One Client’s Journey from Financial Distress to Success

By Shuly X. Cawood

Bette* used to have a china pattern that matched her dining room wallpaper. That’s how little she had to think about money. She had taught math and science in schools, had owned her own real estate company, and had been happily married to a man who had a high enough income to allow her to work part-time around the hours she was home to raise their son. Money was not an issue for the two decades she was married.

This past year, Bette was sent to The Women's Center’s for a budgeting class when she couldn’t pay the deposit for her utilities and asked for financial help from the Orange County Department of Social Services (DSS). The class, a part of The Women’s Center’s Community Financial Counseling program, is a requirement for those who request money from DSS a second time.

But Bette knew very well how to manage money and did not need the class. Right before she moved to the Triangle, she had given her son and his family as much money as she could, but too late realized she had not kept enough for her required deposits and had to turn to DSS for assistance.

Having to go to this class because of the financial bind she was in felt dreadful to Bette. She thought to herself, “I’ve been taking care of myself for years; I’d run a whole company and I thought now this has got to be the most torturous part of Hell -- it couldn’t be worse than this.”

But “this” was not really about money – Bette’s whole life changed five years ago when her husband left her. “I was primarily a homemaker. My husband and I had decided I would work around raising my son,” she said. “I was a person who was really into the home. My husband and my son were everything. Marriage was just supposed to be forever – yet mine didn’t last forever.”

The devastation was overwhelming. “I was just walking around earth. . . my body was here but my mind was in outer space. I had the hardest time remembering things,” she said. “I’d go through whole days and try to figure out what I did – I’d ask myself what had happened to the middle part of it?”

The turning point for Bette came not in the budgeting class, however, but when she stopped to talk about her life to two of The Women's Center’s First Response volunteers who sit at the front desk and are the first contact when someone calls or walks into the Center.

“I’d never opened up before – there was nobody I was willing to open up my life to like that. And it was the conversation with those two women – that was the way The Women's Center helped me the most. It was the emotional support – and it wasn’t even by counselors,” Bette said. “They told me ‘you don’t realize what a warrior you are.’”

She says The Women's Center helped her believe in herself. “By the time I finished talking with those two First Response volunteers, I felt like I could skywalk.”

The instructor from Bette’s budgeting class realized she knew plenty about money management, and now Bette is inspiring others as a volunteer financial counselor with The Women's Center. “I love it,” she said.

She finds that this is the first time that some of her clients have really looked at all their bills and faced their financial situation for what it truly is. “The biggest boogeyman is to find out what you’ve got hidden, so we do that,” Bette said. “I tell them that however big it is, the two of us together will figure out some way to work something out.”

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Information and Referral and Community Financial Counseling are just two of the Women’s Center’s services that help clients succeed. Others are: legal information, career counseling, adolescent programs, and a wide range of workshops and support groups. For more information on services and programs sponsored by the Women’s Center, please call 919.968.4610 or visit http://www.womenspace.org/.

*Name has been changed to protect client’s identity.

To make a donation to The Women's Center or to learn about becoming a member, please click here.

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