Mobile Loaves & Fishes

This is a story of a little girl and her dad.  Like most girls, she loved her dad.  Unlike most other girls she knew, though, she became deeply ashamed of him, because, despite a college education and a wealthy family of origin, he experienced homelessness for over three decades.

When she was young, the girl genuinely enjoyed her dad's company.  He was soft spoken, laid-back and kind, even if he was kind of scruffy, left his messes all over, and smoked cigarettes almost all the time.  One day, the little girl got mad and threw a pack of his cigarettes onto the roof, hoping that would make him stop smoking.  Surprisingly, it was her mom who became angry (even though she also wanted her husband to quit), not her dad.  He just resignedly accepted the situation and never even said much about it. That spoke a lot about his personality.

Sadly, her parents often argued, and the little girl would try to disappear when that happened.  She would go outside and pretend it wasn't happening; would lose herself in the outdoors. One of the reasons her parents fought (though the girl didn't know this at the time) was that the dad wouldn't take his prescribed medicine for his epilepsy condition, because he didn't like how it made him feel.  It was frightening to the girl and her mother when he had a grand mal seizure, and the seizures seemed to happen a lot.

Eventually, her parents decided to separate, and, ultimately, divorced.  The little girl and her mom moved far across town to a small rental house.  Her dad stayed in the bigger house, as it had once belonged to his grandmother. The dad wasn't doing well financially, though. Although he was college educated and had once even owned his own company, he had not kept up with technical changes in his field and was faltering as a result.  He could not afford child support, so the court agreed that, in lieu of child support, he would move out of the big house in the nice neighborhood, and the mom and the girl (now almost a teen) would move back in.

During the separation and right after the divorce, the dad tried to maintain a good relationship with his daughter.  He would take her to one of their favorite restaurants, The Stallion, where she routinely ordered nachos and a cherry Coke, which the nice lady at the bar always made with real maraschino cherries and juice (this was before cherry Coke came in a can, you see). They played Ms. Pac-Man on a tabletop and talked about philosophical matters. Slowly, though, these visits phased out, and the girl didn't see her dad as much.  She was also growing older and wanted to see her friends more, so it all seemed less important. They drifted more apart.

The dad bounced around a lot.  One couldn't ever be quite sure where he was staying.  For a while, he lived on some friends' land, in a teepee.  He fancied himself to be a modern day shaman or medicine man. He had a girlfriend now and then.  He rented space in warehouses or storage units, where he did store his growing accumulation of things, but it was also where he would sleep. He became more used to being unusual in society's eyes, and he kind of enjoyed the idea of being on the fringe.  He was a bona fide hippie, after all. He also claimed that holding down a regular 9-5 job was too stressful for his epilepsy condition, so he had long stretches of unemployment. This grew into decades. At one point, he inherited a substantial amount of money when his parents passed away, but he made unwise business decisions and was quickly penniless again.

One day, the dad showed up at the daughter's first apartment, which she shared with her college roommate.  He wanted to take a bath.  The girl (now obviously a young woman) was mortified.  She felt so ashamed that her father was not the kind of dad she had grown to know in other families; those who could provide not only for themselves but for their children and partners, as well. She begged him not to put her into such a position. She was positive her roommate would object and that it would cause a lot of problems between them if her dad got used to taking baths there on a regular basis. It was too much to ask of her roommate to understand. The only thing to do was to say no, which she did. She felt torn apart in giving her answer, guilty to turn him away, but also extremely embarrassed and ashamed about the whole situation.

Over the years, the daughter helped her father where she could, while also trying desperately to maintain boundaries she felt were necessary for her own well-being.  It was incredibly difficult.  For a time during her young marriage, the daughter and her new husband invited her father to live with them.  Between his messy habits, his hoarding, and his nearly nonstop smoking, it was a disaster. The couple wanted to start a family, and how would her father’s smoking and state of being affect their children? The couple's nerves frayed, and she feared that to allow her father to stay might ultimately lead to her own divorce. In addition, her father developed a strange oppositional mentality when his daughter asked him to modify some of his ways, as if she were the authority he was mentally bucking against.  It was clear that living in the same house was not good for them. He had to go, so he went, back to his own ways of scrounging a life, in warehouses, and, later on, in a series of his cars.

The daughter and her mother often fretted over what to do about her dad's situation.  They looked into various affordable housing options, and, for a stretch, got him into one.  It lasted a few years, and it seemed to make a difference in his health and mental state. He even started a garden.  Eventually, though, he was asked to leave over infractions involving the amount of stuff he had in his apartment.  He wound up camping again, most often in his ex's driveway. Clearly, this situation was not sustainable.  Then(!), however, the daughter heard about a new initiative to develop a tiny house community in her area to help serve the chronically homeless.  Thirty-five years of being without a home should certainly qualify him, she thought. She turned in an application immediately, to secure him a spot on the waiting list.

 

Fast forward...

The dad, now 75 years old, has been living in his tiny home at Community First! Village in Austin, TX for going on three years.  He rents his space with money he receives from Social Security, earned from his brief periods of employment, but also from spousal benefits from his ex-wife. This time has not been without hiccups, though. He's gotten into trouble for keeping his porch and living space too cluttered.  He has given in to online and phone scams several times, despite warnings and pleas from his family, once to the point of not being able to pay rent, so his family bailed him out.  Because of his inability to handle his own finances, his daughter now legally does this for him, giving him the extra left over after the bills are paid.  She wants him to have as much autonomy and control as possible over his life, although she also arranges for and accompanies him to doctor visits, which are increasing in number due to his age and inability to quit smoking.  His daughter, his grandson, and his ex-wife and her sister have worked countless weekends to clear out various storage units he had rented for years and filled to the gills.  He is still learning how to care for himself and his home, all the daily and weekly routines it takes to maintain a household. For once, though, he is in a place where there is a community of people who know him, who accept him and his quirks, and where he offers assistance to others when he can. 

His daughter is learning and growing, too.  

At one point along this journey, she realized that her shame, embarrassment, and silence only added to the stigma surrounding those experiencing homelessness.  For every person struggling on the streets, there are the people connected to that person, who have tried to help, but whose scope of help could not quite cover everything.  In shame and embarrassment, they remain silent, trying to cope without adequate support.  In these cases, it often takes assistance from multiple sources (not just family and friends, but government, private, and non-profit) to make a substantial difference, and many people don’t even have one of these in their corner.  It really does take a village.  We must begin to consider everyone in our midst as OUR people and support those organizations and initiatives that are thinking outside the box and bringing creative solutions to fruition.

Mobile Loaves and Fishes is one such organization. It is this non-profit, spear-headed by Alan Graham, that dreamed up Community First! Village AND THEN MADE IT HAPPEN. To date, they have created homes for over 200 residents.  Recently, this organization started an expansion program that will double the number of homes available to those in need. 

If this story - MY story and MY DAD’s story - resonates with you, and you are able to help, please donate to my fundraiser for Mobile Loaves and Fishes so that they can continue making good things happen for the people in our community who are in the most precarious of positions.   

I'm keeping this fundraiser open for two weeks, until the 20th of December.  Let's see how much we can raise during this time to help further the cause. 

Thank you so very much, from me and my family, but also from all of the other individuals and families who are affected by the myriad causes of homelessness.  Each story is unique.  Each one deserves respect and consideration.