Homeless times

There are different degrees of homelessness from couch surfing to living under a bridge or, in my case, behind a gas station with all my belongings in a laundry basket. 

Funny, I didn't think the word homeless at that time. It was more than 10 years later when i defined that period as being Homeless. 

It started when my father died. Mom moved us all to a much less expensive home, from the Sagemont area to the Beverly Hills area of Houston.  It was still a nice, safe area to grow up. 

Mom and my oldest brother Mike had always had issues and not long after the move she threw him out of the home. This was extremely painful and frightening for my brother Herbert and me. We now knew we were expendable. 

Maybe we already knew that. Not long after the move Mom came into Herbert's room where the three of us were gathered with Dad's gun pointed at us. She said she was there to shoot all of us and then herself. I just froze. Herbert started talking to her softly, I have No Memory what he said, but while he talked Mike maneuvered behind Mom and grabbed the gun. Later he climbed to the little attic door in the garage and threw the gun into a dark corner. It's probably still there.

I was 10 and the boys were 13 and 16 when Daddy died. Obviously our mother was severely depressed but she had other things besides just being widowed. She had severe PTSD from WWII. My father met and married her during The Occupation and brought her to the US. Her first instinct was to take us and go back to Japan. We said NOOO and begged her not to do that. Looking back, I don't know why she didn't.  Was our protest the only reason she didn't?? O e of a thousand questions I wish I would have asked her. It would have been a cultural shock to us kids as we feared but would it have been better for all of us? Plan B, to kill all of us, was definitely worse. And then 2 years later Plan C happened. 

Mom decided to remarry but thought her chances were better without the baggage of teenagers. The 2 years after our father died she kept food in the house and provided clothing but she mostly stayed locked in her bedroom. She wasn't totally heartless, especially to me. She let me get a kitten right after Daddy died. He didn't allow pets and she did it to help me. She also used some of his death benefits to buy me a piano,  something I had dreamed of for years. I had been taking lessons for 2 years before Daddy died and was quite good but I only had a 22 key organ at home to practice on. I drew piano keys on strips of paper and put them along the edge of the kitchen table to practice songs that needed more than 22 keys. The new problem was that she stopped my lessons. I did try to go on at it alone but was soon discouraged. To this day I Love playing a piano but feel deep regret I didn't have instruction and incentive to reach my potential. 

We weren't easy kids to raise. Being keenly aware you are unwanted is hard to deal with! and we were teenagers in the 70's with no parental guidance.  Herb started partying, smoking marijuana,  having a lot of people over on weekends and when Mom started dating on the weekends Mike would often come,  too. 

In many ways we were terrible. We didn't keep the house clean and there was often a terrible mess after a party that Mom came home to. We would clean those up and, except for the kitchen, the house was decent most of the time. Mom bought Joy dish soap which we were allergic to, out hands and feet swelled and itched horrifically after washing dishes. I'm not saying we would have kept a spotless kitchen if she would change dish soap but it sure would have helped.

Mom had Rages at times. She would keep it all bottled up and then explode. During a Big explosion she took my cat and said she was getting rid of him because I was Bad. Mike was there,  he jumped on the hood of her car begging her through the windshield not to do it. She took off and took the first turn so fast that Mike flew at least 25 feet. The next day I came home and my piano was gone. 

Mike had already experienced being homeless.  Fortunately a family of friends, Brian and Mark Sweeny, pretty much took him in as one of their own. I don't know his life before or after that. He tried to help us but he was just a kid, too. 

When Mom finally found her next husband she was done with us. He had been a lifelong bachelor,  I don't think he really wanted to marry at all. But, one night he was at the house and I was about to go to a place called The Eighth Day where Mike's band was playing. David Holman offered me a ride. On the way there he pulled over and tries to rape me. I fought and made sure I left deep scratches on him to prove the attack. I got out and ran. That night I told my mother. She showed no reaction so I went to my room, next to hers, where I could hear through the wall between us. She called him, and threatened to turn him in if he didn't marry her. 

When she finally spoke to me about it she explained that it was my fault. I loved to dance, was very good at dance, and I had been dancing around the living room when DH had come over that night. My dancing was inappropriate and misleading to an older man. He couldn't help himself.  

I also had a couple of families who took me in when I needed shelter. Primarily the Brady family who lived across the street there on Foredale Street. They had moved out of town before Mom got engaged but would still play a large part in the rest of my life. 

We had some small hope that Mom might leave us the house on Foredale. The house payments were only around a hundred a month, which we later found we could have easily paid with the Social Security she would still receive for Herbert and me, but we didn't yet understand that and she did not. 

Mike came and the three of us discussed how to survive and stay together. 

The man who lived next door, west of us, I don't remember his name any more, Jack Something, was a Bad Man. He had once lured me to his home and molested me and then that New Years Eve he had invited Mom for a cocktail. He brought her home several hours later, carried her really, because she was throwing up drunk and in total disarray.  Knowing the man I felt sure my mother had likely been raped by him but we Never discussed that night. I never mentioned it to anyone until just now.  But I did tell Mike about what the man had done to me. 

