Where We Belong (2 page)

I
f you don’t like how things are, change it. You’re not a tree. You have the ability to totally transform every area in your life—and it all begins with your very own power of choice.

MICHELLE HAUSER

Michelle Hauser started working part-time jobs by the time she turned twelve. She could already tell: no one was going to take care of her better than she could take care of herself.

Instability inserted itself into Michelle’s life early. She grew up in Mason City, Iowa, a blue-collar town of twenty-eight thousand people located halfway between Des Moines and Minneapolis, Minnesota. The local hospital was the largest employer, but many of the residents worked in a variety of factories, including Kraft Foods, Armour, and two industrial door manufacturing companies. Michelle’s parents, Mike and Laurie, divorced after a nine-year marriage that was challenged by time spent apart. Mike worked long hours running a struggling diner owned by his alcoholic father. Laurie was a stay-at-home mom until Michelle turned three, when she began working part-time as a radio disc jockey. The couple’s relationship suffered under the weight of their busy lives. They divorced in 1988 when Michelle was seven. As agreed upon by the couple, she and her younger brother, James, stayed with Mike during the week so they could remain in the same school district. They spent weekends with Laurie. Both households had drawbacks: Mike was rarely home; Laurie was often at work, with friends, or disabled by untreated depression and anxiety. Michelle found solace playing outdoors. A sensitive child, she was drawn to tending to an injured bug or bird. She was also happy holed up in a quiet room.

“I was chatty if you got me into a conversation,” Michelle says, “but otherwise, I was interested in using my imagination out in nature or reading books and drawing. I was a very intellectual kid. I also spent a lot of time in the kitchen experimenting with recipes I found in cookbooks and inside my mom’s small metal box filled with handwritten recipe cards.”

Mike remarried a year after the divorce and continued to work eighty hours a week at the family restaurant. He took Michelle and James to the restaurant early many mornings and cooked them breakfast, bacon and eggs, before dropping the kids off a block away at grammar school.

“I’d watch him in the kitchen and ask him how to do things,” Michelle says of those mornings.

She was too young to be around sharp knives and hot fryers but was allowed to watch how the root beer was made in the basement of the restaurant. At home, Mike taught Michelle basic cooking techniques, even though she couldn’t reach the stove.

“I learned how to cook eggs,” she describes, “standing on a stool.”

In 1991, when Michelle was ten, her grandfather suffered a stroke and the family decided to sell the restaurant. Mike found new work delivering Pepsi products to businesses around town. Long hours continued to keep him away from Michelle and her brother, but the kids were grateful to have a consistent home base. The same couldn’t be said about home life with their mother. That year, Michelle’s mom gave birth to a baby named Zane. The father was a boyfriend who wanted no part of fatherhood, making Laurie a single mom with three children. Ten-year-old Michelle often cared for James and Zane when her mother went to work or didn’t feel well. While Mike worked steadily, Laurie supplemented her inconsistent income with public assistance. She used food stamps at the grocery store and also relied on trips to the local food bank for nonperishables.

“A box of government cheese, cans of peanut butter, containers of corn syrup,” Michelle describes. “Food was definitely not a guaranteed thing staying with my mom.”

If the pantry ran low, Michelle was not afraid to ask for help, because from time to time, her family had provided for neighbors in need. She remembers at least twice knocking on a door to ask for food.

“I never went hungry because I would go find a way to eat,” she says, “but it wouldn’t always be
our
food I was eating.”

Michelle is not completely clear on why her mother moved in and out of homes frequently, even several times within the same year, other than that it was sometimes for work. Laurie didn’t always let the kids know that a move was coming or that it had already happened.

“I kept everything I cared about at my dad’s place because sometimes my mom would move when I wasn’t around.”

Michelle says some of her mother’s relatives were involved with illegal drugs. Because the local factory jobs required drug tests, these family members worked as waitresses and shop clerks—or not at all. When one of the relatives watched Michelle and James at her house, Michelle says she sometimes sent them outside to play, locked the door, and used drugs. On other days, the relative used while the kids were inside.

“There would be trays of drugs lying out on the coffee table—methamphetamines or marijuana,” Michelle describes. “Sometimes the drugs were put under the couch, but if you dropped a toy on the ground, it would be easy to notice they were there.”

Laurie’s string of boyfriends brought additional anguish into the kids’ daily life. Michelle says one drunk boyfriend held a knife to Michelle’s throat as the two watched
Jeopardy!
on television. She was eleven. He was in his thirties.

“He would make me sit there and watch with him. He’d want me to say the answers, but then he would get mad and belligerent if I knew more answers than he did.”

The same boyfriend threatened to kill Laurie as he drove drunk with Laurie and Michelle in the car.

