So once I found a teaching position and began to get settled into it, I began talking with my family of origin and exploring resources for trying to get them all into better housing. As I described in the last post in this series, the situation they were in was not only inappropriate on a variety of levels, it was in my opinion unsafe and would certainly have made for an undignified setting for my father’s death. One option we began to explore involved a 3-bedroom house in North Richland Hills. There’s a woman who has for many years been a friend of the family. She runs a charity organization and has often used the resources of that organization to try to help the twins with school clothes and supplies or with summer camp, for example. She’s also employed my brother with painting jobs and my Dad and now one of my sisters with help putting together mail-outs  for her organization, etc. This, of course, is good and wonderfully helpful.

However, experience over the years made it clear that this benefactor’s help almost always came with some type of “string” attached- some expectation that the family would assist her with some project, etc. at a later point. She also is notoriously inconsistent. She’ll give instructions for a project for example and change them midway though, requiring half or more of the work to be redone, or she’ll promise the boys something and not always follow through, whether or not it was “intentional.” In any case, some time before my return to TX she began talking to them about renting this house from her. It had been on the market for a number of months and apparently wasn’t selling, and she wanted to rent it to them for $750/month with a $100 security deposit. They couldn’t afford it, but it was an intriguing possibility, and after I was there and finally employed I began encouraging them to think about taking the house- especially after I saw it.

It only has 3 bedrooms, and they really need at least 4 (though 5 would be even better), but the garage had been converted into a family room, meaning that this could also be used as a bedroom, albeit awkwardly. To make a long story short, then, they agreed with me that it was worth pursuing; so we did. As it turned out, I was the one to sign the lease for them (on their behalf), and with some temporary help from a benefactor of our own (since I wouldn’t see a paycheck until the end of September) we supplied the funds for my family of origin to pay the security deposit and make plans to move in. Of course, the security deposit more than doubled (there’s that inconsistency) by the time I actually paid it, but it still seemed worth it. My Dad and I agreed that he would pay $350 of their rent (what he was already paying for lot rent on the trailer), while Kirsten and I would supply the remaining $400 per month.

It took some doing, but they all finally moved in, to my great relief, and things seemed good. Predictably, perhaps, that “good” feeling lasted about a week or two, as that was all the time it took for the woman who was renting it to them to begin pressuring me to buy the house immediately. I had previously told her that Kirsten and I had every intention to try to buy it from her for them in a year, but not before then. Our credit and finances had taken a major hit from the sudden move and my going without a paycheck for so long, not to mention now being financially responsible for three dwellings- our house in Ohio that we still pay the mortgage for every month and had rented out ourselves for about half our monthly cost on it, plus our apartment here in Dallas, and now additionally more than half of the monthly cost of Dad’s rental house. This was and is a heavy burden, and though together Kirsten and I now make more money than we ever have, we also have more expenses than we ever have. Anyway, we had hoped to be able to make an offer on this house for them, but in a year, not before.

Nonetheless, suddenly the woman we rented it from was going through a contentious divorce and needed to sell the house- immediately- or at least claim she had a firm buyer. Toward that end, she pressured me on an almost daily basis to sign a purchase agreement on the house. She was willing to have the purchase agreement somehow last a year- so we could buy it when we said we had hoped to- but she wanted the agreement signed immediately with no independent appraisal, no home inspection and no mention of any negotiation about price. She was essentially dictating the price and terms of the sale and even said she couldn’t afford to lose money on it given the divorce, etc. I did my best to hold firm and set some boundaries- as respectfully as possible- but it didn’t go over all that well and soon she was threatening to sell the house out from under them and require them to move just months after they got in there- and now with no place for them to go (or go back to), as the trailer park assumed ownership of the trailer, which is another long story.

This was a source of tremendous stress and pressure for me until I was finally able to get in touch with her soon-to-be ex-husband (she had refused to supply any contact information for him despite repeated requests for it), who reassured me that they would both honor the lease for at least the year, or that if circumstances dictated that they do sell the house prior to that, he would let me know as soon as possible and provide an opportunity to buy it still at that time. There’s more that could be said here, including describing some pretty suspect behavior on the part of the landlord, but as it is now at least temporarily resolved, I’ll move on.

