Finding Joy in the Mundane

To have chores, you must first have all the items that need attention and upkeep. When those aren't there you long for the burden.

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Earlier today I returned home from my morning gym session driving on roads flooded by Hurricane Debby’s outer band. After taking a quick shower, I started a load of laundry and moved on to dust the living room, clean the dining room table, and do other odds-and-ends chores throughout the house.

These everyday tasks are carried out by people everywhere all of the time, but they were once unavailable to me. Just over a decade ago, I dealt with several seasons of homelessness. This is something I’ve discussed a bit in previous posts here, but this specific aspect of homelessness is rarely discussed and oddly enough, it’s something that reminds me of struggling nearly every day.

As I drove to the house that I own in the car I bought in full with cash and pulled into my driveway, I felt nothing but gratitude for where I am today. The constant flashbacks and reminders of how life once was are what push me forward every day to become more than I was yesterday. I strive to try new things, learn new skills, and fill every waking hour with something that helps me grow and move forward without fear. The darkness stays in the rearview mirror as I forge ahead into the unknown.

It probably seems like an insane thought to wish you had dishes to scrub in the sink or toilets to clean, but for me, it’s something I longed for at one point in my life. When I say I dealt with different seasons of homelessness I mean that there was more than one stint and each time it looked a bit different than the time before.

The first time I became homeless, the home we were renting was being sold out from under my then-boyfriend and myself. We had a matter of a few weeks when we were told we had to go and after scrambling to try to find a new place and with no money saved we ended up in a local motel. Of course, this was supposed to be temporary, but it quickly became a money pit. Staying in a motel or hotel seems cheap enough, but when you’re living paycheck to paycheck, a week at a hotel/motel ends up costing the same or more than what someone renting or even those who may have a mortgage pay.

There were times we didn’t have enough to pay a week in advance, so we would pay for the night. Sometimes we didn’t even have that and would sleep in the car in the parking lot. The motel owners by this point were very familiar with who we were but not once did they ever budge on a room if we were a dollar or two short to pay for a night. We would empty the room from whatever we had, and load it all into the car.

NYTimes

At night, we would take out all of the blankets we had neatly folded up in the backseat and begin the routine of blocking the windshields and windows for the night before we locked the doors, and attempted to lean the front seats back so we could attempt to sleep. You really couldn’t lean the seats more than an inch or so backward because everything that we needed day to day was in the floorboard and backseat of the car. The larger possessions we owned were in a storage building that we paid for (adding onto our monthly bills) leaving mainly clothing, shoes, toiletries, hygiene, and a few books. I remember having 2 bowls, 2 plates, 2 forks, 2 spoons, 2 knives, and 2 coffee mugs.

The owners of this motel would give us the same room almost every single time we had the money to stay, which was interesting but it also felt almost as if it was our own space after a while, compared to being in a different room every night. This didn’t happen each time as sometimes that room was occupied, but it happened more often than not.

If we were able to rent a room for the night or week, we would take several trips from the car to the room to once again empty our belongings and pretend to be happy we were there. We were grateful to be indoors. At this point, it was winter and very cold outside making sleeping in the car without heat difficult. I remember days when we would run the key and open the door to a rundown, less-than-pristine room in a sketchy motel and be so relieved.

Once everything was upstairs I would attempt to make it feel like home. I would strip the motel bedding down and replace it with the same bedding used to keep us warm in the car and shield us from passersby attempting to look into the windows. I would pull out the three shirts I had with me, the one sweatshirt, the two pairs of jeans etc., and begin to hang things up and put garments in empty drawers in the dresser/TV stand. The drawers never looked full because we had so little with us, but still, everything was in its right place.

There was one sink in this motel room, right outside of the bathroom. This was your “everything” sink. We would use it more as a kitchen sink than anything else. I would use washcloths provided by the motel and body wash or sometimes shampoo to wash the dishes or mugs we would use when we did have enough money to afford a meal. I’d set them on the side of the sink to dry, tilted up against a cigarette-stained wall.

When it came time to wash the clothing we did have, that wasn’t always possible either. Because we were so low on cash there were many times we only had enough gas to get back and forth to work for the week, with no extra trips a possibility in between. Due to this, there were times I would have to hand wash clothing in the bathtub or the “kitchen sink” and hang it over the shower curtain to dry rather than go to a laundromat. There were no back decks in these rooms, so there was nowhere else to hang things to dry.

This was all we had, but it beat being in the car. I would sometimes go down to the front office and ask to borrow the vacuum used by housekeeping, just to clean the room and feel as if things were normal.

Things were far from normal, but deep down I needed them to feel like what we were able to afford was my space. My space to exist in, my space to be hungry in, my space to be depressed in, my space to calculate how to get out of and never return to.

We had so little money we were buying discounted snacks like crackers and cookies from the gas station down the road. It had to be within walking distance since gas was always an issue. There were even times where pre-paycheck we would not have enough to get a room but needed to park somewhere where we had just enough gas to get to work the next morning to pick up the paycheck that would get us through the next week. On a few occasions, that spot was the hospital parking lot. I remember many nights going into the Emergency Room just to use the bathroom, brush my teeth, and take a “bird bath” in the sink. There were a few times we would have enough change to get a coffee out of the hospital vending machines and we would sit in the lobby while we drank it just to warm up. They started to catch on to us, to not wear out our welcome, we would stay in the car in the parking lot, watching patient’s TVs through the windows, several flights up. If one of us needed to go to the bathroom, we would have to walk and walk and walk until we reached the closest restaurant that was open 24 hours a day.

Unfortunately for me, things wouldn’t get better. The extreme stress and inability to ever get ahead would send my alcoholic boyfriend of three years into a tailspin. Days got more difficult and I dreaded dealing with him once he returned from work. I had no control over the money, nor what alcohol he would purchase on the way home or bring home. The gas station was close enough that there were many times he would go over and grab a few beers for himself for the night having already consumed God knows how much before coming “home”. I didn’t drink at all, which meant dealing with him nightly was always exhausting to navigate.

He became increasingly more physical with me. One night in particular things got heated, I couldn’t even tell you why today, but it quickly became a physical fight for my life. At one point I ended up on my back between the bed and the wall with my legs bent across the bed and my back on the floor, neck up against the wall.

He was sitting on top of my chest with all of his weight on me, holding my wrists above my head against the wall so I wasn’t able to touch him at all. After fighting and trying to get up several times, realizing it was futile, (this really pissed him off) he began to choke me with his hands. I remember thinking this is it as I started to preserve what air I was still able to breathe in while I tried to fight my way out of it. I remember digging my nails into his arms trying to get him to let go as the room started to go black around me. He stopped for a second, leaned over, and grabbed the motel phone. He ripped it from the wall and quickly wrapped the cord around my neck. This was really it. This is how it would end. Would he feel remorse once it was done and I was laying there lifeless? Would he sober up and realize he had just killed his girlfriend with his bare hands? How would he explain this? Would he go on the lam? Would he call the cops? Would he leave me there for housekeeping to find me?

All of these thoughts raced through my mind as I laid there looking up at him, tears running down my cheeks and flooding my ears, looking at a man I once loved and who I thought loved me.

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