Looking out the window of her North Side apartment recently at the mounds of snow piled up on the corner, Brenda Myers was overcome with gratitude.
“I thought, thank God nobody can rustle me out of my sleep anymore and make me go stand out there in below-zero weather in a miniskirt,” said the 43-year-old, who spent 2 1/2 decades as a prostitute before quitting in 1997. “I said, thank God I’m on the inside now.”
Though Myers broke free with the help of Genesis House–a residential program for prostitutes on the North Side–others in the program have retreatedto the streets. Myers and other alums began to wonder what they could do to help their “sisters.”
The answer they came up with is the not-for-profit organization Exodus, a new mentoring and peer support group that assists former prostitutes in the challenges of everyday life.
Though Myers is just one of a group of women building Exodus, she uses her own journey into and out of “the life” to explain why the program can help others.
“I want them to have what I have,” said Myers, who’s tall and stalwart with a powerful alto speaking voice. What she has these days is her own modest apartment with her own doorway, through which she can come and go as she pleases.
Even more important, Myers has a blossoming relationship with two daughters who have forgiven her for boomeranging in and out of their lives.
Myers’ journey to these happier times has been anything but easy.
Reared by an alcoholic grandmother with a penchant for “dirty men,” Myers said she was molested countless times before her 10th birthday. The abuse paved the way for years on the streets, which began at the corner of Clark and Division Streets when she was 15 years old.
There she stood, nervous and shaking, in a “sad little pale dress, cinnamon-colored stockings and my grandmother’s orange lipstick,” hoping to make enough money to pay rent and buy Easter Sunday dresses for the family.
“When I think about what I’ve done and what I haven’t done, I shudder,” said Myers. “But I’ve got to keep moving forward. No little girl or little boy wakes up one morning and says, `I think I’ll be a prostitute when I grow up. I think I’ll waste my life away in back alleys, or in the back seats of cars or in nasty motel rooms.'”
Myers said there are good residential programs for women at the crisis stage of recovery, the point when they decide to leave prostitution or fight their drug addictions. But after those programs end, it gets tougher.
“We don’t know anything but prostitution,” said Myers. “Once you get out, you’ve only made it part of the way up the hill. You still have a lot of climbing ahead of you.”
Many women are saddled with police records and have never held a steady job or had a credit card or bank account. Few have completed high school. In addition, a large number of the women suffer from mental illnesses.
Myers said the aim of Exodus is to meet each woman’s needs, just as her friends do for her. When she fell behind in her rent recently, they provided a loan–and, she said, thwarted any notions of making some “fast, easy money.”
“It’s like there’s a pattern out there,” said Myers. “Women either return to the streets or they try to kill themselves. Sometimes, any little thing can push you back over that wall.”
There was a time when “I thought I’d die an old woman in a cat suit and a blond wig,” she said. “I may be behind [in life], but I say thank God I’m not where I used to be. We want to help other broken women feel whole again.”
For more information, call 708-387-2466.
