Support Robert & His Dad’s Journey Out of Homelessness

Hi guys, if you’re reading this - thank you. This will be a long and hard story to tell as it’s the hardest time of my father and I’s life. (TLDR at bottom) About a year ago, my sister called my dad on July 16th and told him that she has some things to tell him. She said “Dad, I have some things to tell you that I just can’t hold in anymore and it’s gonna hurt”, My dads heart immediately dropped and he became heavy hearted, my sister continued to tell him the things and they consisted of things that my mom told her and made my sister promise not to ever tell my dad. Things like “I hate your dad, I wish he would just die”, “I never even wanted you kids” she told my sister about her going into another man’s hotel room while she was on a work trip. Before all of this, my parent’s relationship was already on edge. My mom has never really been a mother figure to me and was only actually a provider which I am very grateful for but I never really knew what went on behind the scenes until I got older. My dad has had chronic back pain and degenerative discs since 2002, they couldn’t afford surgery and my dad also didn’t want to have surgery with the risks that coincided. My dad has been a stay at home parent since the beginning because my mom didn’t have the patience to raise my sister and I, they agreed to let him raise the kids while she goes and works for the family. She’s always been in control of finances and my father along with us kids had always tried to be as cost friendly as possible for her and try not to ask for too much because she always said she was tight on money. She would go out with friends or go to concerts whenever she felt like it but wouldn’t want us as kids to really get to experience much. My dad filed for divorce on August 22nd after my aunt told him to “fight like hell” and gave him her credit card so he can go get an attorney, she put $2,500 on credit so he could have a fighting chance. My mom got served her papers on August 30th and got some of her belongings and stormed out shortly after getting physical with my dad. At the beginning of September, she put our wifi on “vacation mode” knowing that I needed internet to make money. From what I know, “vacation mode” essentially means she’s still paying the internet bill but it’s disabled, I tried to call the internet provider and set up a new service but they said no because there’s already a service at that address. From September-February was basically a waiting game, there was mediation on November 6th but in no way was she being civil about it and tried to only leave my dad and I with a car, she said “that’s generous, I could just be a bi**h and give you nothing”. We knew before the divorce that it was going to be a hard fight against her, she hasn’t been transparent during discovery and still isn’t being honest. As I was growing up I started to notice that she would always talk bad about everyone, including her own parents and family. The only person I can guarantee I haven’t heard her talk bad about, is herself. My mom was even really hard on her new puppy when she just needed to go to the bathroom, she would yank on her leash as hard as she could saying things like “come on you stupid f**king dog”, the puppy was maybe a few months old at this point, my mom was about 200lbs and pulling that leash as hard as she could. It was really a hard thing to see as I truly believe no dog ever deserves anything like that. She’s done other things like left her puppy on a leash right next to her on her chair while she worked outside, that puppy needed to go to the bathroom so badly that she ended up going right next to my mom because she wouldn’t take her to the bathroom no matter how much she whined or struggled to get off the leash. Back to the main timeline, after my parents couldn’t come to an agreement during mediation, we waited for another court date. December 4th was a court date for a motion my mom had filed, “Motion for exclusive use of and to sell the martial residence”, that court date got pushed back to December 18th because her attorney had a conflict. When December 18th came, my dad and I were at the courthouse waiting for our hearing, my dads attorney comes in and tells us we can leave because she and her attorney won’t be showing up due to her attorney being sick. Back to the house we went and waited for another court date stressing day in and day out about packing our stuff and getting an email from the attorney. We ended up filing a “motion to compel” and that hearing was for February 5th, what ended up happening was our motion and her motion got compiled into the same court date. On court day, we went and were waiting for our hearing again. When it was their turn to go up to the stands with their attorneys, they went back and forth for a couple of minutes and then everyone went back to their seats. Not one time did my mom look over at me or my dad, my sister was also there and she didn’t look at my sister either, she had that look on her face like a wicked witch, I truly don’t know how else to explain it but I could feel like there was no soul behind her eyes or no emotion on her face, meanwhile we’re all three crying in the courthouse because of the situation she put us in. The outcome of that hearing was my dad agreed to vacate the residence by february 13th. We had no money for a storage unit or anything expensive like that. Luckily, our neighbor offered to 1, let us use one of his trailers for storage and 2, offered to let us stay for as long as we needed in an RV he had sitting on his property that belonged to a friend of his who was in another country and said that friend would give him about a year heads up if he’s planning on coming back. We loaded all of our belongings into this trailer over the course of a few days and then moved it next to the RV where we were about to be living. The day before we moved into the RV (Feb 12th), we gave our neighbor a heads up saying “Hey we’re gonna be moving down there tomorrow”. He says “Okay, well we’re gonna have to talk about a timeline”, referring to how long we’re going to be staying there. That immediately made us hesitant to even go over there because if we moved in and then waking up everyday wondering if we’re going to get kicked out, just not a good feeling.. but we had no choice. We moved our stuff over there and noticed a few things right away, the main one being that there was no heat and no water (including toilet and shower, both were not functioning). There wasn’t any electricity either unless you ran the RV and used gas but that’s also not good or smart to sleep through, so we asked our neighbor if we could plug in the RV using the 220. He said yes and we managed to do that, we had electricity for lights but still didn’t have heat because we found out that heat was gas powered. It’s the middle of February, heart of winter and we’re in a metal box with no heat. As grateful as we were for any shelter, we asked if maybe he had any spare space heaters we could use because there was a snowstorm coming our way that was expected to snow for a couple of days and the ice to last about a week. He gave us a rather old and used space heater and we plugged it in, it kind of worked as long as you were right up against it almost and we could smell it like burning our clothes. The way the RV was setup, I was sleeping above the driver and passenger seat, my dad was sleeping on the rear end of the RV on the bed, the space heater was in the middle and we slept with it on as sketchy as it was, because we needed any help we could get with heat. At this point, we had no bathroom, no shower, 30 minutes from town for any food. When this snowstorm came by, it was very hard to get sleep or even get warm but when I eventually did fall asleep, my dad would wake me up several times throughout the night because it was so cold he wanted to make sure I was still breathing. It was single digit temperatures at night and negative temperature with the wind plus the snow on and around the RV. Our case of water bottles next to the heater froze solid, that’s how weak the heater was and couldn’t compete with the temperature in there. Our neighbor started to show true colors but we stayed there for a few more days. It started to warm up but we saw another snowstorm coming and it was going to be way worse than the one we just went through, bad enough to where we didn’t think we’d be able to survive that one. I told my dad let’s go get a hotel for this storm and I’ll use my savings so we went and did that. While we were in the hotel, my sister introduced us to a friend of hers who said he was willing to help us with the hotel rent. He helped us pretty consistently for a while, about a few weeks and I was able to work with him to earn it rather than him just giving us a handout. We were so grateful for his help but unfortunately things eventually got pretty wishy washy with him being able to help so it ended up turning into us waking up wondering of we’re going to have to check out of the hotel and live in the car. I was able to start making money again using the hotels wifi but the speed was really bad and almost unusable, about 1-3mbps. On days where we didn’t receive help, I would really try to make enough to be able to pay for the hotel room that day. We stayed in that hotel for about 2 months. We got a call from a childhood friend of my dad and his friends mom, who told us to come down to Arkansas and stay with them and that if we didn’t come down she was going to come up here and drag us down. So we went, it was honestly pretty good there, for about 3 weeks. We knew the environment we were heading into (negativity, alcohol, violence, etc). It was a pretty full house, we slept on the living room floor but we didn’t care because we were just happy to have a roof and be somewhere where we felt wanted, hot meals, a shower. It meant a lot to us. After a little over a month, we had to go back to where we were so my dad could sign papers for the house to sell. We then went back down to Arkansas and when we got back there it was different. They were back to fighting and yelling and arguing all the time rather than when we first got there they were happy to have us there. It was a long new month of waking up to negativity and arguing, slamming things etc. We eventually decided to come back up to Kentucky and live in the car because it just got that bad down there. Since late May, we’ve been living in the car again and just trying to survive. We did the calculations on how much we’d need for a year’s worth of living expenses and that’s the goal we’re trying to reach with this gofundme. To add onto everythjng, we received a call from an animal shelter on June 12th, saying they have one of our dogs and that if we didn’t go get him, he’d “become their property” So we went and got him because our brain jumped to the worst when we heard that. We had to find a new home for these animals at the beginning of my parents divorce, all 7 animals. 4 dogs, 3 cats, my mom went to live with her mom and didn’t take any of the animals. We had to find them new homes because we didn’t know what we were about to go through since it was still September so it wasn’t fair to bring the animals with us through the mud. My mom cut off my dad’s cards on September 17th and hasn’t offered to help us whatsoever, hasn’t reached out to me or my dad to ask if we’re okay. It’s really hard to talk about my mom like this but it’s a fact that she’s actually been trying to make our lives as hard as possible throughout this divorce (lying to the court, cutting off my dads finances, disabling the internet, getting us removed from the house, not reaching out to help at all, etc). It’s been a very hard 9 months of this and we are in need of any and all help to try and get us into an apartment for a year. That would give me enough time to get work and be able to live from then on. I want to take a moment to thank you for reading all of that, I know it was rather long but I had to tell the truth from start to finish.

