One of the families I was placed with was very religious. I've always made a joke that they put the "mental" into "fundamental" and took the "fun" out of everything. They were much more kind to my brother than me, I think I was a little too off for them.
They put me in an attic room that had ghosts, and back then, fresh from my mother's death, I was ill equipped to deal with any new dead folk. I remember one night when a particularly gnarly spirit was lingering at the top of the stairs, blocking my way down to the bathroom, I got so frustrated I screamed and hollered. All I got was yelled at. I never expected support and was always surprised when I got it, that's true to this day. It was just odd how I got the opposite with these people. I preferred the adults who just dismissed me by this point. I had learned that none of them expected much of me, the ones who weren't pretending to care were easier to deal with. These people would have fun with me. They once took my dog into the bathroom and flushed the toilette saying they were flushing my dog down the toilette because I was a sinner and didn't deserve him. It was torturous and they let me get pretty upset before they finally revealed it as a prank. It wasn't the least bit funny. Getting the dog in the first place was a total manipulation. It was one of those things, "Hey new foster kid, what do you want real bad?" "Gee, I've always wanted a puppy, I'd take great care of it!" "Well, maybe if you pray and pray, you'll get a puppy." And pray I did. And they made sure I did. Back then, you could just show up at your kids school and check in. You didn't even have to call ahead, your kid, your right. I would look up as I was sitting down to lunch and see her there, watching, making sure I prayed before I tucked in to my government lunch. I didn't have a lot of friends. It didn't matter that I didn't have a lot of friends though, I only needed one. I made a friend on the bus when I was just nine years old and had the most embarrassing Sears & Roebucks shopping, praying in school, going to church four days a week foster parents, this girl was still willing to be my friend. She's my friend to this day. Though these people thought they could cleanse my sinful soul by forcing me to ingest Soft Soap, they didn't hit me as much as some of the other people in my life and they never did anything sexually inappropriate. So you could say it was a good couple of years. There was the Grandma at the lake who didn't care for me much, she had "real" grandchildren after all. It was kind of great, she lived in a house on a lot of land and right on a lake. There were a couple of canoes, a couple of row-boats, and cabins to explore since her place had once been a resort. And when no one cares where you are, you can go anywhere. Truth be told, this woman owned enough land that you could explore all day as a kid and not have to worry about ending up somewhere you weren't supposed to be. It wasn't just the land either, there was the lake. We were allowed full reign over the boats and lake as long as we put everything back where we got it from. I felt free at the lake and it was beautiful there. I remember sussing out some of the feelings I was having there as I tried to reconcile the things they were telling me about God that made no sense and the transcendental meditative states I would frequent using techniques I'd learned long before they started feeding my head. It wasn't their fault that they thought I was the spawn of Satan despite the fact that I believed in neither God nor Satan, It wasn't my fault either. What bothered them about me the most was that they couldn't force me to believe what they wanted me to, they just didn't know my head was already fed.
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When mother died I was sent to live with my half sister who was some twenty or so years older than me. Her daughter, just one year younger than me, is my niece, isn’t that a trip? At any rate, my brother was sent to the oldest half sib, our “other” brother, the old one. I’d met these people maybe a handful of times and had become a mirror of the apathy I was shown by them. It seemed odd to separate my brother and I right after our mother died but we never got along anyway, we had our roles to play. I suppose we also went into survival mode, just not with one another’s support.
My brother was athletic and confident. He was good at all the sports mom signed him up for and he had the trophies to prove it. I was somewhat athletic as well but not so confident, I had come to like being on my own due to being so frequently left on my own. I admired my brother, I suppose in my own way I wanted him to like me, to approve of me. I tried to get him to talk to me, to notice me, anything, but he usually would act as though I wasn’t there unless he needed someone to bully, as my big brother, that was his job, he took it very seriously, maybe too seriously. Despite my brothers clear disdain of me I would try all the time to get his approval. For example, when he played hockey some of the venues had an extra rink so people could still skate despite the main rink being used for the game. Often, when most people were focused on the game, I’d have that extra rink all to myself. I would practice until my ears, nose and toes were so cold I couldn’t feel them. Then, when they started to warm up it was like hundreds of flaming needles and sometimes my mother would rub the feeling back into my feet in the warming house. I liked skating, I liked how graceful I felt floating over the ice and the way I felt when I landed a trick just right, it was empowering. I came to love skating. I had picked up some things from watching people and I was