Joan and The Captain

My pride made it hard for me to reach out for help. In no aspect of my life was this as pronounced as in my dealings with my parents. As far as I knew, Joan and The Captain (as I affectionately called them when they were out of earshot) were completely unaware of my residential challenges. When I spoke with Joan on the phone, I made it a point to emphasize the positive points: I've got a job! My boss says I'm great! Things are really coming together!, I trilled. I tried my best to distract her from the train wreck my life had become.

My parents were high school sweethearts, raised in a time when marriage was forever. They've been through a laundry list of problems: The Captain's frequent and long deployments when he was in the Army; financial struggles as they tried to make it on my mom's career as an English teacher and my dad's military career; all the miscarriages.

Both before and after my birth, they experienced several miscarriages. I recall once coming home from an outing with The Captain, only to have Joan meet us at the door with the statement, "The doctor said it's like I was never even pregnant." It didn't occur to me until much later how devastating that moment, like the others, must have been.

When I did grasp the full extent of their losses, I felt a tremendous amount of guilt. Of all the pregnancies, I'm the one who came to term? I imagined them cursing their luck. It didn't help that my life seemed to consist of a series of false starts and screwups. I went to college and dropped out my sophomore year. I joined the military, only to get kicked out to for being gay after two years. They stuck with me through repeated incarcerations, employment terminations, even a couple of boyfriends. Never once did they express what I'm sure was their profound disappointment in me.

Even knowing how much they loved and supported me, I still couldn't bring myself to tell them their only child was living in a shelter. I couldn't bear to be their screwup kid one more time. I decided early in my homeless adventures that I wouldn't tell Joan and The Captain about my circumstances until I'd improved them. The only thing they could do for me was worry, and they'd done enough of that on my behalf already. So I decided to do it on my own. You got yourself into this on your own, I thought, you can get yourself out of it alone.