She's a good girl, loves her mama
Loves Jesus and America too
Once upon a time, long ago and far away, there was a teenaged girl with a seemingly bright future.
She graduated at the top of her class. She didn't sleep around. She didn't drink or use drugs.
She won a prestigious scholarship. She traveled. She pursued her dreams.
She was a very serious and responsible young woman. Friends of the family sometimes asked "Did X, Y or Z make her so serious?" The answer given was "No, she was always like that."
She was the proverbial All American Girl living some variation of the American Dream. Or so it probably seemed to acquaintances who didn't know her well.
I'm a bad boy, cause I don't even miss her
Once upon a time, even longer ago and farther away, a bouncing baby boy was born. It was a difficult birth and forceps were used. The shape of the forceps remained imprinted upon his skull for three days.
He was never diagnosed with a head injury, much less a head injury syndrome. Nonetheless, problems typical of a head injury syndrome dogged his every step and he was a troubled youth.
He never received medical nor therapeutic intervention for any of it. He was just labeled the bad kid and punished for it.
He was an ill-tempered, impatient child who lacked self control. He was mean to other kids and often in trouble.
As he got older, he began using various drugs, always the kind that mellow you out. No doubt, he really should have been on prescription medication to do the same thing both legally and under the supervision of a professional.
But people don't get prescription medication for their issues when the label is the bad kid instead of head injury syndrome. So he had no real choice but to self medicate as his only means to try to mitigate the things he loathed about himself.
Naturally, his drug use also got interpreted as more evidence of badness. It involved illegal substances, arrests and overdoses.
Bad, bad and more bad. His presumed badness just didn't seem to quit.
At nineteen, he was fired from a good job, the kind of job most teenagers don't have. It would have been a good job even for someone several years older.
He didn't take it well. Without telling anyone what he was up to, he simply disappeared one day.
If you are thinking "Surely this is the point at which this young man's sad tale ends in homelessness," you're wrong. After four days with no word concerning his whereabouts, he returned home, safe but penniless.
After getting fired, he had cashed his severance check -- the equivalent of six weeks of income at a managerial position -- grabbed a high school buddy and headed to a beach resort in the state next door. The money that should have provided him a financial cushion for several weeks while he was job hunting was, instead, used to drown his sorrows in a haze of cocaine and prostitutes for a few brief days.
He never had been good at managing his money -- probably yet more evidence of brain damage incurred during his difficult birth -- but this was a new low.
He was single, childless and living with a roommate. He could have sold one of his two cars to make up for the severance pay he had just blown through in mere days.
This was probably his best opportunity to try to actually grow up and be responsible, in spite of his issues. But he didn't choose that path and no one pushed him in that direction.
Instead, he asked his parents if he could move back home. They said "Yes."
My car problems started long ago and far away. Car problems sounds like some trivial First World Problem, but my relationship to such problems is more like some over-the-top comical farce about a woman cursed by a Car God in a past life who refuses to forgive her.
The tales of my car-related woes could be a website in its own right. In the interest of brevity, let's skip to my mid twenties when my husband bought a car over my objections following the sale of a truck that should have never been bought in the first place because it was really too expensive for us.
We sold the truck in Germany not long before returning to the US. In Germany, I could walk or take the bus everywhere, plus gasoline and car insurance were much more expensive than in the US. So I wanted to live without a car for a few months, return to the states debt-free and with money in the bank and get a do-over on our chronically stressed finances.
He wanted to visit more castles or something. He figured he might not ever return to Europe again and this was his one last chance.
This bad decision to buy this car under these circumstances cost us so much money over the next few years we could have financed a luxury vacation to Rome for less. It also would have sidestepped years of terrifying and life-threatening driving experiences that were a direct result of this bad decision.
The car was a black-on-black stick shift Corsica that did not come with factory installed AC precisely because it was purchased in Germany. We bought it in June. It had to be shipped to Germany from the US.
It arrived in July at some port city on the coast. My husband had to take a day or two to travel to the coast and pick it up. He got it home the day before leaving for the field and spent one hour introducing me to how to drive a stick, which I had no experience with.