learning quickly, I liked being good at something, it made it more fun. I guess it helps when the alternative to learning quickly is falling on your ass on the cold, hard ice. My hope was that if I got good enough, my brother would notice and be proud of me, but he never looked, no one did. My brother was a busy dude, he had sports and friends to run around with. I’d be sipping iced tea with a 25 year old Buddhist secretary, playing “Star Wars” with a neighbor friend or hanging out alone on the back stairs hiding from the “babysitter” who should not have been around children at all, ever, while my brother was out being a kid. I had a lot of freedom as a kid. I had a single mother who had to work her ass off supporting two kids, she often did 12 to 16 hour work days. I would run around or lurk in the stairwells, provided I was done with all the stuff meant to get done. With mom dead, everything was about to change, we’d be on the move, me to one place, my brother to another. It didn’t hurt the relationship between my brother and I to be separated at this time since we didn’t really have one. To him I was more like a necessary annoyance, an inconvenience, an obligation. That was a trend that would continue and become a beast I would unwittingly feed as though it were a harmless kitten, it was more like a man eating lion. When I got to my half sisters place, they led me down to an unfinished basement. It was all rafters, wooden frame work and exposed pipes. There were windows high along the far wall and a hot water heater in the corner. There was a part of the framework that we pretended was room-shaped. There were no walls at all down there but they had thrown a twin sized mattress on the ground and even gone out and got one of those cardboard dressers you assemble yourself by folding and grooving. The cardboard dresser was white and it had three drawers that actually worked pretty well. I thought it was the coolest thing that it was cardboard, I figured that meant I could draw on it, I was really into markers back then. At any rate, I thought that cardboard dresser should have come with a pack of Crayola Markers, now that would have been some good marketing. The dresser was my favorite thing in that basement. That basement, with its exposed rafters, strange sounds, shadows twisting with light from the low windows on the wall, distorted, while spiders and mice would scoot across the ceiling and floor in the moonlight. My time there is blurry, kids still went outside then so I’m certain I spent time outside. My niece, being only one year younger than me, was under obligation to share her friends with me. It was always forced and awkward, there was never any doubt in anyone’s mind that I was the one who wasn’t supposed to be there, another budding pattern in my life. We never told any of her friends I was her Aunt. Everyone knew I was an orphan, but no one ever talked about it, at least not to my face. I wasn’t there for long. I’m fairly certain it was for a summer, just until they could fill out the paperwork, put me in the system and make a proper ward of the state out of me. I rocked at being Basement Girl. Do you know how many literary characters have to overcome things? Things like being an orphan or living in servitude or being treated as an awkward obligation thrust upon others. This was back when kids read books for fun and sometimes for survival, for me it was both. In real life I had a character and a role to play; do not be heard, do not be seen, and keep the place you live in clean. Children are incredibly resilient when they are allowed to be, even more so when they have to be, at least back then. Today’s kids are a whole different thing, spending over a minute with any of them is such a chore I’m grateful I was born when I was. I guess I owe them thanks for being so off the rails. My time with my half sister was a short chapter in my story. The main thing it did for me was solidify that I was a problem, an obligation, a thing other people had to “deal with.” Perhaps it was that people tend to be ill prepared to handle a child who has just been orphaned, especially back then. I’m sure they did their best. To be honest, they all had plenty of issues of their own. The man of the household was an alcoholic so the dynamic between him and his own kids was strained. I’m not sure how my sister put up with it, she may have taught me what to avoid in a man without even realizing it. Like if you’re out to dinner and he’s pouring half and half all over his steak, he might be a drunk. Of course my half sister was just trying to hold it all together, trying to come off as “normal.” This is where being the “it” of the household paid off, I was largely dismissed, another emerging pattern. Conveniently, being dismissed means not having the same problems as the people dismissing you. People who dismiss others tend to be unreasonable, assumptive, short-sighted and short fused. If anything, I was coming to realize that more often than not folks don’t teach you a way to be so much as they teach you a way not to be.
The cord around my neck, with my very own apartment key on it, matched the cord around our second floor apartment doorknob. My mother didn’t do this because I was a stupid child, she did it because I was a child. I was 5 years old, just like any other kid in kindergarten. It was before cell phones, before everyone had a laptop and before iPads were a feature on lists of standard school supplies. It was when kids played outside until it started getting dark and we only came in when we heard our mother hollering for us. It was when you had to go farther than the end of your driveway to catch the school bus and children weren’t afraid of going outside.
