When You're Homeless...free chapter

This is an "Interlude" chapter from my book, explaining how homelessness feels for a father...

When you’re homeless, you feel like you’re on the outside looking in. Like there is an invisible wall between yourself and “normal” folks. It feels like it’s a slow-moving nightmare and you can’t tell which part is the dream and which is reality. You want to wake up, but you’re already awake.

It feels like you’re watching the normal folks with their normal life, a life that you used to have as well, and you start forgetting what all that felt like. What it was like to have a kitchen, and a stove, and a bed...and an address. You try to forget about your dogs and your cat and your garden. You overhear bits of conversations about mundane home ownership, and you wish you could be doing those things that had the normal people complaining. You wish you still had a lawn to cut. You wish you had a driveway to seal, or an electric bill to groan about. You’d give anything for a nosy neighbor.

When you are homeless, you don’t wake up on Monday mornings, have the Monday morning blues, and make jokes with your coworkers about how “It’s Monday again...” Because when you’re homeless, every day feels like Monday. Every day greets you with the blues. Every day finds you one day further removed from humanity. One more day since your last meaningful conversation. One more day since you had clean sheets and a warm bed. One more day has passed since you had a cup of coffee in your kitchen, in your mug, from your coffee maker.

When you’re homeless, you can’t run home for lunch, or grill out, or hang your laundry out to dry. You can’t take a warm shower at the end of a hard day’s work, because you don’t have a shower, and you can’t find any work.

When you’re homeless, you can’t stay indoors on a cold, rainy, November Saturday and get caught up on some reading, and have a nice fire in the fireplace and make some soup and watch the cold rain as it falls. When you’re homeless, you try to stay dry and warm and out of sight if you can.

When you’re homeless there are no pictures on your walls, because you have no walls. So, you carry them in your wallet, and in your heart. They come alive at night, these pictures. They haunt you. Pictures of your little girl and the rope swing you had in the oak tree out back, and how she laughed, and wanted you to push her for hours. Pictures of how your beloved dog Bonnie would come over to you on the sofa and lay her chin on your leg, and let out a soft little sigh and look at you plaintively until you scratched her head. Pictures of your daughter and the time you filled the Jacuzzi tub with Mr. Bubble powder, and she was lost in the suds and laughing up a storm and having the most fun you’d ever seen. Pictures of when it was that you had a life.

Other times, it’s like being on the inside looking out. You swear everyone knows. Everyone sees. You hide your bedroll in the trunk of your car but maybe they saw it when you were getting your school books. You circle the church where you hide your car at night to get a few hours of sleep. You circle it like a hawk, hunting for his prey, waiting until you don’t see any headlights coming in either direction and then you pull in before someone sees you. Your heart races, and pounds and you swear that this time, they saw your taillights and they’ve called the cops. You hurry up and back into the overgrowth until you are hidden from view. They can’t see you but you swear they can. You wait, being as quiet as a mouse, barely breathing. Ten minutes go by. Then twenty. Sitting still like this means the fatigue that has become part of your DNA, starts to catch up to you but you fight it. After enough time passes, you let out your breath and realize that nobody saw you. You’ve pulled it off one more time. You get changed into your sweatpants and sweatshirt and zipper into two sleeping bags and try not to let yourself admit how cold it really is. The cold has gotten into your bones by now and you can never quite feel warm. Your body is warm enough with all the layers, but you’re still breathing frigid air and you wake up shivering. You feel like every pair of eyes in the world is dialed in on you when you’re homeless. Do they know? Surely they know. Everyone knows. You walk with your head down, and your eyes lowered. Because even if nobody else around you knows, you know. And that’s bad enough. You stop looking in store-front windows because you can’t bear seeing your own reflection. You hide your shame when you see your daughter, because after all...you’re still her daddy.

Sometimes, you feel like a caged animal. Like the little people inside a snow-globe, never moving, never showing any reaction whenever some outside force shakes their world and stirs up the snow. Their smile painted on. Their faces plastic and emotionless. That is you now. Feeling less and less, because feeling anything at all only reminds you of who you used to be and who you are now.

When you’re homeless, you don’t tuck your kids in at night. You lay there in your sleeping bags and cry because you miss them. On the coldest nights, the tears freeze to your cheeks and they cut you like diamonds when you wipe them away. You remember your little girl’s bedtime prayers and you swear you can still hear her voice as she says them... “God bless Bonnie and Cooper and our cat Jackie. God bless Daddy...”