We had use of the car for about two months in Germany, then had to ship it back to the US from whence it had just come so it would be there waiting for us when we arrived by plane a month or so later. Had we just waited to purchase it in the US, it would have cost a thousand dollars less and also come with factory installed AC.
My parents ponied up a thousand dollars to get AC installed so me and my small sons wouldn't die of heat prostration in this insanely hot black-on-black car while driving around in sweltering parts of the US. The shop that installed the AC didn't upgrade the alternator to handle the higher electric load.
The car soon began eating alternators. One year, we had the alternator replaced six times, each time putting it on our credit card and going deeper in debt.
Towards the end of that year, on our way cross country to my parents' house, the battery was dying while we drove down a highway in the middle of nowhere in a desolate state we had never been to before. Probably Montana or something like that.
As we stopped on the side of the road yet again to charge the battery in the cold and dark with all the car lights turned off -- including the flashers -- I wondered which was worse: The possibility of being run over by a semi pulling off the road without seeing this black car with no lights sitting on the shoulder of this very dark road in the middle of nowhere, probably killing us all instantly with no hope of survival. Or the possibility of the four of us slowly dying of exposure after getting stranded God-knows-where with a dead battery, murdered by our umpteenth defective alternator, but perhaps with some hope of rescue for at least some of us.
We somehow made it to my parents' house and a relative, a talented mechanic, finally resolved the problem for good. In fact, he did far more than fix the alternator.
He put about $800 worth of parts -- purchased at discount through his employer -- into the car and did all of the labor for free. When he could no longer afford to pay for the parts himself, I covered some of them. It was a situation where, had we gone to a mechanic for an estimate, the bill would have been so large that it would have made more sense to begin shopping for a brand new car, something I was in absolutely no position to afford.
After my health went to hell, while my tumultuous marriage was ending, I found myself back home in Columbus, Georgia. Following some ill-conceived trip cross country looking for some town to settle in and start my life over that was cheaper than California, I landed at my parents' house where I stayed for nearly a year before finally getting a corporate job, renting a three bedroom, two bath apartment and moving out.
Having gotten married at age nineteen, in some sense I was on my own for the first time in my life and also responsible for two teen-aged sons as well who both had special needs. Five years later, I had a mountain of debt that I had mostly defaulted on, my car had been repossessed and on the first of December that year I received a notice of eviction.
I needed to be out by the first of the year. "Well." I thought "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to me."
I asked my parents if I could stay with them again for a bit. The answer was "No."
So, when the family safety net wasn't big enough for everyone, I was odd man out and left to fend for myself. Thus began a lengthy stint of homelessness that I initially assumed would be short-lived.
My path in life didn't land me on the street because I was a bad person or irresponsible. On the contrary, I ended up there in part because I had always been the most independent and self reliant of the three children. My parents likely told me "No" in part because they expected me to be able to rise to the occasion, like I had so many times in the past.
The family safety net failed me in part because my father was slowly dying. But, also, because my older brother and his adult son still lived there.
In spite of being talented, intelligent and hard working, my older brother never could quite make his life work. He returned home during his divorce with an infant child in tow and never really left again.
With a minor child as part of the picture, there would be no more opportunities to try to make it on his own again. The opportunity he missed at age nineteen to make good in spite of four days of very self indulgent, irresponsible behavior would never come again.
My brother is, of course, the boy with the difficult forceps birth who blew his severance pay on "hookers and cocaine" like people sometimes like to joke they would do if they won the lottery. The trauma of his birth not only left a visible mark on his head for the first three days of his life, it left a far deeper, uglier mark on the entirety of his life.
It left a mark on his younger sister's life too. That would be me.
I ended up long-term homeless in part because my brother did not end up homeless. He remained housed thanks to the loyalty of our parents to their ne'er-do-well child who meant well and tried hard but somehow just couldn't quite get it right. I ended up homeless and he did not even though the world likes to believe that people like him are the ones you find on the street and people like me are not at risk of homelessness at all.
