A Story From Our Homelessness

A story from when I was homeless: My homelessness started in May 2008. Daisy would spend June and July with me every year, that was our divorce arrangement. (Beside the usual Once a week and every other weekend) That first summer, a friend let us stay in a nice loft room he had over a barn on his property. It wasn't home, but it was better than not seeing her. It had a shower and a TV and some couches. We slept on the floor on air mattresses. She had just turned ten, and didn't understand what had happened to our house or to my job. I didn't want to trouble her with it so I explained the little I could and let her go on being a little girl. One weekend, she went to stay overnight with her friend Shirley Puinno. Shirley's mom had a yard sale that particular weekend and Daisy found two framed sketches of kittens. She brought them home with her when I picked her up on Sunday. The next morning, I woke early, as I always do, and sat there looking at our situation. I was living in a friend's loft, sleeping on air mattresses, and I had no idea what I was going to do next. I looked across the room to where Daisy was asleep on her air mattress and I spotted those two pictures in their frames, propped against the wall near her head. She didn't have bedroom with a wall to hang them on, so she leaned them there before she went to sleep. I had to go outside because I was sobbing and didn't want to wake her. That was a low point for me. There would be many others. If my homelessness had ended right there it would have been painful enough a memory for the rest of my life. But it wasn't. It had only begun. I kept those pictures. They're in my storage shed. My goal is to hang them in our house one day. That's why I'm trying so hard for this house. To finally have something of our own again after ten years. We've talked about planting another vegetable garden like we used to. Having a fenced-in yard for our dogs. Being able to wash our cars without needing a pocketful of quarters. Having neighbors that aren't transient and are separated by more than four inches of studs and drywall. Please keep praying that this happens for us. It's much more than just buying a house.

Still Homeless...

Two weeks ago, I celebrated my third anniversary working at Liberty University.

In May, I celebrated –if you want to call it that- three years of living indoors, after spending most of the previous six years, homeless. I should be thankful, and I am, but the bloom is starting to wear off the rose.

When you lose your home, something inside you dies. There is a vault full of memories that seems ever-more empty as time rolls on. It has unfilled shelves where moments were supposed to be, but aren’t. You remember the Christmases, and the summer evenings and the clear, cold winter nights when you sat outside and looked at the Milky Way and you know there should have been more. You come home to a house that isn’t yours, and holds no memories for you, and you simply live there. But it’s not home. Not really.

The last few weeks this has hit me hard, and I’ve caught myself shedding tears at odd moments during the day. The sadness of losing the home I’d worked for and had grown to love, coupled with the reality that given my situation now, it’s unlikely I’ll ever own a home again…at times has been too much.

I was thinking about the folks in Houston. So far, almost 200,000 people have lost their homes. That’s an enormous number. That’s the size of a lot of entire cities in the U.S.

I feel so much sadness for them. What if you simply can’t rebuild? Your home is in your heart, but it needs a physical embodiment, and our houses become that. I know mine was. My house represented the struggles I’d had and the victories I’d won up to that point. I worked hard to get that house. I survived a divorce that crushed me, the soul-crushing time-restriction of child visitation. I ached with loneliness when my daughter wasn’t with me, but I soldiered on. That house, was our place. Her's and mine. It was full of peace and calm, and stood in stark contrast to her mother’s house, with its tension and violence. She wrote the foreword to my latest book and she described it as her safe-haven. And it’s gone.

But it’s not gone from our hearts and that hurts. It’s a picture on my wall –invisible to anyone else- that silently compares itself to this cramped townhouse we now live in. It’s a vivid scene in my mind as I drive down the twisting country lane I lived on and see my beautiful little yellow rancher as I round the curve. Only now I must drive on past, because it’s not my address anymore.

More and more it feels like it was my last chance at home ownership. It was so perfect for me…that house of mine. It was just right. Nothing about my current address is just right. Nothing. I sleep here, I cook here, I shower here. Repeat daily. I own one couch. We have a crooked little kitchen table that is so warped and sloping your plate will slide off if you’re not careful. We have one chair for the table. We can’t even eat dinner together, my daughter and I. We hardly care because we both feel the same way about this place. It’s just a rental. It’s not home. All our memories lie in a 2000 square-foot yellow ranch house on five acres in some other part of the world. We just live here. But we don’t live here.

It’s not that I’m not thankful for my job and for not being homeless anymore and especially for having my daughter with me where she’s safe. I am. But it’s been three years now. The reality of what I went through has sunk in entirely and the truth about where I am and where I am likely going, has also shown its face. I am lost. Lost, and feeling like this will be my lot in life for the rest of my days. 

A tenant. 

Physically living here, but emotionally living hundreds of miles away. 

I’m stuck. 

I haven’t succumbed to the idea yet…not entirely. I fear that when I do, I’ll be completely without hope from that point on. Living without hope is the worst form of death. Brennan Manning wrote in “The Ragamuffin Gospel” that there are three ways to commit suicide: Take your own life, let yourself die, or live without hope. The last choice is the most dubious, because it takes so long. You’re already dead and you don’t know it. Or you do, and you feel it constricting you and swallowing you a little more each day. I feel that way. I feel –for the first time in my life- that it’s pointless to dream now. That it’s past the point of planning for something better. That this is all there is, and all there will be, and it’s time to get on with the sad tedium of trudging through each day for the rest of my life.

The only hope I cling to is that my daughter will have a far better life than she would have had otherwise, had we stayed as we were. That, and the hope that maybe God is still working in this, and this isn’t the final chapter for me yet. He owes me nothing. I don’t have any expectations of Him depositing a house on my lap, or some mystery millions in my bank account.

I have to pretend. I have to smile and make-believe that this is okay with me. I have to deny the ache in my soul, that cries out for a real home and some real friendships and some real hope and a job that elicits pride and a sense of accomplishment. There is a line in Thomas Wolfe’s classic “You Can’t Go Home Again” and I think of it often. It fits me now and the mere fact that I am living this quotation breaks my heart all over again. But I must live this, or the pain and loss will overwhelm me. It is this:

“Man was born to live, to suffer and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the end. But we must, dear Fox, deny it, all along the way.”

There are those who’ve had it worse than me. I know this. But comparing pain and heartache is a fool’s errand. I’ve had all my heart can take. Maybe your heart could have taken more. Then too, maybe I would have smiled and laughed at your tragedies. It’s impossible to measure and quantify.

Three years have come and gone since I woke up from that nightmare. But I woke to find that some of that dream is reality, and I’ll have to deal with it for the rest of my days.

In some ways, I am still very much a homeless man. In need of a home. A haven. My own little castle to defend. Until then, the warrior in my soul… he who would defend that castle and it’s residents, remains at large. Wandering. Scanning the horizon for the shadowy outline of the place he calls home. Hoping to see it soon. Fearing that he won’t.

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.