Meanwhile, things were not going so well on the job front. I won’t go into great detail here (and certainly won’t name the employer) for obvious reasons, but soon after starting work I found myself mired in what proved to be an untenable situation. I was part of a brand new grade level teaching staff at the school, with the previous year’s staff having either quit or been dismissed (and I suspect the latter). Not only were I and my team members new to the school, we were all brand new teachers as well. Of course, the reason why a brand new teaching team was needed had a lot to do with behavior issues in those grade levels that we were to teach, but even more to do with their scores on the state test, which apparently were just low enough that they kept the school overall from being in the highest reporting category according to the state (in compliance with No Child Left Behind). I came to learn later that there were a lot of issues the previous year, which is perhaps obvious due to the staff turnover (fully a third of the previous year’s students were gone too for those grade levels). In any case, and again without sharing too many details, a mere three weeks into my teaching career I was yanked from my classroom in the middle of a lesson and told that I was no longer a classroom teacher. Apparently, I had “failed” to “handle my class” appropriately (in regard to discipline), and so was removed from my regular teaching duties and eventually reassigned to tutor students on a pull-out basis at another campus.

I was, of course, devastated. I know behavior change takes time, but I wasn’t afforded the time to teach new behaviors in this case. Ironically, the person they replaced me with, after having been given more than twice as long as I was, was likewise recently yanked out of that classroom, no doubt for similar reasons. Don’t get me wrong- I’m not glad for this, but I do take some small comfort in the knowledge that perhaps it wasn’t my “failure” after all- especially as a brand new teacher. Nonetheless, the manner in which all this went down for me- and the incredible systemic and administrative issues that contributed to my situation- was very, very hard to take. To be sure, in fact, I am still struggling with the implications of it all today. Thankfully, I’m still employed as a “teacher,” which is a good thing considering all the people that are relying on my income (along with Kirsten’s) just to keep a roof over their head. Nonetheless, I have no idea if this year will “count” for my permanent teacher certification, and I can’t help but wonder if despite the poor handling and lack of support and all the other problems- in spite of all of that- what if they’re right? What if I’m not meant to teach, after all?

Just for kicks, then, while my family of origin in their new rental house was under threat of being evicted just after having moved in, as my father was all the while still slowly dying of cancer, and just after undergoing all the above noted stress and uncertainty in my new job, I suddenly developed a rather large kidney stone and had to deal with trying to pass it. I did, thank God, and have a picture if you’d like to see it, but I’m guessing you won’t take me up on that. I got good medical attention and am very glad for that, but I still missed a week of work with it before it finally passed, which only exacerbated my sense of job and overall insecurity. Finally, as all of the above was taking place my brother went in for kidney transplant surgery and stayed with us for a short while afterward. This was a great blessing, as we had previously agreed that I would give him one of my kidneys next summer. It turned out that he didn’t need it as a perfect match became available a week after he went on the transplant list, which was something of a miracle. As I said, this was a very, very good thing, but naturally caused some stress too.

In any case, as I’ve articulated often of late, despite everything I’ve been through in my life- including the death of my mom and Kirsten’s dad within a day of each other- this combination of simultaneous stressors is probably the worst I’ve ever faced, and the growing depression I feel mired in at the moment is due in no small part to all this. The other huge contributor to this depression, though, has everything to do with my faith (or lack thereof, depending on your point of view). I’ve been writing some about this already, and will continue to do so. Stay tuned.

I still need to finish that “I Guess I Can’t Avoid This Forever” series, and I will, but not tonight. I should be in bed already, getting ready for another early start tomorrow, but I’m not. Those who know me or who have read this blog for any length of time are well aware that I’m unafraid to “put myself out there” in the belief that my vulnerability- practiced or not- is empowering for others and sometimes cathartic for me. So here’s a decidedly unpracticed bit of vulnerability: I saw a new “shrink” last week, and what had heretofore been a case of “mild depression” for the past fifteen years is mild no longer. The counselor had me do a depression inventory and audibly gasped when he scored it. Apparently I scored on the lowest end of the lowest part of the scale. He wanted to medicate me (and my wife agrees), but I’m pretty resistant to the idea, with the side affects of depression meds having a lot to do with that.