“I remember sitting in the backseat with a long metal flashlight—one of those heavy ones—and yelling at him that if he did anything I would beat him in the head with the flashlight. I had to be a survivalist. There were a lot of situations like that.”

Michelle couldn’t always protect herself. Both parents routinely dropped off Michelle and James at the home of a babysitter who had a son of her own. At age seven, over the course of several months, Michelle was sexually abused by the son, in his twenties.

“I didn’t tell anyone for the same reasons many people don’t,” Michelle explains. “I was embarrassed, ashamed; I was afraid someone would think it was my fault.”

While neither parent could know the sitter’s house was not safe, Michelle admits that her mother made some poor decisions about who she brought into their lives. She does, however, acknowledge that Laurie was raised by a mother who herself had a number of challenges.

“My mom had a more difficult childhood than I did. So, for her, she was doing a good job.”

Despite the chaos and lack of supervision, Michelle was a straight-A student. She didn’t need to study to do exceptionally well in school and on standardized tests. Learning was easy and books provided transport to a brighter, more stimulating world.

“I would just sit for hours and hours in my room and read book upon book. In my fifth-grade class we had to have a reading log over the course of the year. You had to read five books . . . I read one hundred and forty.”

When Michelle turned eleven, her mom moved to a small town—population eighty-two. Bored and untethered, Michelle and a friend walked eight miles up the railroad tracks to the nearest town, ate lunch, and walked back home.

“No one really kept track of me when I was little,” she says. “Even during my teens I had free rein. When I was sixteen I didn’t see my dad for nearly two weeks because our schedules didn’t align.”

By age twelve, Michelle had her first job. She worked alongside migrant workers picking strawberries.

“I don’t know how older people do it,” Michelle says, “because I remember having achy knees as a kid.”

She wanted to earn her own money; she needed to. “I knew I couldn’t depend on anyone else to do that for me, so I wanted to make sure I could if I had to.”

At fourteen, with a work permit, Michelle landed a job at a restaurant waitressing, filling the salad bar, and washing dishes. By law she was too young to work with heat or knives, but some of the managers ignored the rules and assigned her to the grill. Within a year, Michelle began to get caught up in the wrong crowd at the restaurant. Most of her coworkers were older and some used drugs openly and offered them to staff members while on the job. She began to sample pot, cocaine, meth, PCP, psychedelic mushrooms, LSD, and heroin.

“I hadn’t had a close-knit family structure or people I felt cared about me, so these were some of the first people who were accepting of me,” she says. “Looking back, I hung out with them because I felt like I belonged. It would be ten or eleven o’clock at night when I got off work and no one was regularly checking to see that I came home.”

Michelle’s drug use turned out to be a plus at school. It established a common bond with classmates who also used, which resulted in new “friendships.”

“They suddenly had an interest in talking to me and hanging out with me.”

Even with drugs in her life, Michelle continued to excel in school. She was working nearly a combined forty hours a week at the restaurant and also as a bill collector over the phone. Yet, although barely cracking a book, she maintained solid As. While Michelle’s daily life revolved around work and drugs, she believed her brainpower would eventually launch her out of Mason City and into a more intellectual environment.

“My main goal when I was younger was to not end up as an unskilled worker like my family members.”

Michelle’s secret dream was to become a doctor. A nurturer at heart, she loved the idea of caring for and curing people for a living.

“People would say, ‘Oh, you always seem to want to make everybody and everything feel better. You would make a good doctor.’ That kind of stuck with me.”

But how? Without role models, finances, or connections, how could a girl from a small town in Iowa whose daily life revolved around an unsavory crowd and double-shift work hours realize her ambitious dream?

“Every handful of years, someone would make the comment about how I was really smart, and those few comments were really what got me through,” she says. “If I didn’t have that subjective data, there was nothing else telling me I was going to be able to be a doctor.”

Nothing else and no one else. In her junior year of high school, Michelle had a meeting with her guidance counselor.

“When I walked into this woman’s office she said, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ and I said, ‘I want to be a doctor.’ She actually laughed under her breath and said, ‘Let’s find something more suitable for you to do.’ ”

Even after the counselor looked through Michelle’s file and saw how academically gifted she was, she still advised, “I think what would be a great job for you would be to go work in a factory.”

But, by age sixteen, Michelle was determined more than ever to take control of her destiny by working hard and staying self-reliant. Still partying with friends, Michelle had two jobs and was paying for essentials like shampoo and clothes. She also bought a car and car insurance. Michelle told her father she wanted to move out on her own. Concerned about his daughter’s drug use—he knew only about the pot—Mike tried to set ground rules, which didn’t go over well.

“I felt like, I buy all my own stuff, I make my own money for future rent. You can’t just decide you’re going to make a bunch of rules for me now when I’ve never had any, especially when you’re not doing the things for me that most parents do.”