I am, of course, the girl with the good grades and seemingly bright future described at the start of this piece. The girl who never drank or did drugs or slept around. The girl who made good choices and all that.
The family didn't have enough to give for me in part because my brother needed so much more from them than I did and he always had. The family had kept him and his child off the street for decades and this is part of why they failed to do the same for me and my two sons when push came to shove in my own life.
If you believe homeless people are all irresponsible screw ups and drug addicts and the like and if you also believe in a just world where virtue gets rewarded, then you might see this as a tale of injustice.
After all, my brother was the bad kid. He was the screw up. He was the drug addict.
If you don't know about the tragic details surrounding his birth, it would be easy to blame him. Even if you do, I guess some people will still say "Nuh, uh!" because they don't see the cause-and-effect connection between his forceps birth and his many intractable personal problems like I do.
If you are already mad on my behalf over the perceived injustice of my life, you might want to take a minute to step away from your keyboard and do a few deep-breathing exercises because this story is about to become much more "triggering," so to speak. I'll give you a minute.
(Insert one minute here.)
My impatient, ill-tempered older brother who lacked adequate self control is the person who slapped me around and molested me for two-and-a-half years starting shortly after my sister moved out to attend college in another city, thereby leaving me and my brother alone together a lot for the first time in our lives. I was eleven years old when this began.
I don't believe my brother really intended to hurt me. I also think his history of drug use and overdoses likely suggest an unbearable emotional burden of guilt and shame that dogged his steps for many years.
To his credit, he didn't simply wallow in self-destructive guilt. As an adult, he spent years making amends to me in his own way.
My brother is the talented mechanic who kept my screwed-up car running for years in spite of me and my husband both being clueless fools when it came to cars. As described above, my serious car problems could have been simply ruinous financially or even deadly.
So simply saying "my brother worked on my car a lot" doesn't really do the situation justice. It is more accurate to say he was protecting me from problems that could have been worse than what he had once subjected me to himself. And he did so even though he and I rarely spoke and I mostly lived anywhere but my home town.
In fact, he actively avoided me when I was in town. This gave me space so I could comfortably visit the rest of our relatives without dealing with him and the ugliness in our past. Presumably, he heard through the grapevine that my car was acting up again.
When I would visit, he would make himself scarce, even though I sometimes visited on short notice for weeks or months at a time. I would show up and he suddenly had a friend to visit or whatever. He sometimes was semi homeless during my extended visits, living out of a suit bag in the trunk of his car, staying with friends and popping in at home occasionally to pick up clean clothes or something.
My brother's efforts to give me a wide berth while constantly repairing my shitty car for free helped me heal and move on from the abuse he had inflicted while we were both still minors. This helped me avoid getting stuck in a cycle of abuse as an adult.
It helped provide me a healthy sense of boundaries and self worth. I mattered enough to do right by, in spite of his serious personal challenges.
In a nutshell, even though he probably had an undiagnosed head injury syndrome and was getting nothing but additional grief socially for self medicating his problem, he somehow found a way to stop hurting me and even pay penance while expecting nothing in return for it.
As best I can tell, he didn't do it to get me to forgive him or be "friends" again. It seems like he just felt it was the right thing to do, not something he expected to be rewarded for.
My brother did something terrible when we were both still kids and then, as an adult, he set the example in my life for how you behave if, in your heart of hearts, you really didn't mean to hurt someone and you regret hurting them.
Because of how he handled things after he was an adult, I don't take BS excuses off of anyone. My life is all the better for it.
But I also don't take BS excuses off of anyone because the ugly truth is that he didn't stop molesting me out of some innate sense of virtue. He stopped because he turned eighteen.
Presumably, he realized that a legal adult molesting his thirteen-year-old sister faced different and more serious consequences than a seventeen-year-old minor doing the same thing. He quit molesting me to cover his own ass once the stakes went up on his end due to a prosaic happenstance of time passing.
Twenty years after he actually raped me that one time the summer I turned twelve, I did finally forgive him. Yet, forgiveness didn't restore our once close relationship.