God bless Daddy.

God? God who? You question Him. Sometimes you curse at Him because it feels like He’s just left you here.

Sometimes you cry out to Him for mercy and beg Him for hope. You pray to Him. You pray to him for your daughter. “Please, God,” you beg, “Please give me a place to live again. My daughter needs me and I need her.” Then you think about her life and the pain she feels. “Please God,” you continue, “Please protect her like I would if I was there right now.” And the tears resume, and the sobs, and the memories, and the questions, and the doubts.

When you’re homeless, you no longer get your daughter once a week and every other weekend. You get McDonald’s for an hour every few days after school. You try hiding the truth from her, but she’s smart. She finds out, and then you feel even worse because you know her, and now she is worrying herself sick about you every night. When you’re homeless, you are still someone’s father, but you sure don’t feel very fatherly.

When you’re homeless, you think of the old days and the happy times and those memories are triggered by the strangest things. I was walking through the mall one hot summer afternoon, just trying to stay out of the heat. I walked past the “Build-a-Bear Workshop” store and I stopped outside and watched the little kids. There was a girl there who reminded me of my own daughter a few years before. She was finishing up her bear and doing the little routine where they tell the kids to jump up and down and turn around. I remembered all the trips we made together to this place. Back when I had a job and a home and she had a bedroom where she kept all these prized little stuffed friends. It felt like it was a million years ago. It felt like I was watching it all from some cloak of invisibility. The little girl clutched her new beloved friend as mine had done. I turned away in tears. I raced to the bathroom before the sobs embarrassed me in the mall.

When you’re homeless, every little thing reminds you that you used to have a home, and your daughter used to spend weekends with you, and you used to be someone.

When you’re homeless, you reach a point where you want to quit. In that moment, you’d better have a reason to keep fighting. You’d better have something or someone you love more than you love yourself. Believe me, when you want to give up, when you want to craw inside a bottle and die, or jump from a bridge, or just fall asleep in the dead of winter and let your body freeze...there had better be a face you see when you close your eyes that keeps you going. Because when you’re homeless, just you alone...

...isn’t nearly enough.

A Dad Never Quits

My new book comes out next month.

It was the hardest thing I have ever written and chronicles the six hardest years I have lived so far. I wrote the book from late September until about New Year’s Day. I explored six years of the loneliest, darkest, most broken, desert walk of my life in a four-month period. That time frame made it even tougher. I didn’t have time to decompress from particularly hard chapters, or emotional memories. I didn’t have a deadline on this book, but once I “hit the vein”; I seldom paused for very long.

I don’t sleep a lot, as a rule, so I was up early every morning, writing a few thousand words before work. I would come home from work and write until I was exhausted at night. I don’t mean to diminish childbirth, and what a woman endures, but I feel like I gave birth to this book. I feel like the writing process was uncomfortable, long, arduous, and demanding. It’s never been that way for me before. Every book I’ve ever written has flowed freely and left me happy as I wrote it. This book left me weary.

Six years was hard. Six years without a bed, without a kitchen, or a shower of my own, or my garden. At the start of those six years, I lost the two beautiful Springer Spaniels we had owned. We lost our loving cat, Giacomo. I lost the refuge my daughter would come to need as her world exploded at her mom’s house and she desperately needed to escape the torment of her mother’s husband. While I was trapped in that car, she was trapped in her own nightmare.

I cried myself to sleep more times than I can recall, or care to. I dealt with anger, betrayal, disappointment, shame, loneliness, isolation, fear, and doubt. I second-guessed myself every day. “Was I doing the right thing by staying?” “Was I looking in the right places for a job?” “Was anyone ever going to hire me?” “Was my daughter going to be okay?” “Is she going to give up hope one day, run away, turn to drugs or alcohol, or become so despondent that she ends her life?”

I asked God all of these torturous questions every time they entered my heart. Sometimes I got immediate answers, most times, I did not. Most of the time, I only felt His presence and somehow managed to trust that it would be enough, and that He would work His plan in all this. As a dad, that was barely good enough for me, but not for my daughter. I am her daddy. I needed to give her something concrete and I needed to be her protector. I could not be. Not as I wanted to be and certainly not as she needed me to be. She needed me to get her out of that house, and I kept having to take her back to it. On the nights when it got too unbearable, she would call me in tears, begging me to come and get her. I always did. We would spend a few hours together, but since I had no home, I always had to take her back to that dread. I cannot tell you how that made me feel. Not with all the words I know.