My mother was a nurse so she worked more than she didn’t work. My father was gone before I was born. I’ve heard different versions of his demise but in every story he was dead, not just a guy who ran off. Really makes no difference to me. My brother and I were from her second litter, Mum had three the first time around. It’s weird to have half siblings that are 16+ years older than you that you don’t really know and rarely ever see. I think my mother was the outcast of her family, it makes sense based on what I was seeing growing up. She had a failed marriage and was a single mother, not a good look back then. In my mind though, her status made me a double outcast, which I thought was pretty cool. I read a lot of books back then about people not too unlike myself throwing off the challenge with a shrug, so I always had a bit of hope. I was learning that while you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit, you can avoid the chicken shit and sometimes even learn from it, especially about the people throwing it at you. While I was learning an awful lot at a young age, there was plenty I didn’t have the experience to understand. I was young enough that the “right” questions didn’t occur to me, but I was trained to be an "observant servant." I noticed my mother’s absence in peoples’ lives prior to her death and my sudden presence in peoples’ lives after she died. Even while she was dying I was meeting people, the ones who wanted to help out the orphan kid so they could talk about it at church. I believe that by the time my mother had my brother and me she was tired but still had to work her ass off just to scrape by. She likely saw no end to it, just hard work with little or no reward until death. When she was told that it was her own end that was coming around the corner she didn’t try to run or to fight, she just sat down by a tree on the side of the road and waited. The cancer didn’t take long to catch up to her, she went into a coma and died, I was nine years old. She had been a loving mother but mostly, a really hard working mother. Her own influences were from a time when marriage was what you did as a woman and keeping a nice home was second only to squeezing out a few kids and staying beautiful all the while. I had learned a lot from my mother. She made a point of teaching me to cook and clean, that’s what girls do, take care of folks and clean up after them. There was a stool for me to reach things so I could make breakfast and dinner as well as clean the house without having to ask for help. My brother was in sports, I guess that’s what boys do. He’s two years older than me so he got the bedroom, I slept on a cot next to the front door. When my mother wasn’t sleeping much, she would sometimes let me sleep in her room. She liked to stay up late on nights she could, chain smoking and reading romance novels. Sometimes she’d make us popcorn, she made the best popcorn in the world, a perfect balance of salt and butter. If you’ve interpreted any of this as complaining, it isn’t. To be clear, I am simply stating facts that might get someone else’s knickers in a twist but mine aren’t, don’t displace, it’s not a good look. It wasn’t until I was a little older that I even realized it was weird how often I was treated as little more than a servant, and how subtle it all was. How it was shaped as much by my mother’s past as it was by her knowledge that she wouldn’t be around for the future. My brother and I had been cast in well established roles we weren’t aware we’d been playing. My brother was the star, he was the important one. I wasn’t important but learned some important things, like how much of an advantage it can be to not be important. No one really expects much and you’re left alone a lot. I’m also glad I learned to take care of myself at such a young age. I’m glad I became resourceful and creative because I was left alone to be. I’m glad that I know my mother loved me as much as she could and taught me one of the most important things I’ve learned in life, you’re on your own, kid. People tell themselves that I’m making excuses so they can feel better about themselves, I suggest they read it all again, clearly, they’ve only glossed it over. People might say I’m “justifying” things, they’re wrong too, that isn’t what this is. This is me, and I’m not here telling MY truth, I’m here telling THE truth. I’m not offering excuses, I’m offering reasons. It’s fascinating being treated the way I have these last five years.
The reason I’ve been treated the way I have been is largely due to regular folks wanting, no needing, to separate themselves from me. They want to believe they are SO different from me that homelessness could never happen to them. They have to de-humanize me to do this. I’m not even human to them, why be humane? They say, “The homeless” or call me “A homeless.” They don’t say, “A homeless person, just, “a homeless,” as though that says it all, it doesn’t. As much as I’ve been handed the dirty end of the stick it is surprising that I’m not the drug addict, derelict alcoholic, uneducated waste of skin, trash bomb, dumpster fire of a non-person they clearly assume I am based on their treatment of me, all because I don’t own a home and set about acquiring things to fill it up. Oh, and I’ve never married, apparently that bugs married people. Maybe I never had any desire to own a house because I never really felt comfortable in one. Perhaps after working at a bank and seeing how people have a constant stress ball in their loins from the minute they sign the papers, I just didn’t want that for me, I don’t look good in stress balls. And maybe I never was treated with the dignity and respect I deserve by anyone I’ve been with except for once. Maybe I’ve held that relationship as the standard, the one that got away, and no one has measured up since. I won't settle for less than what partnership is supposed to be, not the contract, clout and discounted insurance rate it's become. I’m just going to shut down certain nay-sayers right off the bat, (you know who you are, Big L.) People thinking, “Well, I did these things, why can’t you?” and remind you that buying a house in the 90’s is not the same beast as buying one in the 2020’s in the midst of a global pandemic. Didn’t think I needed to explain that, but apparently, I do. Also, very few of my friends who got married lived happily ever after. To be honest, I’m glad I ‘m not married. It is true that I became homeless prior to the pandemic. I was as productive as I could be but everything happened pretty fast, a series of unfortunate events if you will. One thing going sideways would have been quite easily taken care of, two things and all would have been just fine done right. It was the third bomb. Most of this is already covered here, it's the “How” part of the journey and goes back further than I originally thought. This website is designed to get all this out of my system without having to talk to anyone. This way, they can read it and let me get on with my life. Partially designed with my “family” in mind, they're never pleased, famously telling me, "This is NO WAY to live your life!" And here all this time, I thought it was MY life. I am here to remind folks, this could happen to anyone. Sure it’s less likely if you come from money and have a supportive family, but the world is an increasingly insane place. I’m just trying to make sense of what’s going on now and what I’ve discovered about myself and people in general over the last five years being a homeless person. This rabbit hole ended up going further & farther back than just 5 years. I aim to get that off my chest too. Five years homeless, a lifetime dismissed. |
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