What Have We Become?

Six months ago, our four person family was living in a one bedroom apartment.  We had been there for a year, waiting for our home to sell and to find and purchase a new one.  We celebrated every miserable holiday inside those walls.  Our bedroom was the dining room.  Our children shared a bedroom, my son sleeping on an army cot to save space.  We ate on tv trays.  We could hear every step that the neighbors upstairs took.  We heard every cry  and every argument within their family.  And they heard ours.  It was dismal.  Hands down, it was the lowest point of our lives.

I don't think a day went by that we did not feel sorry for ourselves.  Poor us.  We don't deserve this.  We are so above this.  What the hell are we doing in Section 8 housing?  I remember asking myself, "What have we become?"  

I had so much anger toward God.  Driving in my car I would look up and cry out, "Why are you punishing us?  Haven't we been through enough?  Can you not see how much we are suffering?"

But no matter how much I cried and pleaded, nothing ever changed.  As a matter of fact, it worsened.  We found a home to buy that we loved, only to discover that it did not appraise for the contract price.  We thought we were on our way out, but we were back to square one; back to tv trays and army cots.   

Our situation was really beginning to take a toll on our children.  They couldn't have friends over.  Hell, they didn't dare tell their friends where they lived.  They began to hate the kids upstairs.  They hated their music.  They hated the way they would run up and down the stairs, they way they would leave their clean laundry unfolded, in a messy heap on the dryer.  But most of all, they hated how loud they were when they played in the street.  I used to catch the two of my children peering out the curtain of our living room window, eyes glued to the neighbor children.  They watched in amazement as the children used sticks as weapons and shouted curse words to one another.  I would shoo them away from the window but not before hearing how flawed and disgraceful their upbringing was.  "You really should tell their mom how they act" my daughter said to me.  

Then one evening, something in me began to change.  It started after I had been thinking of those neighbor children and their loudness and lonely, mismatched socks on the floor by the dryer.  I remembered a conversation I'd had with their mother when they moved in.  She remarked how happy she was that the upstairs apartment had three bedrooms.  She'd lived all over Price Hill, she said, and this was the best place they had lived in by far.  The best place.  It was then that I realized how selfish I had been, we had been.  We would eventually be getting out of that apartment.  It wasn't happening as quickly as we would like, but we were getting out one day.  This family wasn't.  But they were thankful to be there.  They were happy to be there. 

As a family, we began to look at ways that we could enrich the lives of others.  On Christmas night, we didn't sit in that apartment lamenting about how we didn't have all of our real decorations up, room to play with our new toys, or a dining room table to eat a Christmas meal on.  Instead, we went in search of people who would love to be crammed into that toasty living room, watching the twinkle lights on our pencil tree, and eating a warm meal on a tv tray.  We loaded up in our car and handed out gift cards to an old woman waiting in the cold at a bus stop, a crippled man, slowly making his way to the homeless shelter, and cops working the beat in Price Hill.  Our kids began to argue about whose turn it was to give the next one away.  It was the most glorious argument I had ever heard.

We lived in that apartment for three more months until we lucked into the home of our dreams.  We found a home in College Hill, a neighborhood of Cincinnati.  The past six months have been the best months of our lives.  No kidding.  Our home is on a dead end street.  We have hoot owls in our tree. Random deer walk down our sidewalks.  We can walk to our local coffee shop.  We have a beautiful park at the end of our street.  We know almost every single one of our neighbors, who are the friendliest, most welcoming people I have ever met in my life.  Our children ride their bikes down these picturesque streets of College Hill without a care in the world. 

When we lived in the apartment, my daughter liked to draw things and tape them to her "side" of the room to liven it up and make it look pretty.  On moving day, I began to take them down from the wall. But, I quickly realized that I needed to take a photo to remember this season of our lives.  All those months when I was busy pitying myself, my eight year old was doing a much better job than I, trying to make the best of our living situation.  

Sometimes, out of the blue, one of my children will walk up to me, put their hand on my shoulder and say "Mom, I just love our house."  All those months ago when I was asking myself "What have we become?".  I finally have an answer.  Thankful.  We have become thankful.