My birthday is on New Year’s Eve. As a girl, my Christmas presents would say ‘Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday’ and so I promised myself that when I grew up I would make sure that I made up for this in a magnificent way. As I grew, my priorities shifted and the delight of my birthday became the heartfelt effort on the part of loved ones to carve out a wee bit of time to share with me over tea or a stroll or an early dinner before the mayhem of New Year’s Eve obliterated any possibility for connection. The week between Christmas and New Years, with all of my endings and beginnings officially happening at once, is my personal holy week. One of immense reflection and gratitude.
Three years and eleven months ago, my loving and supportive friend and landlord was forced to hang an eviction notice on the door of the little blue house by the sea, that my husband and golden retriever and I had inhabited for five years. In that moment, that one act, shifted the reality of our plummeting dreams and finances, into a reality that we, over these years, have had to be with, sleep with, wake up to, cry out to God over, be ostracized for, be judged by, defend, be wildly creative in, cling to each other through and grow wings in. We have walked a walk that my Ivy League background and departed parents could never have grokked possible, and I’m deeply relieved that they have not been here to witness. My gratitude for my father’s humanitarian work in South India that took my family ‘over there’ for crucial formative years, and filled my eyes and heart with the ability to see and feel others’ realities, is immeasurable. But….and…..the truth is the truth, and through this blog I intend to shed light on truth around being homeless in America now.