For the first eleven years of my life, I adored my older brother. He was my favorite relative before things turned ugly.
Sometimes, there is no going back, even when everyone involved tries to take the high road in the aftermath of the debacle.
This piece is being written to talk about the thorny issue of trying to help a homeless relative. It's a question I've seen more than once and it's really hard to try to give good advice for helping a homeless relative.
It's an emotionally and socially complex question. It's challenging to effectively advocate for what's in the best interest of the homeless individual without stepping on anyone else's toes -- and the toes in question tend to be pretty tender. Unsurprisingly, such discussions easily go sideways.
I started with my own story in hopes that the best practices I list will make more sense and sound less accusatory if you can think about them in terms of my life first before wondering how this may apply to your family. Perhaps that will take some of the potential sting out of my words, or at least give them context so they add up better.
Some Best Practices
1. Don't try to control your homeless relative.
You probably can't anyway and attempts to try will undermine trust, anger them and make them harder to reach. Respect the fact that they have a right to choose, even if you can't understand their choices and you desperately wish they were not in this situation.
Although my brother was never homeless, he took a lot of drugs for a time. My best understanding, as someone who hasn't been close to him in many years, is that he eventually stopped using hard drugs like cocaine and stopped having a violent temper with a short fuse. He probably still smokes, but he seems to have accomplished his goal of destroying something he hated about himself, a thing that was doing terrible things to both his life and the lives of people around him that he cared about and seemingly didn't wish to keep hurting.
Some problems are hard to solve and people can't always adequately articulate why they do the things they do. It becomes impossible to articulate it when everyone is telling you that you are flat out wrong, bad and stupid for doing it at all when you know from experience things are worse without this wrong, bad and stupid thing, but you simply can't prove it to anyone.
2. Don't blame them.
If their story is anything at all like mine, they may have legitimate reason to feel "It's at least as much your fault as mine that I have no place to stay." No good will come of getting into that kind of pissing contest.
3. Try to provide some element of normalcy in their lives.
If you would give them Christmas and birthday gifts if they were housed, make sure you give them something for Christmas and birthdays while they are homeless. (Money is good. Don't try to control what they spend it on either.) Try to keep them in the loop to some degree about family news so that their problems are not the entirety of the landscape of their mind.
4. Set reasonable boundaries.
Don't let them bleed you financially, but don't tell them "No, you need to straighten up and fly right first." That's a policy of "the beatings will continue until morale improves" and it's never constructive. Instead, consider how much you can comfortably give and give it without making it dependent upon them getting results of some kind.
Reasonable boundaries include protecting yourself. Cutting your own throat for their benefit is not love. Don't fall for arguments that you would keep giving endlessly if you really loved them. If you can't afford it, then you can't. Learn to say no when necessary. Be polite but firm.
5. Try to actively avoid tying everything back to their "problem," whether that's addiction or homelessness.
Try very hard to not reward them for "being a screw up" nor punish them for it. Try to make sure your assistance is a message of caring, not a message that there is either a payoff for failing or constant punishment for failing, no matter how hard they try.
Try hard to make it clear that you help because you are a relative who cares and you say "no" sometimes because you simply aren't a bottomless well of money. Try to actively be an antidote to the all-too-common experience that everything in their life is somehow about their addiction or their lack of housing. When everything seems to be tied directly to such problems, it becomes a psychological sink hole that swallows their mind and their life. It becomes a black hole that cannot be escaped.
6. Be aware that they may have been abused by a relative, even if you never heard about it. Tread lightly.
The abuse may have been emotional, physical, financial or sexual. If someone in the extended family did such to them, this can mean that interactions with you will be bound up with a whole lot of emotional baggage about family dynamics, even if you aren't in any way part of the pattern of abuse.
As with my story, family dynamics can be and very often are part of why they have landed where they are. In some sense, they may be there through no fault of their own. Like me, maybe they just drew the short straw one day and things went into a freefall they didn't know how to stop.
This is a large part of why it's very important to not blame, accuse, control, etc. Trying to accuse, control or blame them just helps keep them mentally and emotionally stuck in an unjust paradigm.