What I know for sure is that I can’t “medicate” the pain with food (I’m about 10 pounds over what I consider my ideal weight, and MUST reverse that trend again), or (lack of) sleep, or anything else for that matter. I can mitigate some of it, though, with running, writing, and lots of time spent in community. I think I’m good with the writing so far, as the recent flurry of blog activity attests to, and I have great determination to get running again. The community is a bit harder to come by, though I’ve been trying to build it as I can over the past few weeks. Of course, what’s really needed is to deal with the core issues. I don’t know that therapy will solve them necessarily, but if I can learn to cope a little better, no matter how overwhelming it all is, I know I’ll be a lot better off. May it be so.

One of the biggest challenges I faced upon my return to TX for the first time in a decade (when Samuel and I visited in January) was the shocking revelation of the living conditions of my Dad and the rest of the family here.  You see, I grew up from about age 12 on in a very small, single wide mobile home. My parents bought it new in 1987 (I think), but it was a prototype and in hindsight was not well constructed at all, even for a mobile home. The mobile home company basically “threw it together” in order to decide if they wanted to produce it or not. They didn’t (the bedrooms were too small- again, even for a mobile home) and so they deeply discounted this prototype to get rid of it, and we were the lucky recipients. Growing up there until leaving for college, the mobile home itself was mostly fine. It was only my parents and I living there, and it met our needs.

Of course, I knew that I lived a bit differently than most of my school friends, for example, who I learned for the most part had houses when I would visit them (and some of them had quite nice houses, actually), but I didn’t necessarily think of myself as “trailer trash,” for example. Obviously, living in a trailer park as I did, all my neighbors lived much like me, and so growing up there was as “normal” to me as water is to a fish. Back then the trailer park and most of the mobile homes in it were pretty well maintained too. My parents had a good relationship with the owners of the trailer park, and all was well (or as well as it could be considering the daily abuse I faced in that trailer, but I’ve written about that too in other posts). When I moved out to go to college, the trailer was only about 6 years old and still in fairly decent shape. That was 17 years ago.

Not long after I left for school, my niece (who is just 6 months younger than me) came to live there, and has been there ever since. Over time, my older siblings returned too (3 of them), and then my niece had twins. So, six folks were added to the mix (and 1 was taken away when my mother died), meaning that for much of the past decade-and-a-half there have been seven people living in that tiny, not very well put-together space. My niece took the master bedroom with her twin boys, now 12, who have never known what it was like not to share a room with their mom. Two siblings occupy the other two tiny bedrooms, leaving one sister to sleep on the couch while my Dad has been on a small bed in the living room for a very long, long time. But the population density was the least of the problems. As I said, the trailer held up fairly well for its first six years or so when only three of us were living there, but with seven folks in there for as long as they’ve been there it simply couldn’t/didn’t hold up.

I was completely shocked when I walked in to the trailer again in January. As I said in an email at the time:

Being here is so hard, and I know now why I’ve stayed away. My dad’s 77 (or was at the time), and lives in the tiny single-wide trailer I grew up in, which is now literally crumbling around him. I hate to be stereotypical because my passion for justice is so strong, but imagine whatever image “white trash” conjures for you (as awful and offensive as that term is), then multiply it tenfold, and that still doesn’t do it justice. He lives there with my three 50+ year old siblings, and my 34 year old niece, and her 11 year old (at the time) twin boys. It’s infested with mice and roaches, and I mean infested. My dad, who lives basically on a small bed in the living room, has “bugs” crawling around and probably on him constantly- in the space (that bed) where he sleeps, eats, you name it. You can stand in the bathroom and see daylight coming through a hole in the corner of the ceiling. The kitchen floor and cabinets are broken, crumbling, falling apart. The kitchen counter near the sink is pitched at a significant angle because the floor is collapsing beneath it. Tree roots appear to be growing into the skirting of the trailer and perhaps the trailer itself. It stinks- literally and figuratively. It breaks my heart.

