reminded of time I lived in a battered women's shelter

This reminds me of the month I lived in a battered women's shelter while awaiting my temporary divorce hearing, at which the judge ordered my husband, who had changed the locks on our jointly owned home and refused to let me in to get baby clothes even. The residents had to take turns cooking meals for all the other residents, which was abused moms and children trying to figure out their next steps under the pressure of the limit of just one month in the shelter. I was lucky. I was upper middle class, only temporary cut off from my assets when my now-ex canceled all credit cards, closed our joint bank account with the bank going along with that illegal act, and his bro was our investment broker and when I tried to access some of MY money in that brokerage firm, he just wouldn't let me -- also illegal but 35 years ago, such discrimination against women was so routine that few people grokked that it was, um, illegal to deny a person their own legal assets.

Anyway, I cooked a lot, largely because as the oldest girl in a family of 8, I was used to cooking large quantities and most of the women either were not much as cooks or too stressed to plan meals.

The shelter would give the cook a list of what food was available for her assigned meal and then the cook could make whatever she wanted. One time, my food list included hamburger so I proposed having hamburgers. The person in charge of doling out food told me hamburgers were too expensive, they used up more hamburger per person than the shelter could afford.

The shelter had endless supply of flour and vegies so I made hamburger pizza. After that great pizza, all the women begged that I do all the cooking. I was happy to oblige. Every resident had to do a chore daily and I preferred cooking to cleaning toilets. Plus it was fun to do and fun to be praised. We had hamburger pizza once a week, each time hamburger popped up on our food list.

A couple years after I left the shelter as a resident, but had continued at its weekly aftercare support group for support during my custody hell, I somehow came into possession of a watch, a free male watch. Acting on instinct, on the evening of Christmas Eve, I went to the shelter, where alumni were always welcome to enter (the location was kept as secretive as possible), I knocked on the door, a woman who knew me for she was a social worker when I had lived there with my baby and thanked me profusely. She said a little boy had just come into the shelter, that they had small gifts for all the children but that boy and now the boy would receive that cheap watch. A little thing but anyone whose life path leads them to a battered women's shelter, much less on Christmas Eve, is traumatized.

I wonder, sometimes, if battered women shelters still exist. Back when I benefited from one, it was kinda new in this country for anyone to acknowledge spousal abuse was an actual thing.