How Homelessness Changed My Life

How My Perceptions of Homelessness and Family Has Changed

Do you ever have the feeling that something is going to wrong before it happens? Me? I had that feeling. When? January 1, 2006. My sister was asleep. My mother was asleep. My brother...well, he was either sleep or not at home, which had become a norm for him gradually before any of us could realize it. I had just come back from a wonderful trip with my father, which was something I had never done and I was 20 years old at the time. My father and I'd had our confrontations when I was growing up, but to go on a trip with him was a dream come true. We had went from Milwaukee, WI, where I'm from, to California and from California to Brockport, NY. That was the closest that I'd had to true independence since dropping out of high school, which I would not advise. I had thought that getting my own library card almost a week after my 18th birthday was fun. I was definitely wrong.

Anyways, that's not the point to this story. The point is that as I sat across from my mother in the living room that we shared in our one bedroom apartment; I realized that since I'd been in such a high in 2005, things could only get worse. I think that I had actually almost started to cry because I had believed it so much. I told my mother about my theory about a week later and she told me not to think that way, because things had been going so well that far. I tried to be optimistic about it and granted; it had been going great so far. But it only got worse.

By April, my father'd had to leave another job because of his declining health and my brother, now 18, decided to take a stand and practically moved out. My sister was in so much debt, she was being threatened with her wages being garnished. My brother was now 18, so my mother wasn't getting anymore child support and she can't work, so she had no income. I was trying to complete my online high school, but I was now 21 and I couldn't register for anymore classes. The classes that I was in were either too hard or going to expire soon. Everything was so much different than it had been last year. Then, the hardest thing that I ever had to handle happened.