TLDR : My parents are going through a divorce, my disabled father and I are homeless and my mom doesn’t want to help us at all. We have a family member willing to cosign but we need help getting into an apartment with enough living expense money for the year so I can for sure be able to take care of us by the time the lease ends and so the person co-signing isn’t at risk of ruining their credit. My dad has filed for disability but it will be denied for a few reasons, the lady he talked to on the phone said he won’t qualify for SSDI because he doesn’t have 5 years of work history out of the last 10 years being that he was stay at home parent. She also said that he will get denied for SSI because he doesn’t have the medical records showing he’s been going to the doctors for XYZ. It was expensive and they would always just try to put him on pills.

It’s really hard to ask for help even though I know we need it but I'm here asking for any help, no matter how small, to please help me and my father finally get into a stable, safe apartment. We're not looking for anything fancy, just a place where we can sleep without fear, where my father can rest with dignity, and where we can begin to rebuild what we've lost.

This situation has taken a huge emotional toll on both of us. The stress, the uncertainty, and the feeling of being forgotten, it's overwhelming. But I still believe in the kindness of others, and I'm holding onto hope.

If you can donate or even just share this fundraiser, it would mean the world to us. Every dollar brings us closer to a new beginning. I calculated the numbers for expenses and that’s how I came up with the goal total for our bare necessities for rent and utilities, not food, gas, insurance etc.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

— Robert