Surviving Christmas When You're Homeless

As Christmas draws to a close and the next year fast approaches I can now reflect with some wonder on how I survived this, our worst and best Christmas.

You see, my life was recently turned upside down. Many will say this, and many will be right, but this is my story.

Two years ago we filed bankruptcy. We tried to forestall it. We took out loans, tried consolidating, and even sold everything we had to sell. Still, in the end there was no choice. When the state attaches your wages for past medical bills you could not afford to pay, and you can no longer afford even food for your family, it's time to give in and file bankruptcy.

It is suppose to be a fresh start. You are supposed to be able to get right back on the horse and keep riding. It doesn't always work that way. We fell, and we fell hard.

In July of 2004 we gave in. We lost our apartment and our car. We lost even the ability to get a new apartment, or a checking account. Suddenly, with three kids and a pet rat, we found ourselves homeless.

Homeless does not always mean that you live on the street, or even in your car. We were lucky in that we had one family member who was willing to take us in. For two weeks we, a family of five, slept on the floor of a small trailer while we fixed an even smaller trailer so we could go live in it.

When I say small, I do mean small. There were 5 people in a 10 x 6 foot silver trailer for three months. Thankfully it was summer. The children stayed outside much of the day.

We had money for food again, but no idea what our next step could be. Still, we could not afford a new apartment. Rent increased drastically in our area, gas prices soared, and our paycheck did not change. We had even asked help from welfare and they could not help us because we "made too much".

Living homeless with three children is not as cheep as you would think. We had to buy a generator, gas for the generator, commute into town down a dank and muddy road. Food is more expensive when you do not have a fridge, and we had to try, without much hope, to find something better.

Better came in the form of a 20 foot RV with a blown engine. For $100 we had something a little larger. Our girls still had to share a bed, but we could stretch, we could breathe, and we had a table of sorts. We also had a fridge and could buy healthier food.

I had never been so grateful to have such a broken down piece of junk as I was the day we bought that RV. The rains came and it leaked, but I was grateful to have it at all. We trapped it and remembered all the while that we could have been trapped in that 10 x 6 foot silver trailer with three young children who couldn't sit still.

For Christmas that year we had some money to buy the children presents, but we had no room to store anything, so we chose carefully. Socks, underwear, shirts, and just a couple of small toys each. Toys that would not take up what precious room we had. Toys that they could share. Toys that would last because we would not be getting more for another year.

I did not decorate that year. We had no tree. We had no room for one. We wrapped up the gifts and stored them in a cupboard and waited. The rains grew harder, the roads flooded.

For Christmas day we were able to stay a night at a family member's house and open our presents under a tree. Perhaps not as good as our own house, our own tree, but it was warm and dry.

We went back to the RV, dragging our gifts with us, and wading through the flooded creek.

It's been a year since that bleak Christmas. Things have changed. We found a trailer to rent, and have new bills. New bills meant no money for Christmas gifts, but, we have a tree. We pay rent and are no longer homeless. We can still buy food, and we can still let the kids play out in the yard.

However, even though we could not buy much for our children, we could buy them a few well chosen gifts. They each got one thing they had asked for.

We are warm. We are well fed. We are no longer homeless. The future may not quite look up just yet, but even if it stays as it is just now, it is far better then that old rusted out RV with the leaking roof. It is better then the flooded roads that slowly ate away at our car. It is far, far better here, this Christmas, then many before, simply because I have a new appreciation of a home, and family. Of safety and security. A new, and better, understanding of Christmas.