Jack was a real estate salesman who did quite well and Mike believed he could blackmail him into helping us threatening to turn him in for molesting me. Back then I likely wouldn't have been believed and little would have been done if I was but it would still stain his reputation.  Mike paid him a visit and came home with the keys to a house! It was a modest 3 bedroom about 3 miles away. 

We were about 14, 17 and 20 years old and didn't have the maturity for the responsibility of being on our own. 

All our lives we would refer to this place as The House. It was never Home to any of us. It became what I've heard called a Flop House. 

Rob

Children give parents a lot of shocking moments. My oldest daughter, Jami, gave me many and so did my youngest, Jessi, before I got one of the most surprising shocks from my middle daughter. My Jeanette was always the easy one to raise. She was, if anything, too compliant, always trying to please everyone. She never had to be told to do her homework, never threw a tantrum even in her terrible twos, she was too easy to raie. Her sisters seemed to always be getting in some kind of trouble and I was always grateful taht I didn't have to worry about Jeanette like I did them but I also always felt like I was somehow neglecting her. She was given rewards for her good behavior that the others were not and I know I somehow hoped that in some way made up for some of the neglect. But it also caused more problems for her. Her sisters were, and actually, now that they should be grown, they still are, jealous of the priviledges Jeanette received when they were in their teens.
Of course it was her sisters who told me when Jeanette went through her secret rebellion.
Jeanette had made a new friend when she was 14, Brandy, and began spending a lot of time at her home and also spending the night. I dropped Nett off there many times myself. Right about when I started teasing Nett that she was making up her friend Brandy because I had never actually never seen her, Jami told me that jeanette actually had a boyfriend living at the hosuse she was spending so much time with. His name was Rob, the local high school pothead living in the basement of his drug addict mother's house. I was shocked and felt like a really dumb deer caught in the headlights. I talked to Jeanette who of course didn't deny a story so easy to check now that I was looking directly at it. I spoke to the mother, Linda, who was the biggest psycho case I had ever met. (I would later see her medical records and find out that her IQ was listed as below 60 besides her meth addiction.)
I was terrified. It had gone on so long that I was terrified of losing Jeanette completely if I tried to brutally separate her and Rob at this point. So I had to play it cool, show my dissatisfaction and just make new rules for Jeantte that would put a little distance between them, like no more overnights, but Jeanette thought she was in love. It looked much worse than love to the rest of us. She thought the sun rose and set on Rob and somehow thought he knew more than she did and turned to him before making any decisions. Jami started calling her a Robalite and it was a good description and the term would last for the next fourteen years as we watched this relationship continue.
I tried to get to know Rob but over the next fourteen years I never saw him straight and sober or not being Eddie Haskel, my own name for him. You remember Eddie. He was the smarmy friend of Wally on Leave It To Beaver who always acted extra polite in front of Wally's parents while he was a complete jerk and trouble maker when he was off with other kids.
Keep your friends close and your enemies close. When I couldn't get them apart I let Rob move in with our family. At least they were out of the crazy woman's home and maybe I could try to teach Jeanette some of the things she would need to know, continue raising her, and keep her in school.
Rob thought he was a great musician and his only goal in life besides staying stoned was to be a rock star drummer. He had a ragtag band and I started letting them practice in my basement which would go on for the next four years or so. I had to shelve the hope of the relationship ending any time soon, she really was a Robalite, so I jumped on the band wagon so to speak to try to make Rob's dream come true. I never liked any of the music his band played but I started trying to promote them and even bought Rob band equipment when he needed it. I once even went so far as to try to finance him a whole new set of drums but I couldn't because my credit ws too far extended at that point.
After a couple of years I knew Jeanette, being a female, was pining for some kind of symbol of Rob's love for her so I talked to him abut getting her a ring or something. I ended up financing a platinum diamond ring for him to give her that he was supposed to pay me back for $10.00 a month. I never got a dime on that ring and have no clue what ever happened to it, I assume it ended up in a pawn shop for a drumstick or something.
Things went on like this for years until I started having trouble with my own marriage and hosuehold. My husband lost his job, he and Rob had a lot in common especially when it came to work ethics, and I started a home day care to earn money. by now we were living in a $200,000 home in Keystone and our payments were $1500 a month. I tried to get any of my girls to help me with the day care but none of them would so a friend who I'd helped out helped me. We were open 24/7 and the workload for two women was unbelievable. I began to resent the expense of supporting Rob and his band who still came every Sunday to practice leaving me a sink of dirty glasses and a short supply of drinks in the house. top this off, I am trying to run a day care and Rob is growing marijuanna in my basement and the smell became so overpowering it smelt like I was breeding skunks. I decided it was time to talk to Rob and Jeanette about my situation and their lack of contribution and the added stresses I didn't need at this time. They refused to talk to me and I tried an ultimatum, talk to me or get out, and they moved back to his mother's basement. Rob never got over how horrible I was because he had to destry his pot plants to make the move and he started his campaign at this time telling everyone that I was the crazy one. What I always knew would happen was happening, he was working to cut me off from Jeanette now that I wasn't kissing his skinny ass.
Their drug use went way beyond pot even before this. I don't know what all it included but I know they had started tripping on mushrooms and likely a lot of other things.