There were many times when I thought it might be best for me to just leave. I could go to Texas, or to North Dakota,…some of the very few places that had jobs back then. I could make money. I could rebuild my life, and then I could come and get her out of there.

I would think of this and always reject the idea out of hand. I know my daughter. No matter what I told her, she would see this as a rejection and an abandonment. Her mother’s husband would have seen it as the end of the protection that my presence in her life offered, and his behavior would have doubtless grown even more violent and abominable. I might have been broke, homeless, and without prospects, but I was still a big, tough, old-school Italian guy from Philadelphia, who would not hesitate to hospitalize this jerk if he went too far. He came close many times, and only the grace of God that kept me from kicking his front door in and stomping him right into a coma. But had I done that, I’d be in jail and she’d be at his mercy.

I could not leave. I mean, I could have, it was always possible. But leaving would have jeopardized my daughter and I could never do that.

When I began writing this book, I had the working title: “A Dad Never Quits”. My friend “K” called me one day, after I had sent her a rough draft. She had a real problem with the title. For her it was personal and I knew why. She had been through a terrible divorce not long after I had endured mine. She has two young daughters and her ex-husband did not live up to his fatherhood, after the divorce. (I’m being kind here) She was serious –as she can be when it hits a nerve with her- and she said, “Craig…not all dads stick it out. A lot of dads quit.” In hindsight, she was taking the title of the book as a literal statement. I explained to her that to me, if a man quits on his family he is not a dad anyway. A real dad will do whatever it takes, regardless of the cost to him. At first, I wasn’t going to change the title. I even released a short, two-chapter galley version with that title. However, as I wrote more, and as the emotions churned, I saw some of her wisdom on this, and I changed the title. This made me sad. Sad because lots of dads do quit. Sad because my own dad quit, before I was even born. I’ve met him once. He and my mother never married. He wants no relationship. I tried to convince him otherwise for a few years but eventually I grew weary of begging for something that no one should ever have to beg for, and I accepted it for what it was. I was twenty-one before I even knew about him, so it’s not like there was a hole. But there was.

A child is born with a dad-shaped vacuum. It’s similar to the “God-shaped vacuum” found within Pascal’s writings. A child needs to have his or her dad around. It’s not popular to say these days. Feminists have emasculated society until men are viewed as unnecessary. But don’t kid yourself. I work at a major University. I see the long-term effects of this dad-vacuum. The lack of manliness among men of this generation is disturbing. It’s not specific to this campus. It’s generational. We’ve had two or three generations now where the dads have vanished, or at least where they’ve been so neutered that they might as well have vanished. It’s bad enough that my friend Rick Burgess had to write a book called “How to Be a Man.” It’s a great book and it makes me wish I had a son so I could employ the things he teaches. Rick is a real man. Real in the godly, biblical sense. He surveyed the landscape and saw the terrible lack of real, manly, strong, unbending, determined men. ( I recommend Rick’s book whole-heartedly.)

I kicked all this around as I thought about my friend’s words to me. I heard the pain in her voice as she reminded me that not all dads refuse to quit. I’ve seen the after-effects in her life. I’ve seen it in lots of kids lives. My daughter has so many friends whose fathers have abandoned them. I don’t know if she ever told her friends that her dad was homeless…I doubt she would volunteer that, but I do know that her friends always seemed to like the fact that at least one of their friends had a real dad, who was really involved in his daughter’s life.

It’s sad to think that men give up on their families. Sad to think that a man would put himself above his own children and go off chasing his own desires. I couldn’t I stayed.

I stayed and endured whatever hell and mankind threw at me because I simply love my daughter. I couldn’t even fathom doing something else.

There are many lessons in this new book. There was a light in all that darkness and I hope it shines bright enough as I tell the story. Hope did spring out of hopelessness. Faith did get me through. God was good in all that darkness. I didn’t intend it to be a fatherhood book. This book was about my fatherhood, and how that kept me in a place that nobody would want to be. But as it turns out, there is a fatherhood lesson. Sadly, there is a subtle challenge within the pages. A challenge not to quit. A challenge to do the hard thing because it’s the right thing.

If a man reads of my hardships and decides that he has no excuse for quitting on his family, then my ordeal was worth it, I guess. I didn’t write the book for that reason, but I’ll accept that as a tertiary product of the six years I endured.

Let’s get back to the times when it’s not a stretch to say “A dad never quits’”