So those types of behaviors can make you part of the problem, no matter how well-intentioned your desire to help may be. If you sincerely want to help, first do no harm.
7. It's okay to be the voice of reason.
It's okay to tell them honestly in an informational way "X plan probably won't work." Be as neutral as possible. Try hard to not sound like you think they are stupid, being irrational, etc.
An example from Reddit is that someone's parent was homeless and had a pet. Most shelters won't take pets.
It's okay to tell them honestly that keeping the pet will make it harder to get help. But don't try to insist they must give up the pet or that it's stupid to choose loyalty to the pet over a shelter opportunity.
(A lot of homeless shelters aren't that great anyway. I never stayed in one. I felt a tent in the woods was better for me.)
8. Make your peace with the fact that some piece of this is on them. They need to want it and they need to work for it.
There is always some luck or happenstance involved in all outcomes, but it isn't all luck. As the saying goes: Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
At the same time, don't forget that resolving hard problems can take a long time, even if they are actively working on it. So don't assume they aren't trying just because they aren't finding quick fixes. Sometimes, there are no quick fixes.
9. Realize that there are larger forces at work that are beyond both your and their direct control.
These forces may include the current shortage of decent, affordable housing across the US. They may include our lousy healthcare policies that help bleed so many Americans financially.
When the world at large is so broken, someone is pretty much guaranteed to draw the proverbial short stick. It doesn't necessarily mean they did anything wrong themselves.
If the world worked better, there would be fewer homeless people. Maybe your relative would be one of those in housing if only the world generally worked better.
Keeping that in mind may make it easier to not blame your relative for their circumstances and also not feel guilty that you can't seem to immediately fix it. Wallowing in guilt or shame or trying to blame them so you don't have to blame yourself helps no one.
Outcomes for specific individuals are never solely due to their own efforts, their own virtues or their own shortcomings. Outcomes always involve many different factors and fairness is rarely one of those factors.
Every homeless person out there has a backstory and that backstory is usually filled with injustice, hard luck and unfairness as part of the equation for how they ended up in this pickle.
Some people keep getting the breaks they need, even if they don't actually deserve them based on merit or virtue. Someone cared about their welfare. Someone was compassionate, understanding and generous when they needed it. Someone let them have "second chance" number 5,042 instead of saying "Nope, not this time."
And others don't get that. They get told "Sorry, no, not this time." for reasons that may be wholly unrelated to merit or virtue or a lack of such. Sometimes, there just isn't enough to go around and they draw the short straw, so to speak.
I'm well aware that some people "hit bottom" and then change. I'm also well aware this is an argument used to advocate for tough love approaches to tough problems.
I'm all for tough love -- ie caring about someone and also teaching them to be responsible and teaching them they need to behave better rather than just playing the victim card constantly -- but I find the above framing to be deluded and broken. "Hitting bottom" as a consequence of "being a screw up" isn't as directly related to recovery as is widely tauted in the popular imagination.
This is a world in which some addicts wind up as rich musicians and other addicts wind up homeless. When they wind up homeless, the world blames their addiction, blames them and says they simply aren't trying hard enough.
The reverse is not true. We don't say "You must be a rich musician because you use drugs and it fuels your creativity! So everyone should do more drugs!"
Life is almost never that simple or straight forward, neither in terms of cause and effect -- "addiction causes homelessness" -- nor in terms of curing the problem. Addiction is a hard problem to solve and there is no magic formula for solving it.
Some people die from their addiction. This is evidence that "hitting bottom" may fail to clue someone that they need to straighten up and fly right. And then there are others that get their act together without "hitting bottom." These two facts combined should tell us that getting someone to "hit bottom" shouldn't be an intentional part of our plans to try to resolve the issue.
Addiction itself is a complex problem. Homelessness is orders of magnitude harder to solve or even to try to understand than addiction. In spite of so much of the messaging of the world, a lack of housing doesn't necessarily say anything about individual virtue or vice.
If you are homeless or have a relative who is, try to spend your time looking for solutions, not scapegoats. It's generally a much better use of your time.