The Truth Behind the Eyes of Bella

Have you ever stopped to listen to somebody else’s life story, without judging them? This woman, Bella, has been through it all, and yet, still smiles. She arrived in Fort Collins thanks to a trip through hell.

-Photo taken by Renata Julia Ordóñez.

She was a beautiful woman. Big, blue-grey eyes with long, curly lashes, perfect caramel colored skin, and a welcoming smile. She was wearing a hat that covered up her hair and loose clothing with sweatpants. We were sitting at a table that was decorated with a map of the Colorado Mountain Range, in the Backcountry sandwich shop. If you haven’t gone, it’s a food store in downtown Fort Collins, between an awesome coffee shop named The BeanCycle and an equally rad clothing store called Kansas City Kitty. The Backcountry sandwich shop we were sitting in was stuffed with people, so there was a comfortable atmosphere amongst the murmurs of other conversations and the warm sunlight that was shining in through the big windows of the store. She started off by telling me that her name was Bella. She was from Kentucky, and a paralegal (a lawyer’s assistant), a degree she’d just gotten last year. At twenty-five years old, she had three children- the first one she had as a fifteen-year-old, the second at age seventeen, and the youngest child at the age of nineteen. This caught my attention because it takes an enormous amount of effort to take care of three children at such a young age and still pursue a law career, let alone finish high school. According to the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy, “Teen mothers are less likely to complete the education necessary to qualify for a well-paying job- only 41% of mothers who have a child before age 18 ever complete high school.” I asked her about her life and how she got so far even with such conditions, and the intense story she told me left my heart marked with an admiration for a woman whom I’d never expected to have lived such a life.

Bella started by telling me in a smooth western accent that she had been the father of her children since the age of thirteen, and that they’d just recently divorced this year. She’d lived with him for half of her life, and she met him in very hard circumstances, the kind that normally bond people forever. As she started telling me this, she became very emotional as any person would, so I took her hand and told her it would be okay. “We all have our bad stories”, I said, “if you only knew the life I’ve had, and the life of many others, you’re be surprised to know that people aren’t whom they seem to be.” She nodded reassuringly and continued, “I met him when I was thirteen because at that age I moved in with him, since he was one of my mother’s closest friends that sometimes took care of us.” She went on by telling me that she had a younger sister, and she’d never really lived in the best conditions. Bella’s mother was a crack addict and a divorced woman since Bella was four, something that made Bella a woman who had to learn to care of her sister and experience living on the floor of friends’ or family’s houses, in motels, or in a car. It was at this young age that she met her husband, (who’s name she didn’t reveal), when she moved in with him in a small house where her future mother-in-law took care of them. Life away from her mother was always tough though, perhaps even harder, because she was one of the 7.8% of African-Americans that lived in a state where 85.6% of the population is white. This doesn’t mean anything at all, until we put into perspective the fact that Kentucky is one of the most racist states in the USA. Bella said that the woman that took care of them, her mother-in-law, called her a “black bitch”, and hated her for it. Not only that, Bella and her sister were the first black children to attend the elementary school of their town, and parents wanted them to leave and drop out of that school just because of their color. They switched schools all the time because of this, and she told me, “the little kids at the school never had any problem with me. They always wanted to play. But their parents would never let them come to my house or sleep over, just because of my color. I couldn’t really make friends, because… y’know, I was a black girl. I wasn’t supposed to be around those white kids.”

She faced racism on many other occasions, even up to today, because of her color. I asked Bella how it was that she decided to become a paralegal, what led her to pursue her dreams. “I never really aspired to do any of that”, she told me, “as a woman in the place and circumstances I lived in, I never thought of reaching university. I never even let myself dream that I’d make it there.” “What had you always dreamt of doing when you grew up, then?”, I asked. “I wanted to grow up to be the perfect wife. The perfect woman. That’s all I knew of wanting to be when I was older. Y’know, the kind of wife and woman you see in textbooks, in TV screens- with their family, with good manners, and taking care of them from home. That’s all I wanted to be for my husband”, she replied. I was pretty shocked, because I wasn’t used to hearing a woman talk about wanting to be the stereotypical old-style ‘good’ wife in these times. She told me she had wanted to be like what her grandparents thought a woman should be, and that even with the bad role-models she had, that’s who she tried to be. “It doesn’t work out that way, though”, she said, “women get tired of pretending to be good, and nice, and a perfect wife. Pretty soon the man gets mad and wants to know why his wife is acting strange, acting different. What he doesn’t realize, is that she is being herself. Now I know, women shouldn’t follow that stereotype. They should be who they want to be; the woman they are.” I asked her about gender roles, and how they should work in modern times. We talked about men and women being able to take on the choices they believe are right, with their own personalities, without restrictions that come from a partner telling you what to do and how to do it, just because you are a man or a woman.

However, Bella is now a divorced woman. After finishing her degree as a paralegal, she couldn’t find an immediate job, so she kept working at a bottling factory that had always supported the family with a secured income. One day though, there was an accident at that factory, and Bella’s fingers were cut off by one of the bottling machines. She showed me her hand, and her fingers, mostly on her right hand, went only up to her knuckles, including her thumb. For a reason I can’t explain, I became very emotional when I saw that her fingers that weren’t mutilated, had cute, pink-lacquered nails. This kind woman, whom had been a complete stranger to me less than an hour ago had now captured my heart. Bella continued her story, telling me that because of her accident, she had to be off work and in bed most of the time, resting and doped out with medication. It was in her free time, she told me, that “[she] found out he was having an affair with another woman. So [she] confronted him directly, asking him about this person, and that [they] couldn’t continue together if [they] didn’t feel like it was going to work.”