Quite simply, it was no way to live. I know many, many others around the world live in much worse conditions, and unfortunately even some here in the U.S., but then again we here in the U.S. have it so very, very good that I was utterly horrified to see these family members of mine living this way. I should also say that the situation is- perhaps obviously- very complicated, to say the least. As someone said to me not long after I witnessed this, “Being poor doesn’t mean you have to be dirty.” I won’t say more about that here and now other than to say that there were many contributing factors to this situation, some of which could have been helped even without access to significantly greater financial resources. Still, coming from the relative comfort that Kirsten and I were blessed to be able to provide (by the grace of God) for our family, it again broke my heart, and I couldn’t sit idly by and do nothing about it.

So as I’ve said we moved down here at the end of February, stayed with a friend for a couple of months, and then moved into our apartment in Dallas in May. Kirsten was hired at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas shortly after we arrived, and her income and our reduced expenses thanks to our two months of free rent made it possible for me to pursue alternative certification as a teacher here in TX. The process has been long and arduous (more about that later), but would have been impossible if not for those afore-mentioned temporarily reduced housing expenses and the encouragement and connections of the same friend that we stayed with (she and her roommate are both teachers).

Unfortunately, though, because of the economy I began my transition into teaching at the same time as many, many other folks, and once plentiful teaching jobs have begun to be hard to come by. I was very grateful, then, to have been hired at a charter school in July. I knew I wouldn’t see a paycheck until the end of September, making for a very LONG seven months since my last paycheck at my OH job. Nevertheless, as all these pieces fell into place I began to turn my attention to Dad and everyone in regard to their housing. I had spent the Spring working on my teacher certification, looking for work as a teacher, and spending as much time with my Dad as I could, including taking him to doctor appointments, etc.

As summer began, with my employment situation settled (I thought), the housing situation of my family of origin really began to weigh on me more and more heavily.  Stay tuned for that story and more in part III of this series.

Ok…..here goes. I haven’t blogged in a long, long time, about a year actually. I tweet and am on Facebook almost daily, but I’ve avoided this act- the act of writing and the introspection it usually requires. Obviously, I’ve done this for a reason. Frankly, I’m tired of my life. The act of writing for me is one of continually telling my story- in one way or another- again and again. There was a time when doing so was extremely cathartic for me, and it also served to build community among me and my hearers. My vulnerability, though eventually practiced and scripted, gave others “permission” to themselves be vulnerable, and I think everyone benefited. Now, though, I’m just not sure that I can do it anymore, though obviously this post serves as some kind of attempt at it. My problem is that I’m just so…..tired. I’m tired of all of it. I’m tired of me. A decade ago my “story” was long and traumatic. That was after the parent deaths but before our return to Philly, our brief experience living in “community,” and Samuel’s birth and its aftermath, including our self-imposed exile from Philly again and everything it represented. And of course all of that was before the events of the past year, which I suppose I should get to now.

So, the big elephant in the room is my Dad’s terminal prostate cancer diagnosis. In some ways I suppose this should almost be anticlimactic. My Dad, at 78, has lived much, much longer than anyone had any right to think that he would. His body has been through so much with all the hip and blood clot issues and all the years that he abused it through lack of sleep and overwork, etc., that I think most of us who know him thought he would have been gone some time ago. Still, when I learned in February that his end, it seemed, was in fact finally near, I suppose I took it a little harder than I thought I would have. He went into the hospital in December for some chest pain, and wound up staying for a little while during which his cancer was diagnosed. His PSA score was over 6,000 at that point, which I’ve learned is extremely high (the normal range for his age is 0-6.8). Prostate cancer is an interesting disease, as apparently most men will finally get it if you live long enough, and I guess my Dad has. Many men will get it late enough in life and it will progress slowly enough that they’ll quite possibly die of something else before the cancer can finally kill them. Not so with my Dad, though, or so it seems. As I began talking with his doctors from a distance upon initial diagnosis, the prognosis was not good. With a PSA score that high, it was quite likely that he had been living with the cancer for some time, in which case it had likely metastasized and would be resistant to most forms of treatment.

