband that she was taking her son with her to a cooking class. They left and never returned.
“Then I met my daughter's dad,” she remembers. “He was not really nice to me either. He was abusive in a different way. He never hit me, but words, you know, I couldn't deal with that. He was cheating on me.”
Out of her two abusive relationships, Susan had two children: a son and a daughter. Susan’s son struggled in school after the trauma he’d suffered at a very young age. He was kicked out of school several times, even at just five years old.
“I didn’t want to give him up, but I did. I put him in foster care in Wisconsin. (I hoped) that will help him with all the anger problems that he had. I couldn't handle that myself because… I didn't know how to do it. And then, when you’re a single parent… how do you do it?”
Both of Susan’s kids were put in foster care, and she says that’s the hardest part of her life. “I'm hoping that both of my kids know that I love them. I didn't want to give my kids up,” she says.
Susan’s son’s 22nd birthday is coming up, and that’ll be a hard day for her. “I’m hoping that…he will find me someday,” she says. “I’m gonna believe that he will find me someday.”
Susan herself was adopted, and was able to reconnect with her birth mother as a young adult. She also has a biological brother, but the two siblings were separated and grew up apart from each other. “I wish social workers would keep kids together. It is still hard, because we don’t have that relationship. That’s the hard part, if you don’t grow up with your brother or sister, you won't have that closeness.”
The main struggle with finding housing, for Susan, is all the waitlists. When asked if she’d ever been to the CARES campus, Susan says that she hadn’t even thought about it. But Susan believes the Reno community is a special one, and she gets by with a little here and a little there.
“A lot of people are really friendly, really will help you for food. One time I didn't ask for money, I got $20,” she shares. “A lot of people around will help you…and you don't have to ask for money. I've been very lucky.”
Susan comes to the library to rest, wash her hair, and work on her crochet projects. And these days, the library’s resources have been especially important to her— despite her rocky history with relationships, Susan says she has found love. But this time, he lives on the other side of the world.
“I come here to the library everyday to charge my phone…because I have somebody I can talk to. I have someone special in my life that I'm planning to get married to.”
Susan’s eyes sparkle as she talks about her fiancé, a man she’s been talking to on the phone for four years now.
“He makes me feel strong. Every time I had a bad day, he knows how to cheer me up,” she says, dreamily. Susan says that this guy treats her like the queen she is.
Susan’s fiancé loves her dyed red hair. They plan to meet each other in America some day, and Susan is very hopeful for what that future will look like. She doesn’t give details on where he lives or how it will be possible for him to travel here, but just speaking with him on the phone gives her hope and something to look forward to.