-Photo taken by Renata Julia Ordóñez.

As Bella went along giving me bits and pieces of her life, she untangled before me a deeply complicated life. “I’m schizophrenic”, she blurted. “I made the compulsive decision to leave in my car with most of my stuff, and my seventeen-year-old son came with me for most of the journey. I left with less than a hundred dollars, and made my way here.” Never had I been so astonished. It’s ironically funny when you find people with a similar life like yours, but hers was slightly more intense. I questioned her if she’d been in a mental institution for her schizophrenia, and she told me that yes indeed, she’d been in quite a few. “What did you think of them?”, I asked, “My mother was in one, but they didn’t treat her well, it wasn’t really a good facility. After she got out of there, most people shamed her. Was that the same for you?” Bella responded that it was not a good experience at all. “They take you in, but they don’t care about you. I ended up worse in those places than out. They’d just give me pills and drop me out. That’s why people are afraid to get help. They are afraid to get judged. I always have to watch my tongue with a therapist, because I don’t wanna say the wrong thing and then boom, I’m back in a mental institution where I get even more depressed. They don’t take good enough care of the patients. People in general don’t accept mental illnesses well. That’s why everyone that needs it is afraid to ask for help”, she explained.

Her friends and family weren’t a loving support for her on this risky trip to Fort Collins, much less with her schizophrenia. “Many of my friends left me, y’know. People who I cared about started one by one, leading my side. They started thinking I was a different type of person. Pretty soon, I had no one by my side. Everyone had left”, she said, “it makes you feel like you’re worthless. Like you aren’t a good human. And to escape that, you run, you do compulsive things, you go through a cycle and do it again and again and again, to stop yourself from feeling the pain too long.”, Bella told me. In Colorado, a place she thought would be more liberal, any support at all was still very hard to get from people that weren’t friends and family. Bella faced racism through the ride, telling me about an occasion her son and her stopped for help- “We ran out of gas and so we asked someone to help us. My son went out, and people would come, but then they’d turn back when they saw I was black. I cried for about an hour because I knew it would be my fault if my son got stuck here, because I wouldn’t be able to help him, just because of my color. Y’see, my son is blond with blue eyes, because my husband was a white man.”

To turn to a lighter note, I asked about her son. I learned that both her son and daughter were bisexual, and she was very accepting of that. “My son wears makeup. My daughter dresses in sports clothes with baggy basketball shorts and shoes. And I think that’s great. They should be who they want to be.” I took the chance to ask her what she thought of sexuality. Bella, as a mother, saw that it’s become more accepting for teenagers to express their sexuality, and even though more and more people are coming out as gay, transgender or bisexual, it wasn’t really because of a trend- she believes that it’s because they are less afraid to be heard in today’s society, and that acceptance is what the modern government needs most. Bella is hoping that the newer generations take control of society to create a better place that is accepting of every religion, gender, and sexuality; she told me she is “waiting for that moment to happen. You younger kids will know how to fix it, because I see you’re all so intelligent, because you always gotta be alert that nobody’s fooling you, or tricking you into believing to be different, like in social media. And so will the ones after you, they’ll be a better generation, too.” I admired her faith in the future, and her belief in those of us who are younger. We discussed what the world is today. We talked more about sexuality, and then about media, which she said is a “terrible place where strangers can make you believe whatever they want. They can manipulate all the information.” She also had a stand on religion. “I had so many rough times in my life, I started to lose faith in God. I thought, ‘if he wrote my destiny, why would he write it for me this way?’” This led me to inquire what religion she belonged to, and Bella simply replied with “I just believe in God. I don’t have a religion. I don’t think we need one. We all think differently about a god. I just think people should believe in whatever superior person brings them faith and hope. We don’t need any wars or racism to convince people to believe in one specific God, because it’s all the same. The only thing that changes is that they tell you how to behave and they’re in for the money.” Bold woman with bold ideas, but amazing nonetheless.

After a while about chatting about other random things, Bella jumped back into telling me about the harsh trip to Fort Collins that we’d left trailing. Once her son and her reached Fort Collins, she said, they’d absolutely run out of gas, and she had to leave the car and her belongings. Her son eventually returned back to her dad whom had gotten all the custody of her children.

In Fort Collins, she met a young autistic man in the same situations she was in, and “took him under [her] wing, because many people have taken advantage of him, given his disability, and so [she’s] there to protect him.” Bella also plans to get her ID in Colorado, and find a job as a paralegal in Laimer County- and mostly, live the present, day by day.

Bella, a beautiful woman with a difficult past, was at the same time one of the nicest and most open people I have ever met. With her, I learned that your past only makes you who you are because of what you learn from it. She showed me her tattoos that represented specific dark moments in her life- a black rose, her sister’s name, a ring of the family she used to have, her ex-husband’s name, and a butterfly, and she told me “I may not like them, but I don’t regret them. They show the moments of my life I never want to forget I went through. I’m kinda grateful, actually, that this happened to me, because I wouldn’t have gotten out of my circle to learn all these new experiences, new people, and their views on life.”

This same Bella is a woman that has been homeless for six months, whom I met on the street carrying a cardboard sign that said she was seeking help. She is one of the 1,750,000 homeless people in the United States, and part of the 22% of the homeless population that suffers from a mental illness.

This woman has been judged so many times in her life by her looks, her race, her social class, her mental state and her life decisions, and never once been given to chance to be heard or known for who she really is. This is the Bella I walked up to and took out to lunch at the Backcountry sandwich shop, and asked to tell me her story.

#homelessness #FortCollins #woman #lifestory #interview #sexuality #parenting #discrimination #poverty