Nonetheless, his doctors began treating it all the same. In the meantime, believing (based on the best guess of his doctor at that time) that he probably only had months to live, we began frantically trying to move down here to TX to be with him. It was a sudden decision, to be sure, but not one that wasn’t carefully considered. What few readers of this blog I may have will recall previous posts in which I talked about wanting to move back here for lots of hopefully good reasons, and that was long before knowing my Dad was quickly dying. I won’t rehash those reasons here as you can read those other posts to find them, if interested.

What had dissuaded us from making the move prior to this point was the reality of the housing market and our likely inability to even break even on the sale of our Ohio house. Quite simply, we couldn’t afford to come up with the thousands it would cost to close on a sale, plus pay for a move, etc. I guess it’s interesting then what a little motivation can do for such decisions. When faced with the prospect of likely missing his death and having to deal with it and the very complicated aftermath from a distance, we decided to get ourselves down here as fast as we could. We put the house on the market, hoping to sell by late Spring and knowing we’d have to take a loss but trying to hard to limit what it would be not out of unwillingness to lose money but again simply because we didn’t have the money we’d have to come up with at closing. In the meantime, Samuel and I drove down here to visit in January so that we’d have a chance to see him again and spend a little time in case we couldn’t move before his death.

After our visit, Sam and I came back and we all waited- for the house to sell, for my Dad to die, for this next phase in our life to begin. So January stretched into February, and by the end of it we weren’t willing to wait any longer. The house was generating some interest, but not enough to convince a buyer to take it at our lowest, not-even-breaking-even-but-still-at-a-level-where-we-could-somehow-come-up with-the-funds-to-close price. As the house had been on the market, though, I began connecting a neighbor who eventually put me in touch with some friends of his who were in a bit of a rough situation and were looking to rent a new place. One thing led to another, and eventually we took the house off the market and rented it to these folks.

Unfortunately, our tenants were in no way able to afford what we might have gotten at market price to rent the house. In fact, their rent payment to us only covers half the mortgage, but that half was just enough to make it possible for us to go ahead and move; so we did, thanks be to God. That being said, there were several other near miracles of love, hospitality, and grace that needed to come into play in order to get us down here as quickly as we came, and chief among them was finding temporary, cheap or free housing in the short term while we got established here in jobs and were able to begin constructing a new life here. Fortunately, a dear, old friend came through in a big way in this regard, and so we had a place to stay rent free for a couple of months as Kirsten started working and we figured out where we wanted to live, at least temporarily, including figuring out school and childcare for Samuel, etc.

The point is we were able to quite suddenly move to TX within just a couple of months of hearing of Dad’s diagnosis. Meanwhile, Dad’s doctors had begun treatment. First they tried hormone therapy, which worked for a few months to reduce his PSA, and then stopped working. Next up was chemotherapy, which he is still undergoing now. The chemo began a few months ago and some consideration went into the decision to start it. First of all, it’s quite costly, and my Dad simply can’t afford it. Fortunately, though, we were able to secure services for him that so far have enabled him to offset much of the cost. The question, though, regarding this or any treatment, is always one of balancing quality of life vs. quantity of life. That is, we always have to ask if the treatment will prolong his life but make him so miserable that the extra time can’t justify the suffering it causes- perhaps both for him and those of us who have to watch him slowly die.

I kind of have to wonder if that’s not a place we’ll be getting to soon. The chemo Dad’s now getting has, it seems, been effective in “leveling off” his PSA- at somewhere around 3,000! It’s not rising at present, which is good, but it’s still very, very high. Meanwhile, some of the side effects of chemo have been fairly minor due to some good meds. However, one of the major side effects is that it knocks out his immune system, thus making him very vulnerable to infection and causing him to need blood transfusions every few weeks. When his blood count is at its lowest prior to a transfusion, he’s extremely weak, lethargic, etc. Oh, and after stubbornly holding onto most of hair through age 78, he’s now lost most of it, which was disconcerting to see at first.

Anyway, the good news is that a full 7 months after Dad’s doctors told me he probably only had a few months to live, thus prompting our rapid move, Dad’s still here. I’ve been able to participate in this process with him, however it finally winds up, and I’m very grateful for that. It’s been hard, though, and not just for the simple fact that my Dad is dying, but I’ll say more about that in part II of this post.