Whatever Held

My kids have always thought of it as poor Dad. Their father was homeless for a lot of years, on and off, and from where they stood that was the story: their dad had nowhere to live, and that was sad, and it deserved sympathy. And it did. I want to say that at the start, because homelessness is a
real tragedy and watching anyone fall that far is painful, even someone who has hurt you. I never wanted my children to feel anything but love for their father. They saw poor Dad, and they weren’t wrong to.

But there was a whole other half of it that they never saw, because it happened to me, quietly, off to the side, for years. And this is the one place I’m going to set it down. I was the one paying for it. Not in the abstract. Literally. There were stretches where I would put him up in hotel
rooms and buy groceries to stock them, so that he would have somewhere to take the kids for his visitation. So that the court-ordered time could happen at all. I paid for the roof so my children would have somewhere to be with their father. And then he would take that roof I’d paid for and tell them he was homeless because I had taken the house from him. If you sit with that the way I had to, other pages in my story start coming together. I funded his shelter and his story about me in the same breath, and I couldn’t correct the story, because there was no way to say “actually I’m paying for this room”.

For a long while I let him park his trailer in front of our rental house. I did that so the kids could see him, so it would be easier, so there’d be less driving and less friction. And then, after enough time of coming home to my ex-husband parked at my curb, I got tired, and I asked him to move it somewhere else. His response was that I was only asking because I “couldn’t control my boyfriend” — as though a boundary I’d reached on
my own had to be somebody else’s doing, as though I couldn’t simply not want my ex-husband living at my curb.

The trailer itself was ruled acceptable housing for my children, as long as he divided the bed in it so my son had his own place to sleep. I’ve written about that elsewhere. I’ll just say here that a bed cut in half inside a parked trailer was, on paper, a home.

Then there was the night that one of them told me how frightened they’d been. It was pitch black where they were staying. No electricity. No running water. A child, scared of the dark because the dark was total, because there was no power to turn on. So I did the responsible thing. I looked it up, and the county’s own website said that child protective services could help if there was no running water, no electricity, none of the basics. So I called. I explained, as calmly as I could, that my children were staying
somewhere with no water and no power, on the street essentially, and that one of them was frightened.

The woman on the phone asked me, “Is he beating them?”

I said no. I said I was calling because they were without water and electricity.

And she said, “There are kids living in parks and we don’t do anything.”

Those were her exact words, and I have never forgotten them, and I never will. There are kids living in parks and we don’t do anything. That was the answer. That was the help. My children being on the street in the dark without water did not rise to the level of anyone’s concern, and I was told so, flatly, by the agency whose entire job was supposed to be that concern. Once again, I was the only person in the whole apparatus
who thought this was an emergency.

The school knew too. When the kids were in kindergarten and first grade, their teachers asked me directly, and I confirmed it: yes, their father was homeless. So it wasn’t a secret. It was known, by the adults who saw my children every single day. But knowing and being willing to say so are two different things, as I would learn. Later, when it actually mattered, when the custody fight was underway and what those teachers knew could have helped protect my kids, neither of them would admit to knowing anything. And the principal reviewed their statements before they gave them, to make sure the school was covered on liability. That was the priority. Not the children who had been sleeping on the street. The school’s exposure.

So that’s two institutions, in the space of these few paragraphs, that knew my kids were homeless with their father and chose, when it counted, to look away and protect themselves. The agency that was supposed to intervene told me it wasn’t bad enough. The school that saw them daily developed amnesia the moment the truth carried a cost. And I stood in the middle of all of it, still the only one treating it like the emergency it
was.

Another time I was told he finally had housing, and I felt that flood of relief you feel when something might finally be okay. I drove to pick the kids up from visitation, and I watched all of them walking toward my car from around the back fence of a house. It came out later that they hadn’t been living in the house. They’d been living in the garage. That was what “housing” had meant. A garage.

The system spent years working to move my children toward the parent who kept ending up with no walls around them. And when it finally did, when I finally “lost,” it held for almost no time at all. Within about six months he was evicted and homeless again, and the kids came back to me, exactly the way I’d spent years saying they would.

I wish I could tell you it ended there. But homelessness like his doesn’t really end. It just looks for someone to hold it. For a very long time, that person was me. And years later the torch of carrying him was quietly passed to one of my own children, old enough by then to be handed the weight I’d carried alone for most of her life.

While they were loving their dad and feeling sorry for him, both of which they were right to do, I was paying for the rooms he was homeless in. I was calling agencies that wouldn’t come and being told our situation wasn’t bad enough to matter. I was watching schools that knew develop amnesia the moment it might cost them. I was being cast as the villain of a story
I was quietly financing. It wasn’t theirs to carry then. They were children. It was mine, and it cost me a great deal, for a very long time, and almost no one ever knew and for a long time that had to be okay.